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

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It helps that Lucy Easthope is a gifted writer, avoiding the danger of overwriting, and (we heard the audio version) a careful and sensitive reader with, as it happens, a lovely voice. Ones own morality is tested here. The work of pathologists certainly was an eye opener. But then, understanding why pigeons the biggest issue at the accident scene shows how incredibly little is known dealing with the dead in mass numbers. Within her accounts she also provides moving glimpses into her own personal life. I have to admit within seconds of listening to this book I felt a kinship to Lucy upon hearing her recount a Liverpudlian childhood steeped in the Hillsborough tragedy. Growing up as a Liverpool fan in the North West of England just a stones throw away from Liverpool her words resonated on a deep personal level. Knowing that her life’s work has been inspired and driven by this tragedy is a testimony to her character. Easthope’s own trials – to start a family and other medical upheavals – make for quite a pulsating subplot. A modern-day Cassandra, she has taught herself to fear disaster on her own doorstep. She gets a bad feeling on a 2015 trip to Alton Towers. Sure enough, a roller coaster malfunctions in high winds, causing amputations. Her husband had just got off it. With 7/7 “it had always been a question of when”. Ditto the coronavirus pandemic. Most spookily, at a conference she war-games a disaster scenario involving a high-rise inferno killing occupants from many cultures, with local government partly to blame. “We can’t plan on a fantasy,” sniffs one attendee. The 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster happened two days later.

This book is a non-fiction and is Lucy Easthope's experience as a disaster planner. She has dealt with almost every major disaster in the last 20 years, from 9/11 to the pandemic, and has even had first hand experience of some events, like the 7/7 bombings and the Alton Towers crash. Easthope has pioneered methods that maximise the virtues of courage, respect and dignity in scenarios where those virtues are standardly obliterated by panic and instinct. She is – sometimes literally in the context of the book, but also figuratively – the person with a comforting demeanour, a calm tone and a strong cup of tea when things are at their most bleak. When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope’s phone starts to ring.

Start with those closest to you and work outwards. Find a balance between the negative stresses of a life in readiness and fear and the comfort of 'being prepared'." the 2004 tsunami….the Grenfell fire. To err is human. Where technology, nature and humanity come together, disaster is inevitable. But in the aftermath of such calamity, it is Lucy Easthope who is called to recover, support and rebuilt communities. The poet WH Auden wrote in 1938 about how, in one part of a place, a tragedy of the most unimaginable horror can be unfolding while in another part of the same panorama, a farmer can continue to plough his field, someone else is eating “ or just walking dully along”. Life simply goes on all around the suffering. 9/11, the Bali bombings, Grenfell… Each one is seared into my brain Paradoxically, that sense of an ending produces an attentive embrace of our physical surroundings as well as our own physicality. A good few thinkers in recent years have asked whether our suicidal stupidity about the environment doesn’t reflect a kind of illiteracy about our own materiality and mortality; as if something in our peculiar culture encourages us to think of ourselves as detached from these things – a corrosive blend of decayed religiosity and over-ambitious Enlightenment rationalism.

With wisdom, resilience and candour, When the Dust Settles lifts us up by showing that humanity, hope and humour can – and must – be found on the darkest days.Such metacommentary is common as Easthope balances her influence on and role within the infrastructure of disaster response with its good intentions and inevitable shortcomings. 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 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. When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring... This applies in individual as well as in collective contexts. In counterpoint to her narrative of professional involvement, Easthope tells us something of her own experience of loss, especially of successive miscarriages and the near-loss of her husband in an unexpected medical crisis. It is not only that these individual traumas have to be negotiated and endured in the midst of an unremitting programme of work; it is also that the lessons learned in both contexts overlap and illuminate one another.

It also takes a look at other major disasters including 9/11, MH370 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004. We also look at the Grenfell Tower fire and of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. It is raining hard. Water trails down the windscreen and the wipers squeal with effort. I don’t drive, so I’ve earned a reputation for getting as close to the cordon tape as possible in a taxi. I have grown to trust just one driver, Jay. He has taken me to locations all around the country and sometimes to airports or train stations in the middle of the night. There is a certain arrogance and a certain ' I knew it all in advance ' theme about it. The author points out a number of times she is the authority on the topic, and I felt like there is an uncalled for need to confirm that a number of times in the book. In the same vein the UK DVI (disaster victim identification unit) is positioned as world class. I can understand the professional and national pride, but other similar units from other countries have their leanings and achievements too. None of that is discussed in any detail in this book. (France teams the aftermath of facing Bataclan, or Dutch teams working on MH-17 are mentioned briefly or a single one liner and that's it). That's a missed opportunity IMHO, what did these teams learn the Brits and vice versa what did these teams learn from the UK teams ? none of that, which makes you think they work in isolation. Though laced with bleak humour, this vivid and humane book forces readers to look into some exceptionally dark places. Yet it also makes a powerful case for facing up to the worst head on, if we ever want to find hope and even a measure of healing after disaster.Easthope, whether she knows it or not, is that rare thing, a genuine philosopher thinking through what she is actually doing in the mitigation of human suffering, grief and isolation. This book is more searching as an analysis of human needs and nature than a good many technical volumes on the subject. It is particularly pertinent amid the current interest in “transhumanist” aspirations to secure our immortality by uploading the contents of a brain into some kind of non-organic hardware, or the fashionable speculations about the possibility of enjoying multiple virtual identities. Whatever may lie ahead in terms of technical sophistication – and the messianism around these ideas is not exactly in step with the actual possibilities – the reality of who and what we are now is that we are organisms. Whatever virtual alternatives we may temporarily entertain, it remains true that if the organism is destroyed, something comes to an irreversible end. More than we realise, our human cultures are ways of refining skills in managing our organic identity, and so managing the prospect of our death, making it possible in some degree to understand and come to terms with it and to incorporate death into a story with “the sense of an ending”, in a well-known phrase from literary criticism. I'm a disaster expert – and it helped me get through my own ( BBC News Outlook Podcast, March 2022) It’s an eerie thought, but when disaster strikes, who steps in to help? To organize others, to support the survivors, to bring the dead to their loved ones. Easthope tells of her own journey joining Kenyon, an international recognized disaster management company that are called to repatriate the dead. Along the way she provides detailed insight to an industry that is barely known.