Disasters in the South Waikato
Types of disasters
Looking wider at New Zealand, disasters can be classified into three separate categories: geological, meteorological or technological.
- Geological threats include events like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, tsunamis, shoreline erosion. This type of disaster is associated with New Zealand's location on an active margin of the Pacific and Indian-Australian crust plates, or with land instability.
- Meteorological threats include events like storms, tornadoes, river and coastal flooding and heat waves which represent the extremes of New Zealand's weather conditions.
- Technological threats include events associated with human activities which lead to disaster, like accidents involving hazardous materials, failure or structures, major transportation accidents etc.