When the Dust Settles: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. 'A marvellous book' -- Rev Richard Coles

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the people who remain long after the climax of initial disaster. People such as Lucy Easthope, who dwell in the places most of us can only imagine. Laura Kennedy Lucy Easthope is a UK expert and adviser on emergency planning and disaster recovery. [2] She is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham, and co-founder of the After Disaster Network at the university. [3] [4] She is also a Visiting Professor in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, a researcher at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University, a former Senior Fellow of the Emergency Planning College, and a member of the Cabinet Office National Risk Assessment Behavioural Science Expert Group. [1] [3] [5] Salvaging her husband’s bloodstained clothes from a hospital bin is all of a piece with recognising how people want a physical connection with a dead person they have loved. The lifeless clinical jargon that describes what is left of a miscarried foetus as “the retained products of conception” tells us that something is deeply amiss with the world-view of a medical establishment eager to sideline the humanity of an unborn child – once again, for understandable and even compassionate reasons. Whether or not you have a clear metaphysical view of the foetus as a person, it should be possible to grant that “products of conception” is a chilling and reductive way to speak of what has lived in the womb. Yet, It is indeed fascinating to understand the logistics: for example how field mortuaries are organized - the radiographers have to be legally distanced so their machines are safe for those also around. Her focus is on recovery but she is also involved in planning. The final part of the book which touches briefly on the pandemic only hints at the frustration that she must have felt, after years of struggling to convince those in power of the importance of detailed implementation and recovery plans, and training, to see things fall apart in the way that they did. Her ongoing concern for those who died and those who survived does not ignore the politics or incompetence but focuses on the impact on people which, as she points out, we shall be living with for a very long time.

I'd definitely recommend this book (I've already told my dad to read it). It is hard to read and very sad at times but there is a lot of hope and promise there too and the stories of so many people who are out there fighting to do better and to make disaster recovery stronger and more community focused than it is now. I am a child of the indomitable city of Liverpool, where tragedy and activism is wired into the blood. I passed by my first disaster scene when I was eight years old. My parents were teachers who spent swathes of their career in secondary schools in the deprived inner-city areas of Toxteth, Walton and Tuebrook. In March 1987, my mum had arranged a school trip to visit West Germany and we all went along for the ride. My parents, my five-year-old little sister and I were all sailing on the sister ferry of the ill-fated Herald of Free Enterprise. As we approached the place in the Channel where 155 passengers and 38 crew members This was a book I got up early and stayed up late for. A fascinating memoir from Professor Lucy Easthope on her work as a disaster advisor. Entwined with these large scale catastrophes is Professor Easthope’s own experience of loss and disaster. She grew up in Liverpool and was 10 when the Hillsborough disaster occurred. On a school trip, her ferry passed by the capsized Herald of Free Enterprise. These events helped shaped her resolve to understand and assist at times of chaos and devastation. Looming in and out of view is also her own struggle with pregnancy loss.

When the Dust Settles

A less vulnerable and less reflective writer would have produced a chronicle of human desolation and doggedly faithful response, repeatedly frustrated by official ineptitude and the all-too-intelligible longing to draw a line under terrible memories. What makes this book distinctive is, first of all, the poignant awareness that loss is not to be “cured”, but can be integrated and honestly lived with if people are given the right level of time and attention; and secondly, the willingness to connect personal trauma with the sufferings of others – in a way that respects the sheer difference of those other people’s pain, yet assumes that mutual learning is always possible. It shows, time and again, an empathic grasp both of the chaotic emotions of those most directly affected by disaster, the pressure and confusion with which officials work in such circumstances, and the ease with which mistakes can be made out of misplaced goodwill. Easthope writes with understanding, for example, about the local council officials caught up in the Grenfell Tower tragedy, dropped into the deepest of water without much in the way of support or training. But part of the book’s importance is in its insightful exploration of what human beings need to preserve their resilience. Easthope is consistently interested in the long-term rebuilding of whatever habitat has been destroyed – the internal domain of feeling and memories as much as the external. She borrows an illuminating phrase about the “furniture of self” from the sociologist Kai Erikson, and the evocative Welsh word hiraeth to describe the yearning for a lost place where we know we are at home. Human beings are embedded in place and body, their humanity is shaped around things, sights and sounds, flesh and blood.

The gripping story of an extraordinary life spent inside major disasters - from Hillsborough and 9/11 to Grenfell and Covid - from the UK's leading expert on disaster recovery. It was such an eye opening read and at times incredibly frustrating, when you could see that there was a better way of doing something but that those with the authority to make changes refused to listen. I found the chapter on Grenfell particularly hard and moving to read, especially as someone who works in social housing. People shouldn't be let down in the way they were. The book also made me rethink my opinions on a lot of things, the final chapter on the covid pandemic gave me pause for thought and was again, all the more difficult to read about once you know that this was anticipated and planned for.Lucy Easthope lives with disaster every day. When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, she’s the one they call.