The aim of the chapter is to position social work in relation to disasters. It elaborates on notions of disaster based on the literature of disaster studies as well as of social work. The main argument is that social work pursues a genuinely social notion of disaster rooted in a socially framed understanding of disasters, risks and vulnerabilities. It suggests a broad notion of disaster understood as a collapse of the social protection and running along a continuum by integrating intersubjective dimensions and structural dimensions of larger social systems. This broad notion seems to make the boundary between 'everyday steady-state' general social services and 'disaster-related' services permeable to a larger extent than in mainstream disaster management. Further, it can encompass phenomena originating from gradual processes in the wake of an ongoing transgression of planetary boundaries and environmental degradation.