To head off a catastrophe, health officials are struggling to vaccinate 23 million people.
To head off a catastrophe, the World Bank and other international lenders agreed in November of 2014 to provide a loan of nearly three hundred million dollars to repair it, stating that the project requires "immediate attention".
These are both areas in which there is a substantial lag before policy actions have their full effect — a year or more in the case of the economy, decades in the case of the planet — yet in which it's very hard to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold.
Japan was battling to head off a further catastrophe last night, after a nuclear power station damaged by the earthquake was rocked by a huge explosion.
They also hoped to head off a Pearl Harbor type of catastrophe, in which an attack on a large base could cripple the Navy.
We are headed off a financial cliff.
In the early Obama era, romantic notions about making one's mark on history tend to take the form of helping recast America's economy, and by extension the world's, in a way that will head off global catastrophe.
How to head off that catastrophe should be the dominant policy issue of our time.
Since then, physicists at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, have installed exquisitely sensitive warning systems to monitor the delicate splices and head off a similar catastrophe.
To head off catastrophe, geologists and civil engineers here have developed an extensive, exquisitely sensitive monitoring system intended to provide early warnings of floods.
The Soviet Union did not, becoming the main supplier of men and matériel for the Republic, seemingly trying to head off catastrophe.
