One home, routine, and family is the material instantiation of an individual life, and the disaster is when this small reality is taken over or destroyed by a much larger, more urgent exigency. The biggest unit of disaster is the life of a single person. Although the scale of the disaster might be hundreds or thousands of lives (both in the sense of human death, and the survival of a human but the loss of the life he has built) the suffering of a single person is the greatest increment of pain. In this sense, small disasters are equally brutal.
I sympathize with Donguk’s interpretation of the human-dependent nature of disaster. While from an internal perspective, particularly that of the individual, a disaster is something that happens to a person, an event outside of ones direct control which subsumes the individual realities that we build around ourselves, from an external or objective perspective, there is no such thing as a disaster, simply an unfolding of regular physical events. Disaster is a human construct that could not exist in the absence of our normative understanding of our environment.
From an external, objective perspective, the disaster is part of a cycle. The destruction is the erasure of a smaller, more frequent cycle, with that of a larger, less frequent one. People, by necessity, build their lives on the basis of cycle that is observable on the time scale human life, although this may vary from less than one to several generations. However there is always a longer cycle that may disrupt this pattern. The material culture of humanity, shelter, property, food and family are dependent on the cycle on which they are figured – we know that the land is stable, so we build, we know where the edge of a river runs, so we build near enough to use it’s water. These deeply logical decisions are nevertheless undermined by the natural occurrence of earthquakes and floods.
