After an explosion or a crash, a flood or a fire – after any disaster with mass fatalities caused by accident, negligence or terrorism – there are bodies to be collected, identified and accounted for. Or parts of bodies. Appropriate obsequies are required even as lessons are absorbed in preparation for the next inevitable catastrophe.

To be employed in disaster management is to volunteer for an eternal treadmill: the task is to greet grief and incredulous rage with bottomless compassion and wise diligence. “You don’t have to be a saint or a seer with an iron stomach to work here,” the profession’s bumper sticker might read, “but otherwise you won’t last a week.”

Step forward Lucy Easthope, whose eye-opening memoir unveils precisely what it means to be a part of a clandestine profession. As she relates in When the Dust Settles, her first job was to source UK mortuary personnel to work at Ground Zero after 9/11. Her career has daisy-chained pretty much every major incident since: the Indian Ocean tsunami, 7/7, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Grenfell, Covid-19 and many more.

As jobs go, it’s a broad church. At the core of it is a process known as Disaster Victim Identification, or DVI, which involves painstaking analysis by pathologists, anthropologists and odontologists to append a name to flesh, bone and teeth. Over many years Easthope has helped establish sensitive ways of returning – or not – these mortal remains to families. Meanwhile, she advises ministries and other bodies on tackling major incidents as yet unimagined, except by the likes of her. Increasingly, distracted by optics, they don’t always listen.

It’s a profession rich in ghoulish euphemisms. The “Tombstone Imperative” defines a death tariff sufficiently high to trigger legislative action after a safety failing. A “scoop and run” occurs after an incident such as the downing over Ukraine of Malaysian airliner MH17 in 2014, when there is little time to gather remains from the scene (or “cremains” if victims are burnt). An “ante-mortem harvest” is what helps identify unrecognisable bodies via knowledge of, say, their pubic hair design. The technique isn’t foolproof. A plane crash can easily yield two victims with the same tattoo. DVI grows trickier when identically dressed women on hen trips, or sports teams on tour, all die together.