Expert insights from Professor Lucy Easthope: Navigating disasters and building community resilience

As part of our new interview series for Future Local Lab, LGIU’s Head of Content, Freya Millard, sat down with Professor Lucy Easthope, a leading authority in emergency planning and disaster recovery. For over two decades, she has been at the forefront of the profession and involved in the biggest world-shaping disasters, from 9/11 to Covid-19, and many more that fall under and off the radar – but not for Lucy and her comrades in the hidden world of emergency planning.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Lucy shares her honest and invaluable advice for local government as they navigate disasters and the long road of recovery, especially in a post-Covid-19 world. She explores the misconceptions of emergency planning and the pertinent issues that infiltrate the sector – like gender bias and cultural incompetence – while ultimately focusing on the practicalities of what local government can do to improve citizen preparedness and resilience in the face of adversity.

Watch, read or listen below and you’ll certainly walk away with a new understanding of what really goes on behind the scenes in emergency planning and what we all need to be thinking about to build back our societal fabric and get future-ready.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

02:00 – The role of emergency planners
04:30 – Misconceptions and realities of local emergency planning
10:45 – The concept of secondary disasters and bad help
15:02 – Community preparedness and public involvement
23:16 – The value of planning and protecting the plan
25:57 – The cost of gender bias in emergency planning
31:49 – Tackling cultural incompetency in emergency response
35:22 – Walking the slow road of recovery
41:16 – Learning to live alongside risk and disaster
46:50 – Rebuilding the fabric of our society post-pandemic
53:07 – Reflections and key advice

🎧 Watch/listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.

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📖 Are you looking for just the highlights? Below is a written version of the interview edited down into a Q&A format. Use the links below to jump to the key sections of interest for you.

• Realities of local emergency planning and recovery
• Secondary disasters and ‘bad help’
• Community preparedness and engagement
• Gender bias in emergency planning
• Tackling cultural incompetency in emergency planning
• Preparing for emergencies of the future
• Post-Covid: recovering the fabrics of our society
• One key lesson for those in local government

Background

Before we jump in, what exactly does an emergency planner and disaster specialist do?

In the broadest terms, we think about all the things that can go wrong, make big lists of them, try to plan for them, try to be there with the plans when something goes wrong, try to be there afterwards and in that very long, slow recovery that you see done at the local level.

There are lots of different types of emergency planners and lots of different ways we’re described. People use terms like crisis management and resilience. You’ll find people in this sort of ‘tribe’ everywhere, from hospitals and airlines to, of course, what we’re talking about today, usually a unit within a local authority.

This sector flies under the radar for most people. Your book, When the Dust Settles, offers a bit of a glass-shattering moment. Are too many of us walking into the future quite naively, without enough of an understanding of what the big risks are?

I think there’s a balance. My PhD used science and technology studies, which looked at how humans cope with living alongside big risks. I’m definitely the zeitgeist at the moment. There have been a number of big newspaper articles in the last few weeks that have been like, ‘Wake up everybody, there’s all these big risks.’ Certainly, I was naive to the fact that people didn’t know about emergency planning.

Realities of local emergency planning and recovery

You previously worked at Cambridge City Council in risk management. So, speaking from your own experience of working in local government and with local authorities over all these years, what is it actually like doing risk and emergency planning on a local level?

I loved it. There’s definitely a parallel universe where I’m still there, it was one of the happiest roles I’ve ever had. In fact, I’m back with the crew from 2004 next week – we’re going out for lunch. I think it’s very hard to understand, speak about, and get all the different tiers of local government without having been in it. My attitudes to many things were formed in those years, like how we deal with waste and how much councils spend on landfills and recycling contractors. I never looked at what goes on with your council tax in the same way again.

When it came to the pandemic, those years with the City Council really made me think about who does what and what happens when those wheels fall off. Because of that, I’m very protective of the local government sector. I can’t imagine life without that experience, really.

What are the big misconceptions that people have about emergency planning and recovery?

One that I tackle head-on in When the Dust Settles, is the Skyfall effect, which is the idea that in the event of an emergency, some kind of different taskforce with lots of black Range Rovers and screens that show all the AMPRs, vehicle recognition, descends. All eyes on London kind of thing – and there’s Daniel Craig, obviously.

But local government in an emergency is the same as local government every day. I think one of the things that I wanted to capture in the book is the sometimes brilliant mundanity of it—the sort of tea club and the waiting for people to authorise the cards, but also the camaraderie that comes with that.

I think people have very high expectations of emergency planning. One key moment for me was a couple of years ago doing James O’Brien’s Full Disclosure podcast and just talking about the questions you need to ask. For example, if your local authority has to cut its team from 30 people to two, as it did from 2012 onwards in the UK, what does that say for emergency planning? It really is one of the easiest services to cut and nobody sees it until they need it. Then they say, ‘Where did it go?’ That has been a huge frustration that we’re still all living with in local government emergency planning.

Secondary disasters and ‘bad help’

You’ve been all around the world to the frontline of every type of disaster imaginable, and you’ve also studied hundreds of years of historical disasters. From all this experience, you’ve become a big advocate for encouraging responders to slow down and be more precautious in their decision-making to avoid causing even more harm, or as you call it, ‘the secondary disaster’. Can you offer us some advice on what type of considerations during response and recovery can really make a difference here?

That’s such a brilliant question and so helpful to ask because that is the value of listening to some of this before you have an emergency. One of the things that I’ve written about a lot is what I call ‘bad help’. This probably gets me the most anger on things like social media. It comes in many forms, for example, one of the big things that I’ll rail against is the donation of stuff. My hashtag in the event of the early stages of a disaster is #cashnotstuff. What’s been lovely over the last few years is I’ve had a lot more interaction with elected members and council leaders about why I’m not just some kind of terrible Grinch character trying to kill the lovely vibe.

There are real things we do that are harmful. I use a phrase that I can see people react to, which is that sometimes the initial disaster doesn’t do the harm, we do it as responders. Now, that can be a much wider group of responders. For example, after a flood if the local authority decides to divide the affected children up alphabetically and move them to four alternative primary schools, then they’ve done harm to those children. They’ve not looked at the one school as a lifescape and thought about what is best for that community.

I’m very grateful to the very large number of councils who will bring me in early and say, ‘This is what we’re planning, what do you think?’ and the bravery of those places when they take it from me when I say, ‘the downside of X equals this’.

That said, you don’t want to paralyse local authorities so they feel they can’t respond without advice or that their decision is wrong, but seeking consultation on big decisions like reshaping whole communities is important. What’s been very poignant to me while advising in some places, most recently Soutport for Sefton local authority, is when helping with questions about taking down tributes and memorials. All I’m ever really doing is being a broker to lots and lots of international case studies and that’s often what you’re looking for, just a little bit of sense making about your decisions.

Community preparedness and engagement

One of the biggest challenges in the midst of a disaster is communication breakdowns. Is this just a part of the inevitable panic–fight-or-flight human nature of these situations—or is there something more to be done in preparation with responders and the community as well?

One of the things I love about the current zeitgeist is that much more now, I’m being asked about what we can talk to communities about. Because if you say to communities in advance, ‘This is where we would like you to go,’ then they know. What we tend to see, and it’s a very age-old problem, is people fleeing an incident would go where the lights were on.

When I first started to publicise the book 3-4 years ago, there was much more resistance to the idea that the people needed to know this. And now I’m getting requests to do all sorts of things about citizen and community preparedness. One of the big themes in my new writing has very much been around how this is not making people more afraid, it is helping people to place their anxiety somewhere. It is not some generalised anxiety disorder to worry about the state of the world at the moment. That’s good sense to have a little bit of a wonder every day of what’s going on. The much greater use of warming spaces now and having conversations about where people would go in things like winter is opening up a much wider discussion about these crucial community-based assets. And that, for me, is only positive.

Something I picked up on in your book in all the scenario reenactments and planning sessions is that the only people who seem to never be present are the general public. Could this be where local government steps in to help improve public understanding and readiness?

I find that if the elected members are doing their jobs properly as true representatives of the ward, it is as good as the community voice. To me, their role in emergency response is to fully represent, as you say, the one group that wasn’t in the room for the exercises who doesn’t know this is a thing. I’m so passionate at the moment about making sure that the local government guidance to elected members is out and that they have been briefed on their expectations.

I think the other thing is, we need to challenge people to think a bit differently. We see officers bringing existing biases and perceptions to meetings so there’s work sometimes to do. The other thing that we can be guilty of in local authorities is assuming that because you’ve got the priest, the imam, the headteacher at a table, then you’ve done community consultation. I think how you do consultation is one of the big challenges, for local authorities and something they are really struggling with.

From your experience, you say that local councils have some of the most dedicated emergency planners and community engagement workers because they are often intertwined as residents themselves. But do you think even with that closer link, councils are still at times guilty of trying to do recovery ‘to’ communities instead of ‘with’ them?

Yes, I think the vast majority of the incidents that I’ve responded to, it’s always for me, a local response is best. Often the council is a huge employer of local people. I remember once doing some work with Hull around floods. Their Director of Adult and Children’s Social Services flew in about an hour late to the meeting and he was very apologetic, then when we drilled down, we realised he had been flooded too and was not living out of the area in his sister’s back bedroom with his whole family. What I’m very experienced with now is local authorities responding to incidents where their staff are also affected community members.

I think it’s definitely the case, they say in the rhetoric a lot, ‘We’ll be working with you’ and ‘You asked, we did’ and ultimately, they still do struggle. More recently, I’ve been seeing a very authentic attempt to completely be guided by residents and communities. But that can also create a form of paralysis. One of the things you see local authorities do is lose what I’ve coined their ‘technical legitimacy’, on things like engineering decisions, planning decisions, or what’s possible in terms of health and public health. You still need to have a local authority technical legitimacy and a position on something, you can’t just say the path is completely open for a total redesign. There’s this middle ground that I think communication teams and Chief Execs need to find.

Gender bias in emergency planning

You write about women having the cards stacked against them – things like being accused of overreaction, thinking too much or being too emotional. Even to the point where you’ve been advised by other senior women in these roles to ‘keep your womanness out of your day job’. What do you think is the true cost and implications of this gender bias in emergency planning?

Emergency planners, although they are often within local authorities, spend a lot of time with the blue light responders, fire, police, ambulance, coastguard and others, and those agencies for me were really struggling. You could be a woman in the fire or police service, but you were expected to conform and behave in certain ways and make the kit work for you. You tolerate very high levels of kind of machismo and banter, all of the things that we all know about. Then I think there were other things that I allude to, which is having to hide your womaness, essentially having to keep your health very quiet because that wasn’t expected. That could be anything from sort of chemotherapy and colitis to as I write about, baby loss and trying to have babies.

For me, it’s interesting because the more media and writing I do, the more I get asked to do things like young girls and International Women’s Day events, and this responsibility becomes very relevant. What do you tell people about the journey? One thing I think women in leadership roles, in places like local government, have to be really careful of is to not think that they need to repeat the behaviours of the past so that the women today are as resilient as these older women are. This kind of hazing approach to the newer workforce. I feel a lot of hope with the women who came after me. They’re very clear on what they want. There’s a new type of communication around requirements and needs. I follow a lot of colleagues in the military who are supporting things like a better path for motherhood and all those kinds of things. But they’re such fragile rights, aren’t they? I think sometimes, particularly once the book came out, a lot of the men that I’d worked with just had no idea that this was a woman’s experience. That’s really powerful, so what were they seeing?

I’ve got this bonkers interview, I’m really proud of it, that I did for a lovely American colleague who’s written a book on intuition and instinct. One of the things she wanted to explore was intuition, instinct, hysteria and the idea of the Cassandra, which I also explored in my recent BBC Radio 4 show. It’s the idea of understanding the gift of fear and understanding where a situation might go very wrong. One of the things that I’ve come to really value is what emergency planning does allow women to do, which is speak out loud instincts that I think a lot of women have to carry around with them. As female emergency planners, we get to call it a job. And that’s been a true gift.

Tackling cultural incompetency in emergency planning

How can local authorities in particular take proactive steps now to ensure that there’s fair unbiased treatment of all disaster victims regardless of race, religion, socioeconomic status, gender, how do we equalise how we treat each other?

After Grenfell, this idea of not understanding – and there was no excuse for it – but not fully understanding the role of race, colour, creed, culture, diaspora, all of these factors. The NHS in the West London area called it ‘cultural incompetency’, which I sort of got because it wasn’t this overt racism. And in fact, there wasn’t even thoughtlessness, people were trying to think about it, but they got it wrong. There was sort of fascinating feedback from a number of the older Muslim women that people kept trying to tap them for the EMDR therapy or putting male counsellors into Islamic women faith groups and these kinds of things. Although it’s problematic itself because it does obfuscate the racism in there, it is an issue sometimes of incompetency rather than a deliberate ism in local authorities.

What I felt was really sad in the Grenfell Inquiry Report, was how it was so scant on actual findings for the local authorities to work with. There’s a lot of work to do now to dig deeper than that. For me, one of the things that the inquiry was a little bit shallow on was it assumed that people had never given any thought to the needs of Muslim survivors of disaster – and of course, there was guidance for Muslim families. Actually, what I found in my own experience with both Grenfell and earlier disasters that had affected Muslim families was that where white secular responders falter is not that they didn’t understand the faith, but they didn’t understand devoutness. They assumed that if the person was hungry enough, they’d eat anything. Or if the person couldn’t sleep, they’d sleep anywhere. Or if the person couldn’t get access to prayer, they wouldn’t pray that day. Those are the sorts of things that I’m taking to local authorities now and saying, ‘Do your plans understand the faith?’ Not just tell us the basic key tenets that you would do for a religious education GCSE. How deep have you gone in your understanding?

I think that’s the next stage of work for local authorities and nothing must derail this work because it is one of the biggest challenges. Our current response is failing to respond to people’s needs and understand their needs. That should not be an issue in 2025, we should be well past that now.

Speaking of the Grenfell Fire, there’s been a lot in the news recently around the decision from the UK central government to take down the tower block. Back when you wrote the book, you predicted the tower wouldn’t be there for much longer. Firstly, is this what you were expecting in terms of timing? Secondly, how can anyone really gauge when the right time is? You advise that people need an endpoint, but for those involved, it will always feel too soon.

We talked at the start of this about giving advice in the early days and avoiding the secondary disaster. One of the things about seeing lots of responses around the world is that every disaster has its own specificities and causes its own pain, but what you start to see is some themes that they share. We had done quite a lot of work prior to 2017 on the idea of taking an unrested site where the building had been burnt down to a point of memorial and had just started to think about what if they’re still standing in the way that they have been, say, after the New Zealand Christchurch earthquake where the cathedral was half up and half down. What does it feel like to have to be part of something that has to be brought down?

One of the very first things I advised on for Grenfell was that in order to rest the deceased and allow the community to start some kind of healing – all of that is very problematic as concepts – the tower needed to be rested itself in some form. There are examples of where parts of buildings that have been involved in mass tragedies like this become built into a memorial, but that work needed to happen. I was increasingly distressed really to see how delayed that had become. But I was also schooled and humbled then to see it become a symbol of dissent and rebellion and a necessary kind of defiance in the face of so much injustice. What the engineering reports started to show was that the tower was rapidly deteriorating and was requiring substantial propping. So from a safety and risk point, it needed to come down – going very much back to that time as the risk manager in a local authority. But this had to be communicated to the families. As an external person, I saw ministers within the Conservative government really struggle with how to convey that. So, I think what the Deputy Prime Minister has done has been very clear with what she thinks needs to be done. The problem we always have with disasters is the total pool that we call the manifest of people you are consulting with – and with Grenfell, it’s grown and grown. Consultation on disaster is a very nebulous thing that very rarely achieves coalescence.

What my work had taught me, and in the way that I write about it, the tower is very much an unrested mass grave. In order to perhaps be able to allow the community to start to heal, something had to be done with the site. The really sad thing is you’re probably seeing a 10 to 20 year path from now as to what that looks like. In the opening of my new book, I actually look at what’s happening in Wrexham, which is starting a memorial process 90 years after a colliery disaster. One of the things that I often talk to elected members and leaders in councils about is that there is an incredibly lengthy, slow and grinding survivance that comes after disaster. I don’t see endpoints, but I do see a value from resting.

Preparing for emergencies of the future

You’ve seen the emergency planning field change dramatically over two decades thanks to lots of moving parts, like technology, legislation, resource cuts and an undermining of emergency planning expertise. From the outside it sounds like we’re set on a path with very worrying implications for our preparedness for future disasters. Where do we start to mitigate some of that risk?

I think one of the big themes of all of my work at the moment is if it’s your job to mitigate the risk, like you’re a risk management officer in a local authority, then there’s absolutely work to be done. If that’s not your experience, if you’re something else, then you absolutely have to learn how to live alongside it. As John Law says in his writing, we couldn’t get up out of bed and put the kettle on if all we thought about was how safe that local nuclear powerplant is.

On a very practical level, there’s a lot of criticism, for example, of local authority community risk registers. They’re very partial in their information. There’s very little money to do this at the moment, but if I’m a local authority, I’m very interested in things like what’s on your website? What are you telling people? The most useful phrases to use with your citizens at the moment can be quite counterintuitive, and it’s these three words, ‘help isn’t coming’. What do you want citizens to do in the event of a major incident that will give you time to respond where it’s needed? We are behind many other countries in terms of our community and citizen readiness. That would be the biggest thing I would ask local governments to be focusing on. It’s very important to work with our communities so they’re more resilient and also that we’re honest with them.

You should work with what emergency planners love to work with, the reasonable worst-case scenario. I love it when I get press questions from like the Daily Star because it’s always, ‘Is Britain ready for a zombie attack? Is Britain ready for alien attack?’ My answer is always the same: emergency planners are not that obsessed with the scenario. We work to some core consequences, whether it’s nuclear winter or attack of the Yetis – and all of those will fall on the local authority to respond to. I know local authorities are worried about money and they’re worried about resources, but this would be where to focus attention because it would strengthen the rest of the core of the organisation.

Who globally is doing emergency planning and response well and setting a standard to follow?

Everywhere tends to go on a carousel of tough times. We had FEMA envy with the US a few months ago, now that looks like it won’t exist anymore. We would put up Australia and New Zealand as very good examples before the pandemic, but we all struggle together. A lot of questions during the pandemic would come to me about who’s doing well and that’s not really how global disaster works. Everybody takes their turn on the carousel of difficult times. That said, we learn a lot from other places, like Japan with community preparedness. I’m always borrowing from others, so Sweden, Finland and Denmark for things like their winter readiness. Australia and New Zealand, I’m constantly stealing their recovery tools. I’m all about my kind of international copy and pasting.

Post-Covid: recovering the fabrics of our society

In your book, you write about the impact of a degrading safety culture. Is that something we’re tackling right now and will continue to tackle in the future? And how can local authorities step in to make sure that communities are looking after each other?

There was concern after the pandemic that you would see this. When I use the phrase ‘after the pandemic’, you see people slightly bristle, ‘are we still talking about that?’ This is a massive global disaster with huge consequences. One of the things I championed–and continue to champion–all the way through the pandemic was how well local government held things together, but that fraying is exactly what we’re seeing now. The more potholes, the more litter, the old Covid signage. Nobody’s got any money, the problems in schools, and everything starts to feel very frayed, very tired, very fatigued.

One of the things that you can’t do is let that set it. You have to keep up the energy and the momentum. A lot of local authority leaders are saying to me, ‘How do I say to staff, we go again after it all?’ That’s incredibly difficult but that’s why there has to be a point to all this. It’s been a joy to work with local councils during the pandemic who’ve kept a very child and young-person-focused lens. They look at every project through a 20-30-year lens, and that’s the difference between the very short term, as in the four-year political cycle, and policies that I think will endure. It’s asking, what does this do to the local area? What does this build back?

But I also think there are questions back to the public, around the amount of things like antisocial behaviour, littering etc. We have to agree again. We had the social contract broken with us in the pandemic, not by local government, but by national government. That has to be re-reset. Where we tend to take that out as a public is on our local people, our local area, and our local elected members. There’s no doubt the next few years will be tumultuous because of that.

As you explain, the pandemic has made us all disaster survivors now. You warned that there would be a cost to our societal fabric, and it would take years to mend, but eventually, we could emerge stronger and kinder. What do you think now? Where are we on that timeline?

One of the things we joked about was women’s intuition, and you know, I haven’t been wrong yet in terms of what we thought we would see. There’s even that very prophetic line, which I wrote early on in the pandemic: ‘I expect us to see pogroms and riots’. That has become so true. In the new book, I reflect that the timeline for that, when I was asked about it by the government, was about four to five years. It would be a real low point for, as you say, the fabric, that’s where it will be tested. We’re getting some things wrong. We’re alienating and labelling more and more people within society.

The way that humans have always lived is kind of inside the gaps and with hope. I think what we’ll see is a kind of recalibration. When you live your life in disaster, you realise we’re in peril all the time, but there’s lots of living to be done in the gaps and moments between. That’s the big realisation for this next stage of life. There will be, I hope, and I think I already see it, a lot more compassion.  We should start to see a very gentle rebuild. What gives me hope is never the big world picture, it’s always the little moments of joy. It’s going to see my Cambridge local authority pals and all of those kinds of things. Those are the joys of every day found in the community. Communities do wonderful things and it has been a privilege to see that in the worst of circumstances.

One key lesson for those in local government

Lastly, reflecting on all you’ve seen and learned about local community resilience and collaboration in disaster recovery, what key piece of advice would you share with local leaders as they grapple with the impact of these big global challenges on their communities?

It’s a very easy one because it’s about learning to love the disaster recovery graph and guidance. Learn to love the initial honeymoon phase. Learn to understand what the slump does to your community. Learn to think about, as this whole conversation has been about, what can harm and what can help.

Most importantly, a big chunk of the recovery graph is about keeping your own head above water as a leader. It doesn’t mean leader in the sense of political leadership, it means anybody who carries a lantern as anybody working in local authority does. If you choose to work in local authority, you are saying to people around you, I’m here. Whatever role that is from waste management, schools, street cleaning, risk management, finance, etc., you are lantern bearing for your community.

This is a guidance document for you on looking after yourself. When to remember it’s just a job, which is a really difficult thing to say. A lot of people aren’t in the public sector for the glamour and the money. They’re suffering from this terrible disease called vocational awe, which means they got into it because they want to make a difference. This is great, but it means they’re empaths and they’re highly prone to burnout. They start to question their own sense of self when it’s linked to their job. So, one of the things we really have to do is take care of our local government colleagues. That’s my next couple of years with my new book, Come What May. It’s all about taking care of the wonderful people who get us through disasters.

Want more insights from Lucy Easthope?

‘Come What May: Life-changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis, ’ is out on the 15th of May, and you can pre-order it right now on Amazon.

LGIU members had the chance to hear directly from Lucy at our Ask the Expert event on April 9th. We’ve distilled the takeaways from the discussion: Local government and emergency planning: insights from Professor Lucy Easthope.

Links to more resources:

• When the Dust Settles, Lucy Easthope’s 2022 Sunday Times bestseller book.
• Leading in Disaster Recovery: A Companion Through the Chaos, New Zealand Red Cross guidance.
• In it together: mental health support for local government workers, LGIU briefing (open to all via signing up).
• From preparation to recovery: local authorities and emergency planning, LGIU member-exclusive briefing.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.