Disaster strikes all the time without warning or provocation. It doesn't care who you are, where you live or what you do for a living. Disasters are equally destructive to everyone, as can be seen in these recent news articles...

On Jan. 12, 2010, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, reducing much of its capital to rubble. It was the worst earthquake in the region in more than 200 years. A study by the Inter-American Development Bank estimates that the cost could be between $7.2 billion to $13.2 billion, based on a death toll from 200,000 to 250,000. The toll has since been revised by Haiti's president at upwards of 300,000. Huge swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, lay in ruins, and thousands of people were trapped in the rubble of government buildings, foreign aid offices and shantytowns. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed. Thousands of new amputees are facing the stark reality of living with disabilities in a shattered country whose terrain and culture have never been hospitable to the disabled. Read more.

A major earthquake struck southern Haiti on Tuesday, knocking down buildings and power lines and inflicting what its ambassador to the United States called a catastrophe for the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. Several eyewitnesses reported heavy damage and bodies in the streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, where concrete-block homes line steep hillsides. There was no estimate of the dead and wounded Tuesday evening, but the U.S. State Department has been told to expect "serious loss of life," department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters in Washington. "The only thing I can do now is pray and hope for the best," the ambassador, Raymond Alcide Joseph, told CNN.
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ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2010) — The massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck the west coast of Chile last month moved the entire city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west, and shifted other parts of South America as far apart as the Falkland Islands and Fortaleza, Brazil. Read more.

Why Volcano Ash Was Safe for Photographers Stunning Shots of Erupting Eyjafjallajokull Volcano Taken from Helicopters Able to Dodge Threat Ash Posed to Airlines?
(AP) It seems like a disconnect: Most of the media stories about flights grounded because of Iceland's volcanic eruption were accompanied by spectacular aerial photographs of the volcano. That flashed through the mind of ABC News' Neal Karlinsky when he flew over Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano twice during the past week and even briefly landed on the crater. "The irony was not lost on us that we were flying within feet or yards of an erupting volcano when the volcano was basically grounding every flight in Europe," he said. Read more.

Millions of tons of ash from a volcano in Iceland that have grounded planes across Europe is traveling towards North America, government officials report. The latest satellite projections from the U.K.'s Met Office, which monitors volcanic eruptions as part of a global network of Ash Advisory Centers, show the ash cloud already reaching as far as Newfoundland, explained Bob Syvret, a forecaster for the agency. "The latest graphics that we've issued suggest that the tail end of the plume might just get into the far east of the Newfoundland area," he told FoxNews.com. Read more.