"....a process involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural, modified and/or constructed environment and a population in a socially and economically produced condition of vulnerability, resulting in a perceived disruption of the customary relative satisfactions of individual and social needs for physical survival, social order and meaning" (Oliver-Smith 1998, 186). "A disaster is made inevitable by the historically produced pattern of vulnerability, evidenced in the location, infrastructure, sociopolitical structure, production patterns, and ideology, that characterize a society. The society's pattern of vulnerability is an essential element of a disaster. (Oliver-Smith 1998, 187). "...a disaster is at some basic level a social construction, its essence to be found in the organization of communities, rather than in an environmental phenomenon with destructive or disruptive effects for a society" (Oliver-Smith 1998, 181)