Lucy Easthope is a professional emergency planner. She helps governments and businesses prepare for the worst. In the age of the permacrisis, it’s a growing profession. “We’re having a little bit of a—I don’t know if you can call it a renaissance—maybe just a ‘naissance,’” says Easthope, a professor in practice of risk and hazard at the University of Durham. Being ready, Easthope believes, begins with being willing to talk about the worst-case scenario.
“It doesn’t need to be frightening. Actually, it’s great to say: OK, when something happens, I’m ready.” Right now, that something feels like it could be anything: another pandemic, another international conflict, another breakdown of global trade.
Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health in London on March 19, Easthope sat down with WIRED to talk about how governments and individuals can get better at preparing for emergencies. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The world is changing. We’re seeing more extreme weather, lots of humanitarian issues, more conflict. What’s on an emergency planner’s mind in 2024?
One of the big things the world talks about is climate change. But as disaster planners, for us, it’s more lots and lots of sequential smaller events caused by changing meteorology. So we plan for more flooding or more heat waves. It’s a fairly constant cycle of events.
The UK government separates these things into hazards and threats: things that come from nature versus things like terrorism. Then in the middle you’ve got no-notice accidents [like an air crash]. One of the challenges is just how broad that list gets.
And there are new things on the horizon. One thing that often raises eyebrows is the idea that something like a pandemic is very likely. A pandemic like Covid was a very predicted risk. Very few things take us by surprise.
And a constant marinade for our work is chronic conditions—so things like social care collapsing, or very poor financial situations, austerity—and also, obviously, conflict. Things going on that affect your ability to respond.
How well does your country—the UK—respond to emergencies?
We planners have had a hard time. Planning’s very hard to get traction for unless the thing’s right on your doorstep and happening. And that “marinade” affects what goes on.
We’re actually quite far behind other nations in terms of citizen preparedness. There’s a learned helplessness often in the UK. We don’t have the cultures that you see in places like America or Australia and New Zealand.
The other thing we suffer from in the UK is a failure of imagination. People look out the window, they don’t necessarily see a river, so they don’t think they’re at risk of flooding. That’s a real challenge.
What makes the US or Australia better?
There’s much more of a culture of education. Emergency planning doesn’t tend to survive short-term politics. But where there are fairly obvious geographical, meteorological, and seismic threats, it’s seen as good planning by the state to be ready—to prepare for things like tsunamis and earthquakes in New Zealand, for example. It’s not seen as the state letting on that they have a problem.
These places have, for example, “72 schemes,” which is, if you’re in your home post-weather-event or something and no help comes for 72 hours, what would you have ready? What would you do? So, generators, torches.
Certainly in places where disasters are much more seen as part of Earth’s pattern, like Japan, New Zealand, and Indonesia, they’re taken out of the political cycle.
And a lot of places have much more embedded emergency agencies than the UK does, and a lot of other places have enshrined post-disaster law. So: “This is what the minimum standard is. This is what we expect you to do.” We just haven’t done that here.
Would you say humanity’s getting better at handling disasters?
There’s the disaster, which does some harm, but often the response does even more harm. That’s a huge challenge, partly because people are often responding from the heart—that’s a very unreliable organ.
Some people get very hooked into the early stages of a disaster, the honeymoon phase. People will overpromise and be too altruistic in a very unrealistic way. One of my big campaigns is: cash, not stuff—not donating second-hand goods.
We have to accept that disaster recovery itself is a science. It’s well informed, there’s a hundred years of what works and what doesn’t. Yet I’ve been asked to do a debrief on an event, and I’ve gone back to my laptop, and there’s the same event, very similar, 14 years ago, and we made exactly the same mistakes.
Are there examples of good emergency responses?
Yes, probably in every disaster, and I think that shocks people. Often, my debriefing style is what I call “celebrating good.” I will go in and find all the things that are either very innovative or where people have just done the same thing as before but it’s worked really well.
Sometimes it’ll be very fast decisions around grants and support. It might be that there’s some aspects—like in the pandemic—where a lot of the local plans work very well. Sometimes we’re getting things done exactly as we want to. There are several air crashes and things that spring to mind. We met all of the needs that we’d outlined.
The closest you get to knowing you’ve done it well is a lack of criticism.
Picking up what you said about the pandemic, how do you think that went—in the UK and elsewhere? The British government’s inquiry is still ongoing, and some politicians have come in for a lot of flak.
I often train with New Zealand’s recovery guidance. It redrafts quite an old tool in disaster response, the recovery graph.
That basically shows that after the honeymoon phase comes the disillusionment, the anger, the distress, the realization—and the timings of that can be different. But generally, we will always see this phase of criticism. There are some things that the British government definitely did wrong. But my personal views on that are perhaps not always the same as everybody else’s, because I was advising the government.
One of the things that I found very difficult was they couldn’t focus past the very short term, and one of the tricks in disaster recovery is to really be able to project ahead.
Also, in a disaster, there are no good decisions, there are only least-worse decisions. Every decision will come with a set of consequences. What the government really struggled to do was mitigate the consequences of decisions they felt that they had to take.
My personal view is that what the UK’s going through at the moment, it’s quite an expected stage after a disaster. But I wouldn’t want to stop learning lessons from it. I’m quite an active tweeter about the UK government’s Covid inquiry because a lot of the wrong questions are being asked.
What’s being done wrong?
It’s focusing a lot on personal interactions and on behaviors by people who probably won’t be in charge of the next one. What it needs to do is answer: How do you address the fact that there were plans and they weren’t properly used? What is emergency planning? What do we do next time?
It became obvious how poorly the public understood emergency practice. There was very poor communication with the public at the start about what the situation was. You know, what a pandemic does, what it looks like when it’s endemic, all of those kinds of things. We have to review across the board our approach to communicating scientific and medical information to the public.
Disasters can have really long-term impacts on people’s physical and mental health and on the environment. At what point do you judge that a disaster has ended?
For something like 9/11, it definitely becomes intergenerational, it becomes a permanent wound. Sometimes the need for support will spike much later on.
If you are the local responders and the fire and police, you never forget it, but you’ve not got a particularly big need to keep going back to it. If you’re the government, your ability to reactivate the response to it will need to be very ready for decades, and that’s very difficult.
Bluntly, I don’t see disasters end. That’s not how it works. Parts of the community will want to move on, and particularly people like the bereaved will not.
One of the things I work a lot on is Grenfell [a residential tower fire in London in 2017 which killed 72 people], and that’s brought me into more contact with Aberfan [a mining-related disaster in Wales in 1966 which killed 144], and you realize that it’s still very much part of the place. If I walk back around the site of a disaster, and I sort of have some idea of what I’m looking for, I can always find the legacy of that disaster.
What can I do to prepare for a disaster before it happens?
There’s citizen preparedness stuff. If the power went out. Torches or backup packs, phone chargers.
And there are some things you can do in your life to protect yourself. Getting yourself to a dentist, or looking after your health—the world is a bit more unstable, so look after yourself.
And then also, in the past couple of years, I’ve seen people wanting to talk about some of the more difficult aspects. You know, what would I want if they said I’d lost my loved one? Would I want their personal effects back?
You’ll always see me talking about having a will, having a lasting power of attorney, not making assumptions about who’s the next of kin in an arrangement. A little linguistic trick we always use in emergency planning is “when, not if.”
Finally, should we be worried about disasters?
At an individual level, we should care how our country is going to respond to them, because disasters don’t create new cracks. I want people to think more about what they would demand of themselves, their family, their state, their communities. What would they ask of this government?
But worry and fear are both pretty pointless emotions. They take a toll on the body. I would prefer that people thought more like emergency planners, which is: We chat about it, and we work out what we’re going to do.
Hear Lucy Easthope speak at the 10th anniversary of WIRED Health on March 19 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at health.wired.com.
