Disaster studies (original) (raw)

Although historical and literary accounts of disasters date back thousands of years, scientific analyses are more recent. contends that Rousseau provided the first social scientific insights into disaster with his observation that the impacts of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake would have been diminished if the city had been less densely populated and if people had evacuated promptly in response to the initial tremors. More than 150 years later, William James's (1983) observations in San Francisco immediately after the 1906 earthquake also anticipated important themes of later research by reporting improvisation ('the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos', p. 336) and emergent organization ('within twenty four hours, rations, clothing, hospital, quarantine, disinfection, washing, police, military, quarters in camp and in houses, printed information, employment, all were provided for under the care of so many volunteer committees', p. 337). Nonetheless, the first systematic disaster research is generally acknowledged to be Samuel Prince's (1920) study of the 1917 Halifax explosion (Scanlon, 1988). This study documented the presence of convergence and emergence, as well as the absence of role abandonment. As Quarantelli