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

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As well as providing the reader with the complexities of disaster response, the book also reflects on the personal costs involved. This includes not only loss of life and serious injuries, but also the ‘furniture of self’, a term coined by sociologist Kai Erikson to describe photographs, clothing and items that hold sentimental value and make us who we are.

Tower of shame: messages of condolence written around a commemorative red heart at Grenfell Tower, London. Photograph: Bridget Catterall/Alamy When The Dust Settles is a sobering look at our capacity to plan for the worst. Easthope makes it incredibly accessible by dropping in her own life story and the various disasters that have affected her family.This was evident in the property left in the aftermath of the London 7/7 bombings. Easthope lists items such as Tupperware with salads inside, laptops and an unfinished PhD thesis, still being annotated up until the point when the bomb exploded. These objects are reminders that it was a normal commute until it wasn’t. Williams, Rowan (25 March 2022). "Lucy Easthope reflects on life after catastrophe". New Statesman . Retrieved 27 November 2022. After an explosion or a crash, a flood or a fire – after any disaster with mass fatalities caused by accident, negligence or terrorism – there are bodies to be collected, identified and accounted for. Or parts of bodies. Appropriate obsequies are required even as lessons are absorbed in preparation for the next inevitable catastrophe. 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. 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.

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.) 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. 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. Never forgotten: US flags, flowers and a victim’s photograph left on the names on the National September 11 Memorial. New York City. Photograph: AlamyThe chronology of Easthope’s life is marked by hundreds of catastrophic events, the types most people won’t see one of first-hand in their lifetime – from sunken ships, floods, train and plane crashes to the 7/7 bombings, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the Iraq War, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Grenfell Tower fire and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic.

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.When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope’s phone starts to ring. When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring... This beautifully written, heartfelt book is not an easy read. Lucy Easthope is a remarkable person and the story of her career in disaster recovery, intertwined with her personal memoir, is, in turn, horrifying, saddening and ultimately inspiring. Her overwhelming purpose of caring for those caught up in disasters (all sadly familiar names to us), both the living and the dead, is a force for great good but the work that she and the teams with which she works is little known and therefore sadly underrated. This book should be widely read to correct that. Step forward Lucy Easthope, whose eye-opening memoir unveils precisely what it means to be a part of a clandestine profession. As she relates in When the Dust Settles, her first job was to source UK mortuary personnel to work at Ground Zero after 9/11. Her career has daisy-chained pretty much every major incident since: the Indian Ocean tsunami, 7/7, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Grenfell, Covid-19 and many more. She left work in the television industry for her job at Kenyon International, which included support for the repatriation of the remains and belongings of UK soldiers killed in the Iraq War, relocation efforts for flood survivors, and planning. [8] [9] She later worked for the Cambridge city council and then became a consultant for governments and businesses. [9]