Your car gets a flat during rush hour. A cigarette cinder singes a favorite shirt. Neighborhood hooligans drape toilet paper from tree to shrub to tree, the family dachshund finally gives up the ghost, or, God forbid, an IRS audit notice arrives in the afternoon mail. Cripes! Disaster!
No. A fleck of inconvenience, maybe, or a passing unpleasantness. But an authentic disaster, as any of the specialists gathered in Indianapolis last month would tell you, entails grave injuries and, always, at least the possibility of wholesale death. The 600 men and women -- fire fighters and police, civil-defense officials, county sheriffs...