Abstract
This is a chapter about conflict, context, closeness and difference told through the descriptions of three events: A ‘lessons learned’ conference, a public meeting at a primary school and a village carnival.
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Notes
- 1.
I have organised a number of such events including conferences for the Emergency Planning Society and the British Sociological Association Disaster Studies Workshop 2008.
- 2.
7/7 refers to the terrorist attacks by 4 suicide bombers that occurred in London, on July 7, 2005. Lockerbie refers to the terrorist bombing of a Pan Am airline which blew up over 800 square miles of England and Scotland. The majority of the wreckage devastated the Scottish town of Lockerbie and killed 11 people on the ground as well as the 259 people on the plane. Buncefield was an oil storage depot in Hertfordshire which caught fire and became Europe’s biggest peacetime blaze.
- 3.
During a number of research presentations, I have been challenged by a disappointed planner that some of the recovery arrangements trialled by Doncaster Council might only have worked in Toll Bar where there were specific circumstances and specific conditions (such as low levels of insurance, one geographically located community that could be moved to a caravan park).
- 4.
McLean and Johnes write about similar findings after the Aberfan disaster when they say: “Professional help is acknowledged as being secondary to the support of friends, family and community” (2000: 115).
- 5.
Tins is a colloquialism for cans of beer.
- 6.
Extract from the introduction to the Pitt Review which was established to examine the flooding events in 2007.
- 7.
I will explain this role below. Two examples of ‘interpreter submissions’ are the submission on the management of personal items of property in Toll Bar that I authored and the submission on the aftermath of the flooding in Hull that colleagues at Lancaster University provided; see Whittle et al. (2010) in Bibliography.
- 8.
Characteristics such as nurturing or listening may be derided. This can be illustrated through the use of the derisory term “pink and fluffy” by emergency planning practitioners and emergency responders to describe either negatively or apologetically any work that is related to supporting people after death and disaster. Dr. Anne Eyre (2007: 29) explores the way in which the specific term “pink and fluffy” is directed towards Police Family Liaison Officers deployed to support families after sudden deaths. It is used with other derogatory phrases such as their work being concerned with “hand holding”. It means that work with the people affected by disasters is soft, easy and less important.
- 9.
The use of the term ‘debriefing’ in emergency planning usually applies to an event where emergency services or other response organisations are gathered together to discuss what went well and what could have been improved during the emergency response and in the immediate aftermath.
- 10.
I had grown up in Liverpool and later Birkenhead, an area hugely affected by the Hillsborough football stadium disaster that killed 96 fans of Liverpool Football Club in April 1989. In the months and years after the disaster, fans were wrongly blamed for what had happened and were accused of being drunk and attacking police officers. These accusations were proved, in both a public inquiry and an independent review, to be completely erroneous (see http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk for further information). The use of terminology such as feral reminded me of what I had personally witnessed after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 in relation to the coverage by some aspects of the media about the behaviour of the fans at the match and about ‘hooligans’ from Liverpool more generally. I found this a particularly distressing moment within the June 2008 event.
Verbal attacks on those affected by disaster are not unusual: This was also experienced by families bereaved by the sinking of the Marchioness pleasure cruiser in August 1989. Here, negative media coverage of the victims as wealthy party goers and ‘yuppies’ caused the families great distress and allowed certain facets of the media to create a narrative that was at odds with the families’ perspective (Wells 1995: 51). This then influenced the wider public who contributed significantly less to their appeal fund than to other disaster funds in the 1980s and 1990s (Wells 1995: 51).
- 11.
Subjugated knowledges are the ways of knowing that become buried under “dominant forms of knowledge”. Subjugated knowledges often make sense of the world in a different way from some of the more dominant forms such as Western-based science or certain interpretations of history (Danaher et al. 2000: 104). The use of the term subjugated to those who are less powerful and less dominant in the discourse is also used by Donna Haraway (1988).
- 12.
The book, ‘Toll Bar on Sea’, produced by ACL and residents is dedicated to those that they describe as “Our Heroes” and then states “This book is dedicated to all those who helped during the floods but especially to those who protected, cared for and rescued day and night, 26 to 29 June 2007, until the emergency services arrived” (ACL 2008).
- 13.
Set up to examine the instances of childhood cancer in areas around Sellafield, Cumbria, a situation that had first been highlighted by local people.
- 14.
This ‘clash of knowledges’ and resulting distrust has also been written about by Bailey et al. (2006) after the Foot and Mouth Disease disaster across Cumbria in 2001. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were concerned then with the ‘macro picture’—what happened, what was working, where and why. The local, ‘on the ground’, perspective meanwhile is that there is a lack of control, a lack of communication and a lack of trust in those handling the disaster.
- 15.
Studies such as Brian Wynne’s into the effects of the Chernobyl disaster on Cumbrian Sheep Farmers (1992) and Kai Erikson’s on the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek floods (1976) highlight the complexity of the social relationships between the ‘expert’ and the community.
- 16.
An emergency planner.
- 17.
At several training events that I have attended about ‘Recovery Planning’, delegates have been advised to avoid public meetings in disaster-stricken communities (e.g. Cabinet Office College, July 2009) in case delegates became angry or confrontational.
- 18.
There have been a number of initiatives in recent years to ‘bridge the gap’ between academic research communities exploring the aftermath of disaster and emergency planners, with varying degrees of success. A common theme in academic research has been centred around the many competing knowledges in emergency planning and response and how important it is to properly listen to and work with affected communities. I am a member of the Emergency Planning Society’s Education and Research Committee which has this as one of its aims. I am also a member of the Emergency Planning Society’s Human Aspects Group which promotes human issues to other emergency planners (the fact that this is a separate group illustrates how marginalised this issue is).
- 19.
‘Recovery Planning’ presentation by Lincolnshire Emergency Planning Unit in 2011.
- 20.
These included the local council, the police and fire services and the Environment Agency as well as a number of local councillors.
- 21.
This was a local BBC Radio journalist that I got to know during the field work as he did a number of specific pieces from Toll Bar. We sat next to each other at this meeting.
- 22.
“The Academy for Community Leadership provides opportunities for people to develop the skills, knowledge, and experience needed to influence decision-making processes and participate in local democracy and to ensure delivery of successful regeneration programmes”. The Academy provides training programmes, qualifications frameworks, bursaries, community support and events. Further information is available at http://www.afcl.ac.uk/index.asp as at September 1, 2011. The Northern College is a residential college for adults based in Barnsley.
- 23.
I will return to this in Chapter 7.
- 24.
There are a number of examples of occasions when the residents eschewed ‘official’ support even when that meant going to more trouble themselves. In Chapter 4, I use the example of the handwritten minutes at meetings. Another example is this extract from field notes in April 2009: “They have found somebody in the village whose mother in law can translate the Indian letter they received. (It appears that they didn’t want any official help with this translation e.g. through the council.) They think it is from a village that has itself been flooded and have arranged to write back, enclosing a copy of the resident’s book and also asking how they came to hear about Toll Bar. They have filled it with news like the school now being open. Pam says that when they translated the letter it was very caring about Toll Bar”.
- 25.
All the extracts relating to the carnival are taken from my field notes, June 2008.
- 26.
I use John Law’s analysis in ‘Organizing Modernity’ to define what I mean by bricolage here as the small tasks and ‘odd jobs’ that add up to form a whole. Bricoleur is the French word for an “odd job man”: “Someone who makes, makes do and mends with whatever there is to hand” (Law 1994: 136).
- 27.
The use of the word Carnival to describe the event was important. This is quite an ‘old fashioned’, retrospective term but also was perhaps an acknowledgement of the village’s association with the travelling community—see below.
- 28.
A number of Neighbourhood Management Team workers and residents had explained to me that Toll Bar has a number of members of the travelling community who had now settled in housing within the village; this included a bare-knuckle fighting champion.
- 29.
The artefacts are fragile: the way in which they were created was often less formalised than the ways in which official narratives are created/managed. They may be easily lost. In the past, when writing about artefacts there was an acknowledgment that voices and oral accounts were the least transferable and easily lost (see Introduction). Now, arguably, modern innovation has brought about a new hierarchy where it is the documents that have no electric form that are vulnerable; hard to transfer and easy to mislay. They are vulnerable to simply perishing. Paper artefacts cannot travel as well as the electronic artefacts that can be attached to an email; taken from one situation and placed elsewhere.
- 30.
I have used the terms collude and deviate deliberately here although I appreciate that they are strong words. I wish to use them to express that what the residents and responders went on to do together really was a powerful, important, dissenting change to emergency planning practice and norms.
- 31.
Nesta is an independent charity that funds research into societal projects.
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Easthope, L. (2018). Flood Tales and Fantasy Documents. In: The Recovery Myth . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74555-8_3
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