Human Disasters

As human disasters have much in common with natural disasters, we can learn a lot about assessing and mitigating natural disasters by examining human disasters. An important similarity between them is the difficulty in assessing disaster probabilities. In many cases, however, human disasters result from interconnections; one failure causes others or several occur simultaneously. The US financial disaster growing out of the collapse of the housing market in 2006 had major similarities to a natural disaster. The hazard was underestimated and the vulnerability was ignored. Untested hazard models that had been adopted on faith proved inadequate. The swine flu and Y2K pseudodisasters illustrate a common problem in policy making, a consensus approach called “groupthink” that often causes errors. These two pseudodisasters also illustrate the problem of apocalyptic predictions.