What's the difference between accident and catastrophe?

Accident


Definition:

  • (n.) Literally, a befalling; an event that takes place without one's foresight or expectation; an undesigned, sudden, and unexpected event; chance; contingency; often, an undesigned and unforeseen occurrence of an afflictive or unfortunate character; a casualty; a mishap; as, to die by an accident.
  • (n.) A property attached to a word, but not essential to it, as gender, number, case.
  • (n.) A point or mark which may be retained or omitted in a coat of arms.
  • (n.) A property or quality of a thing which is not essential to it, as whiteness in paper; an attribute.
  • (n.) A quality or attribute in distinction from the substance, as sweetness, softness.
  • (n.) Any accidental property, fact, or relation; an accidental or nonessential; as, beauty is an accident.
  • (n.) Unusual appearance or effect.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Road traffic accidents (RTAs) comprised 40% and ischaemic heart disease (IHD) 13% of the total.
  • (2) The authors report an ocular luxation of a four-year-old girl after a bicycle accident.
  • (3) They derive from publications of the National Insurance Institute for Occupational Accidents (INAIL) and refer to the Italian and Umbrian situation.
  • (4) Tepco has taken on a US consultant, Lake Barrett , who led the NRC's cleanup of Three Mile Island, the worst commercial nuclear power accident in the nation's history.
  • (5) Although systemic fibrinolysis with streptokinase was not initiated until eight weeks after the accident, a partial restitution of the markedly reduced macro- and microcirculation in the fingers was possible.
  • (6) A traumatic factor in the aetiology of the AVM was also discussed, since the patient had had two preceding episodes of traffic accidents with cranial and lumbar injury.
  • (7) The risk of postoperative cerebrovascular accident did not correlate with age, sex, history of multiple cerebrovascular accidents, poststroke transient ischemic attacks, American Society for Anesthesia physical status, aspirin use, coronary artery disease, peripheral vascular disease, intraoperative blood pressure, time since previous cerebrovascular accident, or cause of previous cerebrovascular accident.
  • (8) However, most deaths were due to traffic accidents.
  • (9) These episodes are capable of precipitating accidents.
  • (10) A retrospective review of 1900 road accident victims attending the emergency departments of two Melbourne hospitals was undertaken to identify Injury Severity Score levels which could distinguish between minor, moderate, severe and critical injury.
  • (11) During the follow-up period 4 patients in group I had an embolic accident, as against none of the group II patients (p less than 0.01); 3 of these 4 patients had persistent uptake at control scintigraphy.
  • (12) The positive effect of early medical care was established through the variations of injury severity indices currently used in polytrauma: after the institution of Mobile Intensive Care Medical Units on the site of accidents cardiac arrests were ten times less numerous although lesions were more serious in the second series.
  • (13) Extraperitoneal hemorrhage, associated with a fracture of the pelvis, is a major cause of death in pedestrian accidents.
  • (14) Similar organisms were found in the water at the site of the accident in Boston, and at ocean bathing beaches on nearby Martha's Vineyard.
  • (15) The possibility that autotransplantation may also occur in humans by accident, during procedures to remove a colorectal adenocarcinoma, is discussed.
  • (16) We conclude that these good results are due to the short interval between accident and operation as well as to the evacuation of the intraarticular hematoma, together with a stable internal fixation and functional rehabilitation.
  • (17) The paper is concerned with analysis of correlation of the time of appearance of vomit in a person and a mean dose rate of prolonged gamma-radiation in the persons affected at the Chernobyl accident.
  • (18) Her general condition deteriorated continuously and 10 months after the accident she had to be admitted to a hospital again.
  • (19) Votey set out the basic principles of costs and benefits as applied to accident control measures and discussed the various elements of effective economic analysis.
  • (20) The doses were calculated as average monthly doses for each of 454 municipalities during 36 consecutive months after the accident in spring 1986.

Catastrophe


Definition:

  • (n.) An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things; a final event, usually of a calamitous or disastrous nature; hence, sudden calamity; great misfortune.
  • (n.) The final event in a romance or a dramatic piece; a denouement, as a death in a tragedy, or a marriage in a comedy.
  • (n.) A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When it was grown, it would bring both ecstasy and catastrophe to women.
  • (2) The effects of brain injury can be catastrophic and long-term so the impact of more research would be vast, but affected numbers are too small so it loses out.
  • (3) After violence had run its bloody course, the country’s rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but “grave disorder, damage and retrogression”.
  • (4) Strict precautions are necessary to prevent the catastrophic events resulting from inadvertent gentamicin injection; such precautions should include precise labeling of all injectable solutions on the surgical field, waiting to draw up injectable antibiotics until the time they are needed, and drawing up injectable antibiotics under direct physician observation.
  • (5) In contrast, the 2009 report, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" , published by the New York Academy of Sciences, comes to a very different conclusion.
  • (6) As a result, low-lying areas, including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands, will undergo catastrophic flooding, while in Britain large areas of the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary could disappear.
  • (7) It is found that, in contrast to most metallic materials yet in keeping with many ceramics, there are no distinct fracture morphologies in pyro-carbons which are characteristic of a specific mode of loading; fracture surfaces appear to be identical for both catastrophic and subcritical crack growth under either sustained or cyclic loading.
  • (8) In the midst of this catastrophe, the troika is insisting on further austerity to achieve massive primary budget surpluses of 3% in 2015, 4.5% in 2016 and even more in future years.
  • (9) The first report, released last September in Stockholm , found humans were the "dominant cause" of climate change, and warned that much of the world's fossil fuel reserves would have to stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change.
  • (10) "We believe that such a path would be catastrophic for the UK, for Europe and for the protection of human rights around the world."
  • (11) A large number of flight accidents and catastrophes associated with the human factor, high nervous and psychic tension when being on duty, increasing trend towards a greater incidence of psychogenic diseases responsible for pilots to be grounded make it necessary to develop a system of primary psychoprophylaxis of the flying personnel and to help them with various social, psychohygienic and psychoprophylactic measures.
  • (12) This would sound gilded, except here is Klebold, revisiting every detail in a way that implies it might have been easier on her psychologically if there had been a catastrophe in the household, something pointing to why Dylan did what he did.
  • (13) Self-help groups can aid an individual in coping with and adapting to catastrophic illness.
  • (14) Catastrophes, though always regrettable, must be seen as experiments demanding careful analysis and exploitation.
  • (15) This set was called by the authors a syndrome reflecting an overpowering, but latent, unconscious sense of crisis, of a catastrophe ("Catastrophe-syndrome").
  • (16) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
  • (17) I argue that (a) the procedures they used to study confounding were suboptimal because multiple measures of depression and catastrophizing were not employed and (b) the distinctiveness of constructs might better be regarded as a continuous rather than all-or-none (having adequate discriminant validity versus being confounded) concept.
  • (18) Newborn infants with congenital homozygous protein C deficiency develop catastrophic thrombosis (purpura fulminans) and will not survive beyond the neonatal period without protein C replacement.
  • (19) But the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria have been overshadowed by stories about Islamic State .
  • (20) We do not anticipate major impact on psychiatric tasks from some form of catastrophic insurance.