Now, let's look at how disasters are categorized in Korea. Currently, disasters fall into two main categories, natural and social disasters. The first being natural are composed of pungsu-hae, earthquakes, volcanic activity and other disasters triggered by natural hazards such as a low dosed and red tide. More specifically, pungsu-hae means disasters triggered by hydrolyzed hazard. Examples of these are typhoons, frost, heavy rain fall, strong winds, wind waves, sea waves, tidal water, heavy snow fall or other natural phenomena associated with the hydrological hazard. A damage caused by an earthquake includes a direct damage by ground vibrations such as building collapse and the following fire and explosion. The second disaster category is social disaster, which includes chemical accidents, building collapse, infectious disease and other disasters triggered by technological hazard or social phenomenon such as water pollution, large scale fires and domestic animal diseases. So, we can now turn our attention to defining and giving purpose to disaster management in general. The purpose of disaster management is to improve the quality of life of citizens by predicting and preventing catastrophic events, by minimizing and mitigating the impact, by preparing for and responding to emergencies and by recovering from the damage. It is composed of two types of countermeasures. One the structural measures such as constructing levees and dams, reinforcing buildings against earthquake and other hardware countermeasures. The other is non-structural countermeasures which include education, training, planning and other activities of building a safety culture. An American scholar categorized disaster management as four phases in 1948. Since then, the four phases became popular to explain the disaster management system and evaluate it in various ways. Let's look at the mitigation phase first. Mitigation is a strategy to eliminate or reduce risk before it happens. This is done through various activities such as retrofitting property against earthquake damaging, building flood ways to move water away from areas sensitive to damage or developing for shelters. It also include development of a risk maps, insurance, land use planning or re-engineering disaster prone areas. Preparedness is a strategy to have equipment and procedures available when disaster strikes. It includes developing emergency operation plants, establishing all systems, setting up risk communication systems in advance and preparing emergency resources in order to quickly mobilize and activate them during emergencies. The response is the phase of disaster management that is the most advisable by the public. This phase is composed of activating emergency operation plans, evacuating and rescue citizens, search and rescue efforts and implementing emergency support functions. It fundamentally tries to bring normalcy to the affected area as expediently as possible. The last phase is the long-term recovery. It looks at the disaster from many perspectives figuring out what is right or wrong and what can be learned from it. The main focus is to find out the root cause of the damages and to develop and implement long-term recovery plans.
