The damage and the object
Important starting points in the discussion are the aspects of
incident and damage. An incident can, for example, be defined
as an unexpected occurrence with negative consequences or
a course of events with many causes which unintentionally
results in personal injury or damage to property or the environ-
ment. An incident can be a painful or sad event, development
or situation, and is often only taken as the sudden occurrence
that is close to the damage done or injury inflicted in terms of
both time and space. In some incident investigations a narrow
perspective causes the conduct of the directly involved person
to be pointed out as the main cause of the incident, to which
the term the human factor is often applied. This approach
results in dangerous aspects of the technical or organisational
environment being neglected, despite the fact they can be both
easily recognisable and easy to correct. Moreover, it is seldom a
single event that causes an incident or accident. They are more
often the result of a sequence of events (Perrow, 1984).
In the same way damage can be defined as a physical change
that negatively affects a person or thing, or some other detrimen-
tal change in a person’s economic or personal circumstances.
It often relates to something not working as it should, to the ap-
pearance of something having changed or its effect in some way
being devalued, or can also be regarded as the cause of unfortu-
nate circumstances.
The Rescue Services Act (repealed & replaced by Civil Protec-
tion Act) refers to and defines the area of responsibility of the
municipal structure for providing rescue services in relation to
the term emergency (Prop. 2002/03:119).
If we consider the situation from the opposite standpoint,
we can also talk of crisis. The victims of incidents and accidents
or who are in some other way caused damage can be said to be
in a state of crisis. The problem is often associated with a parti-
cular form of behaviour or types of physical or emotional reac-
tion. Even though these aspects lie outside the scope of this
book, they cannot be ignored totally; not least since the help
the municipal structure for providing rescue services provides
must necessarily be based on the needs of those requiring it.
It is important to bear in mind that these people are undergo-
ing some form of crisis. The discussion in this section is based,
however, on the physical consequences of an event rather than