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mmunity resources and actions. The most important factors in evaluating the nature and meaning of an emergency is to take note of the sudden and un-prepared nature requiring the establishment of emergency cohesiveness and action. In the context of this subject, two perspectives have been established for attempting to better define and understand what an emergency is. Those two perspectives are; the perspective of emergency services and a sociological perspective.

An emergency from an emergency services perspective refers to a severe and significant interference directly effecting the population of a community which endangers or causes loss and/or damage and destruction to property which is far greater than the normal capacity of the specific emergency services and which requires unique mobilisation and establishment of resources other than those generally on hand to those emergency departments (Manock, 2009).

From a sociological perspective, an emergency is simply the dicrepancy in relationship to a severe and acute event and vulnerabilty of those effected.

The 2009 Black Saturday fires were an example of an emergency. There was up to as many as 400 individual fires on the 7th of Febuary 2009, caused by a number of serious issues such as arson, lighting and power lines. The extreme conditions and wind speeds quickly made the Black Saturday fires an emergency, with an Australia wide contingent and formation of emergency services made available and desperately needed, community resources and emergency services were pushed to their limit.

2.3 Disaster

A disaster is a sudden disastrous emergency incident, of natural or manmade origin, bringing immense damage, loss or devastation (Oxford, 2010). A disaster often requires the joint effort of more than one community and/or state emergency service effort, as a disaster is generally beyond the coping capability of the community of which it effects and requires multiple emergency service modes.

The Haiti earthquake this year, 2010, is an example of a natural disaster. It was rated as a 7.0 on the richter scale and caused damage of catastrophic proportions, killing as many as a confirmed number 150,000 and leaving iver 400,000 members of the community and surrounding area homeless (Melia, 2009).

A man-made disaster, such as the act of arson in the lighting of huge fires in California in 2007 where a huge 18 seperate fires killed up to 10 people and forced atleast half a million members of the community into homlessness (Lemonick, 2008) or the Attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 by terrorists are just as prolific and damaging as those made naturally. Global warming it may be said is a combination of the two, the disasters which are caused by rising sea levels and global temperatures have been for many years growing and becoming more sudden and disastrous, placing more members of the global comunity, more often, in need of unexpected emergency services.

2.4 Catastrophe

A catastrophe is an incident that affects the members of a community/society, or threatens to effect, resulting in losses of life and/or property and places the entire community at risk and unexpected, exceptional resources and skills are necessary, some of which may be required to be sought from other nations.

As the definition implies, a catastrophe