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

Product Information

With profound compassion and empathy throughout, the actual work undertaken knowing what they are handling is chilling. Easthope recalls sorting limbs with boots attached, when British soldiers were returned from the war in Iraq. She also tells of gathering limbs in frantic panic after given just 30 minutes in a war zone, after a plane blown out of the sky, It was interesting to read how risks are detailed and managed and how various organisations interlink to ensure the recovery processes are followed in line with current best practice. Of course, things don’t always work out the way they are planned for, and the author identifies where mistakes were made. The way in which different countries and cultures prepare for and deal with the aftermath of disaster was particularly intriguing. a b c "People". Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience. Durham University . Retrieved 27 November 2022. This was also very personal to the author's own life - she was very open about her many miscarriages and her relationship with her husband. It must have been difficult to be so open about this, but I think it is a very important aspect of her life that has also influenced her work and life outlook. Easthope was born and raised in Liverpool, England. [6] She began her career in disaster management and recovery at Kenyon International Emergency Services after completing a degree in law at the University of Bristol and a MSc in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management at Leicester University. [7] [1] [6]

King, David (April 2021). "Book Review: The Recovery Myth". Australian Journal of Emergency Management. 36 (2): 18 . Retrieved 27 November 2022.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. 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.

Elsewhere, Easthope recalls the “viewing rooms” for corpses that “would smell strongly of instant coffee”, since “the embalmer’s facial reconstruction kit was often overwhelmingly biased towards white skin and I was appalled to see that well into the 2000s the way round this was to mix Nescafe granules into the mixture if the deceased was anything other than pink”. And speaking of smells, though there are apparently “some similar compounds in fresh-cut grass, semen, particular vegetables, animal meat and menstrual blood”, nothing quite matches the “assault on your nasal passages” of decomposing bodies. Not only has the experience “put [Easthope] off mushrooms for life”, but the particular cleaning fluid used in mortuaries “has a canny, fateful habit of turning up at the wrong moment”, such as in “the toilets of a concert venue on an anniversary night out”. 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. 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.' - New Statesman Thompson, Jessie (4 January 2022). "World Book Day: The best non-fiction books to read in 2022, from Margaret Atwood to Matthew Perry". Evening Standard . Retrieved 27 November 2022. 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.

After a bidding war between eight publishers for her memoir When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster, the book was published by Hodder & Stoughton in March 2022. [10] When the Dust Settles [ edit ] 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. All this difficult and imagination-stretching work underlines the conviction that we must be serious about our “furniture” and our “habitat”. To respect and love one another is a matter of finding meaning in the physical stuff of ourselves and our world. Our responses need to be as “layered” as the reality before us: “Disasters don’t happen in societal isolation,” Easthope writes: what looks like the same kind of catastrophe may be significantly different because of this.

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. For over two decades she has challenged others to think differently about what comes next, after tragic events. She is a passionate and thought-provoking voice in an area that few know about: emergency planning. However in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, her work has become decidedly more mainstream. Alongside advising both the Prime Minister’s Office and many other government departments and charities during the pandemic, she has found time to reflect on a life in disaster. It's a singular career and vocation, no doubt attracting rather singular and special people. (She shares how both her aunt and uncle were coroners and she did work experience with them as a young woman, when others of us are manning photocopiers or working as cleaners' assistants.)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. 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.