A disaster is an event where public safety is seriously threatened. Where also the lives and health of rescue crews, the environment and property is under serious threat. There could also be damage or casualties where a co-coordinated assignment of services and organizations is needed to combat the threat or to limit the danger.

Sometimes a disaster or large scale calamity occurs slowly and there is sufficient time to take the necessary steps. However the most disasters occur in the most unexpected places. The Emergency room operates in the beginning as the central point. All information comes in there and from this location everyone can be alerted. The Emergency rooms are used to short term pressure in limited calamities. However if the incident turns out to be a large scale calamity or disaster then the emergency room is insufficiently equipped to handle this and often in the first few minutes of a disaster things can go wrong.

Certainly the first phase of a large-scale emergency is crucial for the further containment of the disaster. For this reason in the first 30 to 60 minutes, often called the ' Golden hour' scaling up should take place. The emergency room works as a bottleneck during disasters and large-scale calamities, by channeling information. Furthermore sometimes the same information is tainted, depending on the background of the operators of the dispatch center, and also passed on at differing times to the higher powers so that a misleading picture is given about the nature of the disaster management.

Large-scale incidents often lead to problems with the local telephone network through overuse. This applies to Mobile and landline connections that become unusable under these circumstances. Often complicated procedures have to be put in motion to compensate for this and information about the strangest objects has to be collected from here and there. Some large scale incidents last decade show what many knew already that there is much to be improved with communication between teams, and the distribution of information to and from the scene of the incident, not forgetting the communication between the operational units and the higher co-ordination centers and disaster teams. The CMI incident in 1996 demonstrated the faulty access to information about dangerous substances and formed the need for the starting of a ICT project to improve the access of information in crisis conditions.