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Left: Aftermath of 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Why do you call them ‘stealth disasters’?
Generally, a natural disaster has a fairly
rapid onset – boom – an earthquake
happens or a volcano starts erupting.
Sometimes there are no precursors.
Other times there are some warning
signs, but the actual onset of the
disaster tends to be rather quick. In
contrast, stealth disasters or humaninduced disasters have a fairly slow
onset so they tend not to be noticed
because they ‘creep up’ on us, like a
stealthy predator. There were indications
a hundred years ago about climate
change but the signs were fairly subtle,
and we didn’t have the instrumentation
or the global awareness to follow-up
on it.
You’ve talked about disasters within
disasters in some of your previous
work.1 How do you define
‘disaster within a disaster’?
I think Hurricane Katrina in the US is
a good example. The natural disaster
was the hurricane, the disaster within
that disaster was the mismanagement
of the evacuation. Even within that
disaster there’s another one. The