July 2025

One of the three major categories of threats which also generate the same incident types. The other two being Product Process and Fictitious.

This also aligns with a conversation about the definition of a threat versus a hazard. We view threats as the “thing” causing the potential adverse impact (the “hazard”). So a series of days of heavy rainfall generates flash flooding, which makes your street flooded where you can’t get in or out of your home. Hurricanes can generate flash flooding and so can dam breeches. The incident occurs when people are adversely impacted by the hazard (or hazards), generated from the threat (or threats).

Natural/Human-Made Hazard-based Incidents – which by the way, we are using the term ‘incidents’, when others may say disasters, catastrophes, crises, emergencies, etc.

Someday we hope there will be clearer definitions for the severity of the incident to delineate between an emergency and a catastrophe – and also elimination of the phrase “natural disaster“.

UNDRR

These are those incidents which are generally self-contained within your organization or maybe involves your supply chain with third-party vendors. Bottom line, is that the rest of the public is not (yet!) impacted in the same way as you are – but these incidents can also be the start of something worse – they can cascade into other types of incidents or magnify/amplify other incidents out there.

Severe weather incidents, are certainly examples of a Natural/Human-Made major incident. They undoubtedly will have adverse impacts on your organization, as well as your workforce. They can also adversely impact your suppliers and customers. EMINT is needed for incidents with notice (when you have advanced warning of the potential incident and its impacts) and those no-notice incidents when you do not. EMINT helps organizational leaders select which planning elements to activate. EMINT helps determine what actions their own staff should take, for their own safety in many cases. Sometimes it is sheltering-in-place and sometimes it is evacuating to somewhere else, which is safer.

And sometimes it can start out as one action, and then end up the other. We are pretty sure when hear the phrase human-made incident, emergency, or disaster, their thoughts go right to acts of violence at the workplace – everyone jumps right to an ‘active shooter’ or worse terrorism.

Examples of Natural/Human-Made Incidents

These are fairly easy to find – everything from flooding, to wildfires, to terrorist attacks, to switching the water supply from one lake to another.

A Natural/Human-made Incident can originate from and generate other incidents

Now is not the time to harvest the crops. Companies in a wildfire impact zone need to communicate to their workforce to evacuate, or not to come in – and shelter-in-place somewhere safer. Failure to preserve and protect life safety can be both deadly and costly to organizations. The Emergency Management Intelligence around these incidents is critical for leadership to make informed decisions in both the short-term and the long run. Incidents can grown and expand into others. That switch on the water supply impacted the lead pipes to homes causing illness in an entire city. When a dam operator reduces capacity in a reservoir to avoid a breech, but releases too much water downstream, generating flooding in the town below – that is a cascading set of incidents.

What to do about Natural/Human-made Incidents

The key to Natural/Human-made Incidents is to defend against them the same way you would any other threat or hazard. By taking an All-Hazards, All-Threats approach to Natural Human-made incidents the same way as you would for Product/Process and Fictitious Incidents, your emergency management team (i.e. crisis team, crisis communications team, risk management team, etc.) will have the ‘muscle memory’ of following the same pathways and checklists for all threats and hazard types. Yes, the “response” is very different for a product recall than it is for a tornado, but reframing management’s priorities, along with their crisis communications to the public, stakeholders, and their own workforce is what Emergency Management is all about. Shifting from revenue generation or other mandates, to ones where life safety is now the guiding priority (sometimes at the cost of lost revenue, lost prestige, etc.) is also what Emergency Management represents.

[Ad] Barton Dunant can help any organization view Natural/Human-made Incidents in a holistic way, along with the other incident, threat, and hazard types. We help organizations build crisis action plans, which cover all of the workforce actions needed on an all-hazards, all-threats basis.

You can also learn more about disaster/incident typology at the Center for Emergency Management Intelligence Research’s Substack (part of York Drive, LLC, which Barton Dunant is also).