A Natural disaster is an unforeseen incident of an event that causes damage to society. There are so many Natural Disasters that harm the environment and the individuals living in it. Some of them are earthquakes, cyclones, floods, Tsunami, landslides, volcanic eruption, and avalanches. Local range measures the degree or intensity of the disaster.
Natural disasters show a crucial threat to the life of the mankind. It effects the overall behavioral health of a people. Some of the key negative events have the ratio to cause physical destruction and devastating loss of life. The damage that these disasters are mostly accidental and unexpected leaving the whole society in shock. Such disaster impacts people on not just physical but also emotional and mental levels. Individuals who have undergone through these disasters are seen to experience emotional anxiety.
Some of the disturbing conditions caused to the victim of natural disasters are feelings of anxiety, trouble in sleeping, constant worrying, and various other depression symptoms that are common type of responses to natural disasters prior to, during, and post the calamity.
Types of Natural Disasters
Several types of disasters are categorized in terms of their nature and duration of effects. Let categorically understand several forms of disasters. Normally, According to Disaster Management in India (Ministry of Home Affairs – Government of India), Disaster can be classified as,
Natural Disasters
(a) Earthquake
The earth’s coating is made up of rough layers of soil or rocks which structured of faults at many places. These geological mistakes appear as planar breaks or cracks on the earth’s crust. The geological mistakes form a tectonic plate which motions over time. At times, these moving plates discharge higher energy in the form of the wave, causing the earth to shake. Simply put, this shivering of earth is known as an Earthquake.
(b) Volcanic Eruption
A volcano is the most unstable vent in the earth’s crust from which the fluid rock in the form of lava, a cloud of ash, and gases are released into the air. When the tectonic plates move, the magma (a molten and semi-molten rock mixture) existing under the earth’s crust applies tension at a particular location, causing the volcano to fulminate. The vent continually release hot lava which floats out on the ground.
(c) Forest Fire
Fires can be human-made or happens generally like a forest fire. Natural fire is normally started by lightning or due to the detonation of dry leaves or hay. A man-made fire is caused due to many reasons. Regardless of its origin, a fire can cause huge damage to humans within a short period.
(d) Tsunami
A tsunami is a range of large estuary waves often caused by an earthquake or undersea volcanic detonation. The large tidal waves are the outcome of the eviction of a huge volume of water in the ocean. As they travel next to the coastal areas, the waves increase to dramatically-great heights, demolish everything that comes in its way.
The height of the estuary wave increases continually as it travels to the seaside due to the reductions in the depth of the ocean.
(e) Landslide
Landslides are clarified as a digressive movement of a solid mass like soil or rock under the impact of gravity. The melting snow, heavy rainfall, stream decline, earthquakes, volcanic activity, human-made disturbances, or a blend of these can cause an earthy solid mass to become uncertain and slide down under the impact of gravity. Landslides cause huge harm to property, injuries, and even death. It also demolish the water supply system and the sewer removal system, and other utilities like power, gas etc. thereby disarrange normal life.
(f) Floods
A flood is a crisis that generally occurs in the monsoon season. Flooding is a provisional overflow of water on to the land, that is generally dry from water bodies such as rivers, lakes or ocean where the waters flow over top brier, floods occur during heavy rain or when snow melt for fast or where a dam breaks, when the water moves farther its normal boundaries. Flash of floods are the most harmful sometimes due to heavy rain, the city’s drain fails to liberation storm water and it floods the city’s routes and even houses.
Also read: Effects of Global Warming and Climate Change
Due to the increase of sea tides into rivers and lakes the rainwater stream on the land, submerging it perfectly. The vocation of rain rises on the ground due to the issue of excess deposition, drainage congestion, and synchronization of rivers.
Floods can also be effected due to other natural crisis like thunderstorms, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Since floods cause massive damage to lives and the economic well-being of an region, it takes a lot of time for people to live a ordinary life again.
How Natural Disasters affects Human Life?
Natural disasters can have a life-altering effect on the people and families providential enough to survive them. But the impact of natural disasters can be felt at the societies, city and state level, or many times can effects an entire country. Natural disasters can have spacious environmental impacts as well, even when human communities are relatively unaffected. How well the impact of a disaster event is absorbed has much to do with the intensity of the impact and the level of preparedness and resilience of the subject impacted.
Disasters and mental health are connected to a large range; the impacts of disasters might have a negative effect on the affected population. Along with the social and economic losses, the people and societies experience a mental uncertainty which might take part in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Anxiety and Depression in the inhabitants. Normally, the disasters are scaled by the cost of social and economic damage, but there is no proportion to the emotional pain a person undergoes post-disaster.
The affects of natural disasters are both short-term including loss of life and harm to property and long-term impacting on the economic steadiness of a region or a country. Harm to infrastructure and energy producing centers lead to adverse impacts on a country’s economic development. Comeback efforts impacting construction and rebuilding of capabilities help reverse the impacts of disasters and provide employment to the affected individual. Other natural disasters such as floods bring profitable products as areas such as agriculture expand.
Also read: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Lives
