Final answer:
Natural disasters like hurricanes are seen by customers as uncontrollable events, lowering service expectations. Disasters can reveal systemic and infrastructural shortcomings, impacting services and leading to significant challenges for elected officials and service providers in crisis management.
Step-by-step explanation:
Because they are viewed as uncontrollable events by customers, natural disasters such as tornadoes or hurricanes may lower service expectations for services such as insurance, telephone, and the Internet. Natural disasters represent economic risks over which individuals have limited control, and in the event of such disasters, people seek assurance that their basic needs will be met despite the disruptions. During events like Hurricane Katrina, for example, societal and infrastructure weaknesses were exposed, such as inadequate disaster planning in underprivileged neighborhoods and the failure of services like evacuation transport for residents reliant on public transportation.
Furthermore, when politicians and officials have to handle the expectations and respond to the outcomes of disasters, they experience pressures related to over-preparedness or lack thereof. Their decisions can profoundly affect how services like emergency response and utilities are managed during times of crisis. As seen in south Texas's freeze, where a lack of preparedness led to widespread infrastructure failure and loss of life, the importance of robust and well-planned services becomes evident. Engineers and planners continually seek ways to protect and improve the resilience of vital services to reduce the vulnerability of communities to natural disasters.