Still, she is frank in the extreme. The book is written, unsurprisingly, with the kind but unrelenting tone of someone well versed in delivering bad news. It is a challenging read, relaying countless anecdotes that expose the inherent friction and humanity in caring for the dead and investing in our flawed reality. She is the author of When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster and The Recovery Myth: The Plans and Situated Realities of Post-Disaster Response. I'm a disaster expert – and it helped me get through my own ( BBC News Outlook Podcast, March 2022) When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope’s phone starts to ring. Easthope conveys the wretched physicality without veering into vulgarity or callousness. Still, she is frank in the extreme

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. 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. 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. As one of the world's leading experts on disaster, she has been at the centre of the most seismic events of the last few decades - advising on everything from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, the Grenfell fire and the COVID-19 pandemic.Despite the bleak subject matter, this book is a beacon of hope in an ocean of despair, a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. It is written in a conversational style and is recommended for readers interested in the dynamics of global disaster management. 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. I know I will find it impossible to tell the man I love what I have seen. The words stopped forming on my palate a long time ago. The hardest part of working in a disaster is going home. But something about the notion of them and us has shifted since the pandemic. Life doesn’t simply carry on around the suffering as it once did. It is universal, less hidden; we are all disaster survivors now. We will feel the effects of Covid-19 for many years to come. Easthope writes of attempting to identify the remains of British soldiers repatriated from Iraq when there were only feet left behind. These, she says, were sometimes still wearing strangely undersized desert boots. She discovered that some British soldiers had bought the ill-fitting boots from their American counterparts and writes: “I have never been able to put out of my mind that they were sent to war without the boots that they needed.”

Mixes disaster-grade C.S.I. with hiraeth , a Welsh word expressing a deep longing for something that is gone" NEW YORKER Easthope’s respect for the deceased, including those who are unaccounted for, is evidenced throughout the book. Williams, Rowan (25 March 2022). "Lucy Easthope reflects on life after catastrophe". New Statesman . Retrieved 27 November 2022. I enjoyed how Lucy brings in touches of her personal life and how disasters from her childhood and adolescence like Hillsborough influenced her career as a disaster expert, as well as how her career and the disasters she dealt with interplayed with her personal life. As someone who is a widow, who has been through life-changing loss and the mortuary inquest experience, I was very moved by the thoughtfulness and humanity that Lucy had in her work dealing with victims and their families. I was particularly moved by the chapter describing setting up the mortuary and dealing with families of veterans coming from Iraq. 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”.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 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. I liked the insight into the aftermath of disasters, including some aspects which I hadn't really considered before. I appreciated Lucy Easthope's personal focus on recovering personal items and centering the recovery on the survivors being able to grieve and move on in the best way for them. 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. 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,