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Any soldier or scientist, disaster worker or United Nations war crimes investigator who heads off on deployment will tell you that ‘demobbing’ is the toughest part. Trying to fit back into your family roles again. Refocusing your brain on small talk and a grocery list. Steadying your nerves when you reach for a household object – a toothbrush, a pen – the brand that you’ve seen in the wreckage.
The hardest part of working in disaster is going home.
Later I would come to know this as the hierarchy of disaster grief. The ripples reach far and wide but those in the outer circles have much less claim to feel the effects.
Later in my life, I would come to know that disasters like this force wider change. This is known as the ‘Tombstone Imperative’. When safety failings result in a large enough death toll (tombstones) that some form of action becomes essential, the state will acquiesce to a series of legislative changes. Then, once that is done, responders and politicians can set about shifting the tragedy into archive and historical narrative.
As a survivor of disaster, even if you are not physically injured you might lose your sense of safety, your trust in the authorities and you may encounter a number of mental health challenges that can cripple you. You are not the person you were before.
It is true that in CBRNE incidents, government agencies must be very firm, even aggressive, towards the public just to get control of the situation. They are forced to use a lot of command and control statements. Normal interactions are stripped away and medical personnel may need to become faceless humanoids in masks, increasing feelings of panic. Distance is imperative in a CBRNE incident but if we are not careful we remove all that makes us human and then it is very hard in the recovery phase to pull the public back into trusting us.
The response phase is finite, maybe hours, days or months, but it will creak to an ending eventually. Whereas the recovery phase, the ‘afterwards’, both physical and psychological, can be infinite. Chernobyl will always be Chernobyl. For all of the incidents I have ever been involved in where contamination is a concern, I have urged the responders to dial down their use of fear of long-term contamination and simply deal with the issues calmly, while explaining to the communities what the science says. However serious the harm, people have to have hope for the future.
And after the Japanese tsunami, the government’s chief scientific adviser was receptive to the idea that other voices, wider perspectives in government scientific advice, needed to be represented on SAGE – the ‘soft intel’ as the Cabinet Office called it. They saw the importance of including more people who understood the humanitarian aspects of emergencies and the needs of vulnerable people and children.
But Lac-Mégantic taught me that perhaps the greater honour for those who died is to live for them. To keep their stories alive by including them in yours.
There was also a particular challenge for the UK responders that I spotted creeping in. The UK DVI team were good at what they did but they were occasions when they caused other nations to bristle. I wondered if some nations found us a little too smug and a little too quick and keen to deploy. Our requests to attend some scenes where British citizens had been killed overseas had been rejected several times. In 2012, following a plane crash that killed seven British men, the heads of Nepalese police and forensic teams told the press that they could manage ‘perfectly well’ without any British
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New guidance was littered with military and management consultancy terminology. In a new world that saw the public sector as sluggish and leftie, we ‘humanitarians’ with our amateurish, pro bono ways had little traction. Nowhere was this more obvious than the treatment of Disaster Action.
The focus had shifted from genuine interest in public perception and resilience in the face of emergencies to ‘optics’. Instead of being asked about what we thought survivors might need in any given scenario or how a public health message might be received, we were now being asked to judge whether we thought the prime minister would be able to weather the storm or have to resign. It felt inauthentic and contrived.
Originally, the risks (things like extreme weather and ‘accidental’ bridge collapses) and the threats (bad men, terrorism) that had a high likelihood of happening in the next five years were scored and organised into a matrix so we could create a hierarchy of potential damage. But in the later 2000s, this focus shifted to us being asked to provide a score for ‘public outrage’. We produced additional papers and reports on this, based on new evidence and case studies. More and more ways to predict and later to ‘nudge’ human behaviour in emergencies were explored.
I also had growing concerns about human slavery and trafficking, which is the fastest growing and most lucrative of all global crimes. Everything seemed geared to a certain type of disaster victim, or perhaps, more accurately, a certain type of voter. I was worried that the ‘wrong’ sort of people would fall off the edge of the plans – the poor, the trafficked, the vulnerable.
Because, as we know by now, disasters don’t occur in isolation. They domino into other disasters. And, as they unfurl, they become entangled with the other challenges in our lives that would have occurred regardless.
Grief is best dealt with in the tiniest of incremental steps: how about you make the cup of tea today? Shall we walk to the end of the drive? Let’s redecorate the kitchen . . .
For me, one of the most troubling aspects of the point that we have reached is that our response has been so anti-human. The government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has included hefty doses of fear in the messaging. People are afraid – of the virus but worse, of each other. More people started to die at home without seeking help for other medical emergencies than of the virus. Just like with chemical and nuclear threats, fear is a dark genie that is not easy to recapture into its bottle. Its effects will linger long after the disease itself has felt more under control.
