The president waited 36 hours to declare areas hardest hit by the quake "catastrophe areas," a move that allows the military to take over the disaster zones and institute nighttime curfews of darkened streets.
The scene there reminded me of a disaster area, with people forced to improvise after an unexpected catastrophe.
The micro-catastrophe, however, already has: the US is an aesthetic disaster area.
Vehicular networks can also be employed to provide connectivity to remote rural communities and regions [7 12], or to assist communication between rescue teams and other emergency services in catastrophe hit areas lacking a conventional communication infrastructure [13].
In February, a full four months before the official start of the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, Allstate customers in what the company called "catastrophe-prone areas" of New York — Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk Counties and New York City — found their homeowners' policies were not going to be renewed.
He finds "a language of menacing catastrophe in most areas of public debate" and a dominant mood "of despair or helplessness or sober pessimism".
Moments after the ceremony, Mr. Pi? issued a catastrophe order for the area around Rancagua, extending the disaster zones declared by Ms. Bachelet.
Their actions, he said, "could result in an ecological and human catastrophe in the entire area south of the dam". The fighting began Friday when the Croats crossed the cease-fire lines into United Nations-patrolled areas near the Serbian enclave of Krajina, where the northern and southern halves of Croatia meet like a hinge.
She combined the long-term hurricane record with new data on property exposure -- building-replacement costs by ZIP code, engineering reports, local building codes, etc. -- and wound up with a crude but powerful tool, both for judging the probability of a catastrophe striking any one area and for predicting the losses it might inflict.
The government has declared the area a catastrophe zone.
