Disaster management expert Lucy Easthope talks about her work dealing with major catastrophes

Lucy Easthopeâs job titles make you stop a moment. She is â read it properly now â an expert in disaster management, Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham, and Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath.Â
Well, yes. But what does this mean, in reality?
It means turning up after the police, paramedics and forensics, with a plan for how to deal with whatâs left, and care for who is left: the survivors, the bereaved, the helpers themselves, and the dead. It means bringing her experience of all the other disasters sheâs known. It means Disaster Victim Identification (DVI), where âvictimsâ often means scraps of bone and flesh, teeth and ash, and where pathologists, anthropologists and odontologists work at the naming of parts. Itâs mentally challenging, emotionally extreme, and physically relentless. And thereâs a great deal of admin.
What we all really want is a woman who knows what sheâs doing when it comes to disasters
This clear-blue-eyed, cheerful, charismatic woman is expert not just in responding to disasters but also in recovering from them â a long job, that ebbs and flows. Recovery is a chronic condition. She advises governments, including our own. She travels the world in response to tsunamis, terrorist attacks, floods, nuclear accidents, air crashes, fires, earthquakes and wars. Her first job was sourcing mortuary workers to go to New York after 9/11 for Kenyon International (âKenyon International Emergency Services offers a set of integrated, configurable solutions to help private and public organisations manage the consequences of an incident,â it says on their website.
âKenyon works extensively in the mass fatality arenaâŚâ). Recently sheâs been trying to help steer covid responses so they are not just effective, but long-term effective. Aftermaths can be terrible, and they are not finite.
Today, though, Professor Easthope â Lucy â has been recording for TV, and to her own amusement is wearing what she calls âChannel Five eyebrowsâ â thick and black â on top of a level of foundation you just know is not her usual look. Her publicist is delayed: the British Library wonât allow his suitcase in (she and I both appreciate the mild irony).
After twenty years working in a bleak area about which most of us will never have to know, Lucy Easthope is having a moment. She has written a book, When The Dust Settles: a poignant, funny, analytical and profoundly humane collection of âstories of love, loss and hopeâ from a lifetime in this compelling and complex world. And, as she points out, itâs a love story. And, I should mention, extremely well written: this is no trite string of ghoulish anecdotes.
The day we meet, When The Dust Settles is being serialised on BBC Radio Four. Itâs received rave reviews across the board, written by writers who, I suspect, (like me) half-wish they too had had a serious, go-deep job doing difficult things. It turns out that as we lurch from the disaster of covid to the disaster of Russiaâs war in Ukraine, under the umbrella of the disaster of climate change, what we all really want is a woman who knows what sheâs doing when it comes to disasters.
Lucy wonders whether her dramatic birth â an emergency vertical-cut Caesarian where her mother was close to death â may have set her on this course. Does she believe in luck? âI smile at the fates sometimes,â she says, smiling now. Sheâs a Liverpudlian, and the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster was significant for her. Lucy was ten. âI was watching TV â it wasnât live, it came on later as a broadcast on Grandstand. And my Dad says, âWhat on earthâs going on?â And then, over the coming days, âThis is terrible!â and heâs shouting at the screen, âSomebody needs to sort this!â And I just took it as direction.â
âItâs not just me,â she says. âWe see a lot of children, in places like Amatrice after the earthquake in Italy, [grow up to] become disaster activists. So that helped me to give Hillsborough the weight it deserved in my story. When somebody would ask, âHow did you get into this?â Iâd give a very under-explored answer. You didnât want to try and claim the Hillsborough grief as your own. Youâre very wary of the hierarchy.â
The hierarchy of grief is something all bereaved people know about; and many recognise, too, the urge to claim more involvement than perhaps one quite has a right to. Thatâs easy to sneer at, but Lucy is more generous. âItâs often how we centre ourselves,â she says, âand make a link. In the first 24 hours of the invasion, people were saying, âDo you know a Ukrainian? Do you know somebody there?â They want to articulate what theyâre feeling.â
Her fatherâs imprecation, âSort this!â, can apply to so much, from the everyday to the massive (though as Lucy points out the massive is everyday: disasters are happening all the time, just not necessarily to us, which allows us to be appalled by them when they do). Lucy shares her knowledge on Twitter.
Donated items are described as âthe second disasterâ by responders, and itâs much preferred that money is given
Sheâs made important points about safeguarding, when volunteers take in Ukrainian refugee families: how traffickers move fast; that billeting in homes is very disruptive and that although huge temporary villages may not look good they are better in the long run for keeping communities together. Sheâs insistent that giving money to existing organisations is more efficient than shipping items to a disaster zone, as in #cashnotstuff.
âThere are decades of research into what may cause further harm. Analysis of past tragedies provides a fascinating insight into the things that people sent that caused further problems on arrival,â she says. âKippers to the widows of the Gresford colliery disaster in 1934, alongside letters that suggested that, now they find themselves on hard times, widows might want to consider being taken in by the writers. Motivations may not always be wholesome!
Donated items, often soiled or damaged, are described as âthe second disasterâ by responders, and itâs much preferred that money is given to established and well-governed charities. Itâs a challenge â people assume that food, toys, medicine and clothes would be just what people need but we can buy that better and safer and just as quickly. A key principle we use in training is to think about how you might want to be treated in this situation â would you want to pull on somebody elseâs unwashed socks?â
Sheâs boldly expressed her frustration about the governmentâs declarations during the pandemic, that âthis is all new, weâre all in it together.â âIt mayâve been new to them; it wasnât to us,â she says drily. âWe assumed weâd be listened to.â What disaster management teams needed was engagement; what they got was delays and postponements and the discovery that PPE stockpiles developed since pandemic planning began in 2004 simply werenât there. She smiles as she refers to herself and her colleagues as âCassandrasâ, but her purpose is steely.
 âWe need to prioritise and resource emergency planning, prioritise compassion, put the people affected at the heart of arrangements. We need to lose the overwhelming focus on optics. And we need to do so much more for child food and fuel poverty â you canât respond to any crisis when we are living in perpetual crisis.â Whatâs the worst thing? âPeople forgetting, repeating the same mistakes. Cruelty from politicians.â
Lucyâs parents are teachers, her uncle and aunt both coroners. Helping and âneeding to knowâ clearly run in the family, and if one theme runs through both the book and Lucy herself, it is the constant dance between intensely personal experiences and the universality of community experience and public responsibility. The disasters may be huge, but she remembers them, she says, by the personal effects.
Her job is deeply practical, involving logistics, in the midst of chaos and heartbreak (mortuaries for how many? what kind of coffins â childrenâs/ geriatricsâ/ young menâs?) but, she writes, âthe aftermath of the London bombings of 7 July, 2005 was all about⌠Tupperware filled with salad, wallets, blown-off clothing⌠wheelie bags, laptops and the thick paper wodge of a near-to-submission PhD thesis, still being annotated up until the point that the bomb exploded.â
Taking home items to families whoâve lost people is a large part of her work. Nobody, she believes, should make assumptions about what property people may or may not want returned, or in what state.
âEvery family is entitled to their own story,â she says, referring not just to the story of their individual loved-oneâs death, but also to the whole familyâs story. She is exceptionally loyal to her fellow workers: the police, social workers and forensic anthropologists, mortuary staff, pathologists, undertakers. Support for them, she says, is among her first priorities when examining any disaster management plan. For them and for her, the hardest part is going home. One of the conversations sheâs never not had with people involved with disaster is the one about how they arenât talking about it at home.
âMy work recently has brought me into the path of contact tracers who worked during the pandemic, on the phone all day, and sometimes they were the last person⌠well they know now that they were the last person somebody spoke to. Sometimes the person hadnât eaten for three days, and they were sorting them out food. The contact tracers were mainly women, drafted in from administrative roles. You go from disaster to disaster and you see people co-opted in. So for Grenfell, for example, it was the social workers. You know â [youâre encouraged to] apply on this hyperlink here to become a social worker. And all of a sudden youâre working on this horrific event. And what happens is, your family donât adjust as quickly as you.â
There are other reasons for communicating well at home. âConfidentiality. Youâre tired. And itâs not being able to articulate it. With the military, itâs similar to what happened with Vietnam. The Iraq conflict became soiled. So you couldnât go: âIâm really proud of last year.â It wasnât something that people were being terribly honoured for. I put out a tweet about being so impressed and proud of these women. Hadnât given it a second thought. And immediately a load of tweets come back saying it was a waste of money, all the Dido Harding stuff. Very similar to what we do to our soldiers. Itâs that constant lens for me.â
In the book, Lucy mentions motels that keep the bar open for disaster workers who are going to be back late. Is alcohol a big part of this world? Lucy doesnât drink herself but agrees that it is.  She encourages the use of parks and gardens, where workers can âhave tea and a biscuit, and just talkâ without drink being an issue. Itâs not just about self-medication. Thereâs also the macho âcamaraderie of the pubâ which is something sheâs tried to dismantle somewhat, even though it can be a great comfort. She believes itâs part of the system whereby people who are female or gay or of colour are welcome in institutions â so long as they behave like straight white men.
âA space can be 50/50, but if the 50 per cent of women have to emulate men to be there at all,â she says, âthat means nothing.â Sheâs already at a disadvantage for not being police or forensics, and for being a woman. Time is wasted having to win men over, explain herself, and look for allies sheâs worked with before. She mentions the stereotype of the combative Scouser, but not in the way you might expect:
âIt can be hugely unifying â people can be very supportive. I blend in. Sometimes thereâs affinity, and people root for you.â Sheâs certainly a fighter, but above all sheâs a unifier, a communicator. She has had arthritis since youth, and is dyspraxic:Â âI do wonder if my dyspraxia (now I understand a bit more about it) is a factor in seeing the world differently. Iâm hugely understanding of the voices that donât get heard in disaster, and very conscious of ableism.â
The difficulty in going home became very personal for Lucy. âFor, me,â she says, âitâs always been about having to immediately get back into another role.â She of all people knows that âthere are two worlds, and as soon as you step into one you leave the other behind, even mid-sentence.â
âPolicing, in areas like body recovery and disaster victim identification, is very, very hard on a marriageâ
As a responder, she feels it happening: âYou carry yourself differently. Sit up. Gird yourself, eye contact. I train girls about this. Theyâre always looking down, canât raise their eyes.â She has âplanthemsâ: the right music to inspire herself for what she needs to do. Kanye and Eminem get her going for site work. I tell her I canât think straight if I donât have a bra on; she tells me about her special red fleece: protective, snug, comforting, emboldening.
Returning home from work, she plays show tunes, or has a kitchen disco with her children. But the changeover is not clean-cut: âThere was a moment in February 2020 where we were doing the excess death planning for the pandemic. I came out of one call and there were the children waiting at the bottom of the stairs, wanting their tea.â
Home is where the love story comes in. She talks of a âgauzeâ developing between her and her husband, Tom: âIt becomes quite worrying. You know, where are we going to go with this? With a lot of my colleagues, their relationships donât survive. Policing, particularly in areas like body recovery and disaster victim identification, is very, very hard on a marriage. The first time Tom read the book was because the lawyers asked him to. Weâd stopped sharing the specifics long before.â
I suggest that when soldiers are fighting to protect something â peace, say, or innocence â and then they go home and tell the people theyâre protecting what theyâve had to do to protect them, that in itself can destroy the peace and innocence.
âYes,â she says. âAnd thereâs a shared experience with these environments, the battlefield, the mortuary. Because you canât describe the fabric of it, nothing else makes sense. The conversations have no context. One of the best examples of that is about the feet and the limbs.â
Ah yes.
Itâs not always easy in war to know how soldiers are going to be killed, or if they are more likely to be maimed. (Lucy was organising body bag provision before the Iraq war even started.) One of many strong, unforgettable images she offers the reader is that of a coffin, sent out in expectation of dead bodies, returning to the military airbase at Brize Norton full of feet.
âHow do you go from that day, which Iâm incredibly proud of, whatever the politics around the Iraq conflict⌠how do you pack up your bag and go on a weekend break with your family and they say, âWhat have you done this week?â People quite understandably say: âWe donât understand what you do.â Iâd say, âOh, I work in disaster planning. Iâve just had a busy week.â âBut a busy week on what?â âOh, Brize Norton.â âBut thatâs handled by militaryâŚââ
How can one be clear about dreadful things with people who donât get that world, donât want to, and perhaps shouldnât have to? Itâs about emotional and physical understanding as much as factual or intellectual. âOne of the biggest challenges with Brize Norton was that for months and months it was just lots and lots⌠and lots⌠of young men. And, it doesnât have to become traumatic, but things like flashbacks, imagery, nightmares serve an important place in the human brain working through trauma.â Lucy has so far been very articulate and voluble. Now her speaking slows. âAnd one of the things Iâd really struggle with was coming home to Tom.â Himself a young man at the time.
In disaster response training you learn not to go home straight away. Lucy mentions the Korean War, when soldiers were brought back in boats, so they could benefit from the longer journey home. We talk about Odysseus, the ten years of sex and drugs it took him to get back to Penelope.
âOne of the biggest outpourings and reactions that Iâve had,â she says, âis to that line, âthe hardest part is going homeâ. A couple of coppers and colleagues I know have really struggled to process the pain, and theyâve just sent me a photo of that line.â Colleagues have also thanked her â âwell, punched me on the armâ â for bringing their murky, upsetting, discreet, confidential world into the light. Theyâve said, she tells me, theyâd given her book to their partner, âjust sort of slid it across to them.â Itâs not that communication causes reconciliation, but certainly thereâs no reconciliation without communication.
For the bereaved themselves, reconciliation is fraught. Lucy is profound in her respect for the dead, in particular for the disastrous dead. Every religion and basic humanity, requires that the dead be dealt with appropriately. Look at Antigone! So, what if you have no body? Or, what if you have only feet? DNA, initially a wonder-tool for DVI, has proved a dreadful rabbit hole.
Can it be right that a family such as the Petroccelli, who lost their son on 9/11, should be contacted five times with ever more bits of their child, scraps that have emerged and now need â what? Their own funeral? âItâs very painful,â she says, âto see everyone presuming what families want, rather than taking the time to sit down and carefully negotiate with them what might be possible. Families donât get a chance to opt out of some of these processes.â
Iâm reminded of the first Marquess of Anglesey, whose amputated leg had its own grave on the field of Waterloo. Mary Shelley kept her dead husbandâs heart on her desk. I still wonder about my grandfatherâs arm from 1918. Lucy writes movingly and funnily about her fatherâs finger: âWho are we to censor what works for healing? When my dad cut off his finger on a bandsaw⌠the nurses brought it out to him, he⌠bid it a fond farewell before it was taken to the hospital incinerator.â
We mind so much what happens to our dear dead flesh. But a line must be drawn, and Lucy argues warmly for the bereaved to be left alone, after a while, to know theyâve done the right thing, and to get on with being alive. What she calls âthe right stepsâ must be taken so the dead individual can be properly acknowledged. But what steps are ârightâ can vary with circumstance. Why dig a body up from an earthquake or avalanche, at great upset and all kinds of difficulty, only to bury them again? âLet me sleep,â as the unquiet corpse says in the old folk song. Which lets the bereaved sleep too.
Survivors have their own vulnerabilities. Lucy recalls a roofer working on her parentsâ home, who took one look at her and ran away: years before he had fainted in her arms at a mortuary, where he was identifying a brother soldier. And at a conference, she and a man sheâd met under similar circumstances (and hadnât seen since) had such an intense reaction that people thought they must be having an affair.
âI really struggle,â she says, âwith the way people consider themselves, if theyâve survived, as lucky. I was at a conference with a mix of bereaved and survivors. One survivor did a talk about how they knew now that they were both lucky and blessed. And that was bone-crushingly awful to sit through knowing that the bereaved mothers were next to youâŚÂ luck is a very interesting one.
You can see the things that [people] try to articulate that donât come from Western thinking, you know, life and serendipity, not traditional things. And one weâve struggled with is, what is the role of faith and fatalism and all these things, that might have been quite strong protective factors? I just say thereâs good stars and bad stars.â The very word disaster comes from the Latin dis and aster, meaning ill-starred.
There are terrible ironies and coincidences in her book that you could never get away with in a novel
Lucy has been through, or close to, an exceptional number of dreadful things, not just in the course of her work but in her own life, since as a child of eight she sailed past the Herald of Free Enterprise, half sunk outside Zeebrugge, gazing and wondering how people could have known which stairs to take when a ship is on its side. âThereâs certainly nothing odd,â she says, âabout seeing so many disasters when youâve chosen this as your career. And you become desirable, actually, by your presence at multiple disasters because for the next one youâve got a real frame of reference.â
But when youâre just going about your business, itâs different surely? She was on the tube in London on 7 July, 2005. Her husband, a pilot, nearly got on the Smiler at Alton Towers on the day it crashed in 2015. He flew British tourists to Tunisia who were involved in the terrorist attack there that same year, and flew survivors back as well, reading to them a script of comfort that Lucy had written. She too has had cause to follow her own guidelines. She is heartbreaking on how it is to miscarry in a public loo at a disaster management conference. Where can respect and honouring the flesh be then?
There are terrible ironies and coincidences in her book that you could never get away with in a novel. She recalls editors wanting to remove the rollercoaster incident âbecause âthe reader is going to think youâre completely mad, youâre always at these things.â And I refused. That isnât my view. One of the newspaper reviews,â she says, âused the word âobsessedâ, which made my husband laugh. âSheâd been obsessed with disaster.ââ
On 7/7, Lucy commandeered a cab, whose driver kept staring at her in the rear-view mirror. âHe told me why he had been a bit wary when I had jumped in shouting, âHeathrow please!â Eighteen years earlier, on the night of the Kingâs Cross fire, a man had leapt into his cab and demanded to go to Heathrow, too. âI looked round,â said the cab driver, âand he was a little bit on fire. I had to say to him, mate, youâre on fire.â So the driver had been looking in the mirror wondering if I was a little bit on fire too.â
She kind of is.
As we leave, re-passing our table on the other side of a glass wall, ever-aware Lucy spots my glove, abandoned on a chair, maybe fifteen yards away and barely visible. Tiny disaster averted. As we part, I say: âIâm about to say I love you so I should probably just run.â
âI love you too,â she says. I believe her. I think itâs all about love.
Professor Lucy Easthope is the UKâs leading authority on recovering from disaster. She has a degree in law, a PhD in medicine and a Masters in risk, crisis and disaster management. She is also Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham and Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. Her book âWhen the Dust Settles, Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disasterâ is published by Hodder
Louisa Youngâs latest novel, âTwelve Months and a Dayâ, Borough Press (HarperCollins) comes out on 9 June
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