Exclusive:Why a disaster expert wants Scotland to better prepare for the worst

Professor Lucy Easthope, who has advised on major incidents including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, Grenfell and the pandemic, said there was “huge concern” about the resources being put into preparing for catastrophes.

She also raised fears about how an event such as a bombing would impact on the wider NHS, given the existing “corridor care” crisis in the health service.

Professor Easthope, whose 2022 memoir When the Dust Settles became a bestseller, said Scotland was "very vulnerable" to environmental change and had a “real problem with flooding”.

Asked if Scotland and the UK should be braced for more environmental disasters given the impact of climate change, she said: “Absolutely.”

The disaster recovery expert told The Scotsman: "There's no doubt that there's climactic changes, and then on top of that you're also seeing other kinds of things.

“Last year was the year we saw the most elections in the history of anybody ever recording elections, so you've also got this kind of geopolitical tension.

"What I really want to move us to as a world, really, is thinking differently about things like being prepared and what that might mean on a household level, all the way through to an organisational level, so being readier for these things, and also talking about these things."

She added: "More than ever now, when we have a major flood there are very real discussions about whether that community will be able to go back. We call it managed retreat. And that's happening right now.

“The interesting thing for me is the interplay between responding to no-notice [incidents], responding to repeated storms - of which Britain is pretty rubbish at doing, although we’ve seen some good resilience, particularly in urban areas - advice on what to do in these things, and then also the interplay between the country actually fundamentally changing because of these things.”

The disaster expert’s comments come in the wake of Storm Eowyn last week, which battered Scotland with 100mph winds that left almost 300,000 people without power and caused “devastating” damage to dozens of prized heritage properties.

Prof Easthope said: “I think the other thing is, because Scotland has got a real problem with flooding, is just this understanding that you can't have a really healthy, robust economy and tourist sector and good psychosocial health of your population if you are constantly flooding, and that's a big link that I think leaders aren't making.”

She emphasised just how “depressing” flooding could be for community morale. “Both England and Scotland at the moment, and Wales and Northern Ireland, we’re all just constantly recovering and then going again,” she said. “You’ve got areas hit seven times.

“Your Angus floods were devastating. And again, the governments need to manage that down and make that less of a problem, when in fact it’s profound.”

Hundreds of households were hit by flooding in Angus in 2023, many of them in Brechin, causing millions of pounds in damage.

Prof Easthope, who co-founded the After Disaster Network at Durham University, said the psychological damage of flooding on a community "is really, really hard to repair".

She added: "We've got real issues, I think, with things like environmental awareness."

Prof Easthope will be one of the key speakers at the coming Health, Safety and Environment Conference in Aberdeen, hosted by Offshore Energies UK.

Speaking to The Scotsman ahead of the event, she said: "There's huge concern, Scotland and England, about the resources going into preparedness."

She said good emergency planning was vulnerable to cuts, and referenced the closure of leisure centres across the UK.

"Leisure centres are a crucial place where we take people in environmental catastrophe,” Prof Easthope said. “A lot of our plans are predicated on being able to take them somewhere. 

"So what we see is all of the ways we would deliver care and compassion and basic needs are being eroded. I was asked a question by a newspaper a couple of weeks ago about, do I worry about us having, say, a bombing in the middle of corridor care and an NHS crisis. 

"I think what you'd see on day one is a massive, good response, possibly with some issues around survivable injuries, but a decent response to that no-notice event.

"But what would happen back at the hospital, I dread to think. And I'm of the school of thought that the people that die because of the corridor care on the same day as the people who are being attended to at the incident scene are entitled to equal care. So that's one of the challenges that we have.

“You create a myth. I call it in When the Dust Settles the Skyfall effect - that there’s a button pressed in major environmental catastrophes and suddenly the best of the best happens.

“What you’re seeing in the public sector and the health and social care sector every day is still the same response. There’s no extra Daniel Craigs, there’s no extra team. The difference would be, you would have commercial and private sector partners hopefully working reasonably well together with the public sector response.

“I like to think that there’s much more awareness of how difficult that response would be.”

Prof Easthope said the UK was also no longer a participant in the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. “That’s quite a significant loss for how we used to exercise for mass environmental disaster or mass casualty incidents,” she said.

Asked about planning for another pandemic, Prof Easthope, whose new book Come What May is released in the coming months, said global co-operation was “worse than ever”.

She also said society was “in a much worse position” in some areas than it was previously.

“I think the economy is struggling even more,” she said. “I think family and personal relationships are struggling even more. And I think things like people's general health going into a next one [pandemic] would be a major concern.

"We went into the last one very worried about how health and social care would stand up, which was of course going to be tested. It did its best, but it couldn't really survive, and now it's running on vapours."

Prof Easthope added: "So much in both Scotland and England was completely built on goodwill. One of the big things now that's very different for me responding to no-notice incidents is a) fatigue, but also people have kind of spent their goodwill quota."

She said a lot of people had been alienated over the past few years. "I am sad to see some of the consequences of the pandemic,” she added. “I always assumed that we would prioritise children more highly in that."

However, she said there were “lots of things that worked better than expected” during Covid.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Scotland has tried and tested processes for planning for and responding to major emergencies. We will continue to work with a wide range of frontline organisations to ensure that risks are identified and addressed, and that our processes for doing so are continually refined and improved.”