a disaster waiting to happen

disaster | American Dictionary

disaster
noun[ C/U ]
us/dɪˈzæs·tər/
an event causing great harm, damage, or suffering:
[ C/U ]financial disaster
[ U ]disaster aid/relief
[ C ]Over 100 people died in the disaster.
[ C ]The hurricane may be the costliest natural disaster in US history.
fig. A disaster is also a complete failure:
[ C ]Our last dinner party was an absolute disaster.

disaster | Business English

disaster
noun[ C or U ]
uk /dɪˈzɑːstər/us
a sudden event that causes a lot of damage, such as a very bad fire, storm, or accident:
Insurance companies often charge extra to cover floods, earthquakes, or other natural disasters.
an extremely bad situation that can destroy a company’s plans, success, or ability to operate:
mean/spell disaster for sbA crash in real estate prices would mean financial disaster for the housing lenders.
The $7.48 billion takeover quickly turned into a major disaster.

Examples of disaster

disaster
Thus, drought, one of the greatest natural disasters intermittently confronting the nation, was blamed on political conflicts within the royal family.
They are predictive in that one could use them with hypothetical disasters to predict what the most likely policy and political outcomes will be.
The states ensured that their peoples were able to regain the property that they regularly lost to natural disasters and to foreign invasion.
Since the early 1970s, the region seems to have been widely beset by civil wars, political upheavals, famines and other natural disasters.
Historical studies of major natural disasters offer invaluable insights into a society by revealing long-term themes and continuities.
A contemporary chronicler opined (in the annal for 1011) that 'all those disasters befell us through bad policy (unraeligdas)'.
Other scholars have concentrated on individuals or local efforts with a particular emphasis on ballooning firsts or ballooning disasters.
Catastrophic disasters violate expectations about an efficient and forceful government response and damage agency reputations.
Before the 1980s, at least, citizens looked to states and localities if they looked to government at all for help with disasters.
Will we strive to salvage the disaster's 'event-ness', or work to make it 'process-like'?
The research agenda is not to look for impending disasters or catastrophes lurking around the corner.
The computer itself was about to be indicted for the disasters.
An extreme example of categorizing landscapes based on health is cities, which are enormously expensive ecological disasters.
Major disasters, for example, compromise many interdependent systems simultaneously, often including individual lives, social systems, ecological systems, communication systems, and computer systems.
The study also depicts the clinical disasters that could follow the enthusiastic pursuit of an untried, fashionable idea, notably faradism.
See all examples of disaster
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withdisaster

disaster

These are words often used in combination with disaster.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

absolute disaster
So too would cheerfulness and patience in the face of absolutedisaster.
brink of disaster
As a woman of questionable morals, she seemed to stand by as her family teetered on the brinkofdisaster.
climatic disaster
This will mean that we fail to achieve our climate policy objectives and result in a climatic disaster.
From Europarl Parallel Corpus - English
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
See all collocations with disaster