The “ bolt-from-the-blue” hypothesis oversimplifies the complex and intimate relationship between disaster, death, and human ecology. The definition of “disaster” and our response to the event may be influenced both by leveling-sharpening dynamics and by an ethnocentricity expressed through the proposed Law of Inverse Magnitude. Human factors sometimes heighten the probability of disaster, or increase the toll. Several “meanings” of disaster are explored. It is also proposed that society “needs” disaster to vent internal psychological pressures and transform anxious dread into a mass target-phobia. Finally, it is suggested that disaster can also be regarded as a state of being and, as such, claims many victims who have not experienced dramatic and “official” catastrophic episodes within the public domain.