Public Safety: Natural Disasters.

Natural disasters include a range of events such as earthquake, hurricane, avalanche, flood, severe storms and volcanic eruptions. As such, they constitute risks to lives, health and the environment. It has become axiomatic within the social sciences that modern society is generally understood as a risk society (Beck, 1992). In risk society, risk is globalized and generalized in ways that seem out of the individual's control; nonetheless, science and technology are presented as solutions to the problems of uncertainty and anxiety that risk generates. Natural disasters exemplify events that seem out of the individual's control, that generate uncertainty and anxiety, and that have several elements in common: they are relatively unexpected; emergency and rescue personnel may be overwhelmed; and lives, public health and the environment are endangered (Department of Homeland Security, 2003). They disrupt "lives, spaces, organizations and institutions" (Iverson & Armstrong, 2008, p. 2) which policy and research responses have tended to assume were functioning adequately prior to the event. Moreover, natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, as forms of "catastrophic risk," follow the poor (Beck, 2006) and exacerbate pre-existing social and economic divisions and vulnerabilities. Policy research and development therefore has focused on the intersection of local, regional and federal responses to natural disasters.