While natural and technological risks to megacities worldwide have been recurrently emphasized by practitioners and scholars vulnerability of the small towns has been much less a focus of the social science studies.A notable exception is provided by respective investigations of the developing nations with the small towns in the industrialized and transitional economies being at the peripheral interest of researchers.It is argued that whatever high is the megacities exposure to and impact by disaster agents,metropolitan areas have much greater disaster re- silience and thus reduces vulnerability to and cushions severity of disaster impact.Meanwhile, small towns lack the political influence and economic power of megacities that determine resili- ence capacity,which in turn could decisively reduce the risk of disaster’s escalation to catas- trophe.In addition,yielding to megacities in the absolute number of people at risk often far higher proportion of the small towns’ population and economic assets are vulnerable to disaster impact.Eventually,megacities experience mostly debilitating (although undoubtedly major) effect produced on them by disaster agents,while that produced on the small towns is often extremely disastrous and even turns into a real catastrophe with particular communities totally devastated.This reveals much more complicated picture than usually portrayed and corrobo- rates the smaller communities’ in-creased risk (as contrasted to big cities) to experience devas- tating impact of a disaster’s escalation to catastrophe. While natural and technological risks to megacities worldwide have been recurrently emphasized by practitioners and scholars vulnerability of the small towns has been much less a focus of the social science studies. A notable exception is provided by respective investigations of the developing nations with the small towns in the industrialized and transitional economies being at the peripheral interest of researchers.It is argued that whatever high is the megacities exposure to and impact by disaster agents, metropolitan areas have much greater disaster re- silience and thus reduces vulnerability to to cushions severity of disaster impact .Meanwhile, small towns lack the political influence and economic power of megacities that determines resili- ence capacity, which in turn could decisively reduce the risk of disaster’s escalation to catas- trophe. Addition, yielding to megacities in the absolute number of people at risk often far higher proportion of the small towns’ population and econ omic assets are vulnerable to disaster impact .Eventually, megacities experience mostly debilitating (not undoubtedly major) effect produced on them by disaster agents, while that produced on the small towns is often extremely disastrous and even turns into a real catastrophe with particular communities totally devastated .This reveals much more complicated picture than usually portrayed and corrobo-rates the smaller communities’ in-creased risk (as contrasted to big cities) to experience devas- tating impact of a disaster’s escalation to catastrophe.