In another time, or another place, Lucy Easthope says, she would have been a fortune-teller—a woman of opaque origin and beliefs, who travelled from campfire to town square, speaking of calamities that had come to pass and those which hung in the stars. Easthope, who is forty-four, is one of Britain’s most experienced disaster advisers. She has worked on almost every major emergency involving the deaths of British citizens since the September 11th attacks, a catalogue of destruction and surprise that includes storms, suicide bombings, air crashes, and chemical attacks. Depending on the assignment, Easthope might find herself immersed at a scene for days, months, or years. “I am the collector of a very specific type of story and the keeper of a very particular type of secret sorrow,” she has written.”…
“’Catastrophe and Social Change’ became a founding text in the field of disaster studies. In the nineteen-fifties, the U.S. military, looking for insights into how to manage society after a nuclear attack, funded sociologists to analyze the ways that people behaved during large-scale emergencies. Instead of finding Hobbesian dioramas of disorder and panic, or dazed, wordless automatons—the Hollywood version of disaster—the sociologists discovered that, during a crisis, people often experienced deep feelings of solidarity and belonging. (One of the researchers, Charles E. Fritz, had been a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War. Afterward, he studied the impact of bombing on the German civilian population. “People living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in lightly bombed cities,” he wrote.) Reports of looting in disasters, for example, were almost always exaggerated. In some cases, calamities were made worse for the victims not because of their own actions but because of the incompetence or prejudice of the authorities, a phenomenon later identified as “élite panic.’…
“Easthope also shared the recovery graph, a standard tool among emergency planners—a faltering zigzag of heroism, social cohesion, disillusionment, and slow, eventual reconstruction which describes the emotional phases of most disasters—and explained that things would probably get worse. In 2018, Easthope met Barry Quirk, a veteran government official in London who had been hired to run R.B.K.C. after the fire. “Lucy, I would say, was the first person that actually gave us perspective,” he said…
…”It was a case of what Donald MacKenzie, a Scottish sociologist, describes as the “certainty trough”—when those people closest to a technology have less faith than an average citizen that it will actually work.
“Easthope moved her parents in with her and stopped letting her older daughter ride horses, in case she had an accident and the ambulance was delayed. She joined Twitter and became increasingly vocal about her concerns.’I think a lot of us in planning came up with our own ethical framework,” Easthope said. “And then you’re fully deviant. At that point, you have fully left behind the idea that this government has your back.’…
“She focussed on what she could control. “I couldn’t do so much,” she said. “It had to have a purpose.” In the days before the first covid lockdown, Easthope helped lcat, the art-therapy charity, move its activities online. Later in the spring, the British Department of Health used Easthope as an adviser, mainly for excess-death planning. “I just thought, This is the end of times,” she said. As the first wave of coronavirus deaths rose, the book began to flow. “When the Dust Settles”—which mixes disaster-grade C.S.I. with hiraeth, a Welsh word expressing a deep longing for something that is gone—was published in the U.K. last March and became a best-seller.”
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