Easthope, who grew up in Liverpool, says it was witnessing the impact of the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 that set her on her career path, said Jasper Rees in The Daily Telegraph.

Whilst I am in the privileged position of living with my husband, dogs, and having a regular wage from a good job, lockdown terrified me. France teams the aftermath of facing Bataclan, or Dutch teams working on MH-17 are mentioned briefly or a single one liner and that's it). When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope’s phone starts to ring. Get things right, on the other hand, and an important step will have been taken towards helping people and communities recover. Other than making a cup of tea and bringing biscuits/cookies, I have no better idea of how a person or community can manage - and after the last few years of a global pandemic - we are ALL picking up the pieces, and will be for longer than I think we might like to believe.Lucy Easthope is a disaster planner, one of the hidden squadron of people who try to prepare our communities for the worst. Main Hi Kahaani Hoon”, an Audible Original i Her assessment of the decisions made by the UK Government following on from an exercise that pre-dated the 2020 pandemic should make very uncomfortable reading for Ministers and senior Civil Servants.

Easthope understood the importance of preserving these items for grieving relatives, and now she was doing it for herself.

It allows you to make up your own mind on what score the UK government gets for its capacity to plan and organise for the worst. My heart goes out to Lucy (and other emergency planners) who have watched a lifetime’s work of readiness being ignored and dismissed. I was lucky to meet Lucy online during the start of the pandemic, which then resulted in meeting up when lockdown restrictions allowed. Yet when she arrives at another scene of carnage, she tells us, she is “always struck by how fine the line between catastrophe and the rest of the world can be”. Easthope is excellent on these small yet significant details, which provide an insider’s perspective on situations that most of us will only ever experience via news reports.

Sometimes disasters happen around her, or just after (as at Grenfell) she has delivered training on the subject (the Grenfell training was criticized as too grim and unrealistic).This generosity is one of the things that makes the book so powerful, all the more as it never slips into a sentimental glossing over of incompetence or insensitivity. A riveting no-nonsense memoir that pulls back the curtains on your worst fears and shows you that someone, somewhere, will always truly care.