The book begins in the summer of 2007, when parts of the UK experienced exceptionally high rainfall and were devastated by floodwater. It is firstly the account of a longitudinal, ethnographic study of the residents and responders in one flooded village: of the relationships that are formed, the houses that are rebuilt, the personal items that are missed or thrown away and the places that are lost or compacted. It is also a reflection on the changing role of the researcher as an insider in governmental emergency recovery planning who became entangled in the life of the village. The two aspects combined allow the analysis of myths that are stubbornly reinforced throughout the aftermath of disaster.
The health and social consequences of flooding, and more specifically the loss of home, a sense of security, space and possessions, have been documented in a number of studies. Some of these consequences have also become the focus of UK government attention. How well people recover from emergencies is seen to have a direct bearing on individual, community and economic well-being. A plethora of instruments such as checklists, templates and guidance documents have been produced by government planners to effect this recovery. I define these as technologies of recovery within a wider context of emergency planning which has at its core the aim of bringing order to complex and messy times. Technologies of recovery endeavour to place a framework over a complex process where much is uncertain, reactive and dependent on individual and ad hoc social relations. Like many other areas of health and social policy, while such protocols are not necessarily unwelcome, they carry many assumptions. I demonstrate that these are built on official narratives where much has been left unseen or unsaid. The final product is distilled and compromised, blind to the situated practices that remain hidden.
Drawing on literature from science and technology studies, human geography and disaster research, this study shows how technologies of recovery are transformed in localised practice, enabling actions to happen that are entwined with a communityâs own existing strength and resilience. The contribution of this book is to show, through a case study that makes visible the practices that are often hidden, how localised emergency responders find ways to collaborate with residents. In an informal network, they do different with the instruments to co-produce regeneration and survivance within a community.
Introduction
This book traces the path that the aftermath of floodwaters took in the village of Toll Bar, Doncaster, and is an ethnographic account of the everyday experiences of people rebuilding their lives after these floods between 2007 and 2012. It also interweaves a simultaneous observation of the work of a London-based âNational Recovery Working Groupâ, part of the Governmentâs Cabinet Office, as they designed tools to assist emergency planners with a time after floods and other emergencies that they defined as ârecoveryâ.
It is structured in three parts: The first, Technologies of Recovery and Their Role in the Recovery Myth, examines these tools, the forms that they take, and roles that they play in a phase that has been called ârecoveryâ after a disaster. I define and explore these tools that I have termed technologies of recovery and their attempts to bring order to a messy and complex time. This part also examines the concept of a ârecovery phaseâ after disaster and the way in which tools and technologies have been imbued with such importance in the field of emergency planning. In the final chapter of this part, I discuss a particularly potent example of the way in which the situated realities of life after flooding deviate from the instruments that aim to manage it.
Part II of the book, Plans and Situated Realities, examines aspects of life in the village of Toll Bar, the role that recovery tools provided by actors located at a distance played in this life and specifically the way in which residents and responders worked with these tools, and with each other, to co-produce what happened next in Toll Bar. These aspects became visible to me, only by watching closely the situated realities, and I use them here to make visible much of what may be hidden during âflood recoveryâ.
The third part, Reflections on the Recovery Myths, draws together concluding themes from the study and also outlines the contribution made by this work. I then go on to highlight a number of practice-based recommendations. I conclude that this is a story of omissions and oversights and the way in which technologies created elsewhere, imbued with assumptions, were re-imagined by local planners when faced with the loss of homes and places and things. The study is also a challenge to a phased approach to writing about/planning for/acting upon disasters where there is claimed to be a clear beginning, middle and end and an emphasis on the technical management of an emergency.
The floods of June and July 2007 were happening as the technologies were still in development back in Whitehall so this is not a story of cause and effect and of how a set of checklists and flow charts were applied universally. It is rather a story of watching a community taking the tools that were available, either from the National Recovery Guidance or other emergency planning tools, and transforming them into something that was localised to place and circumstances. It is also a story of how recovery happens anyway or happens differently and has always occurred. As Parts I and II of the book develop, they particularly chronicle the changing and developing relationships between the residents within the village and the responders placed into the village to support them.
All of these chapters are built around the field notes, transcripts and artefacts that are the result of five years of ethnographic research in Toll Bar between 2007 and 2012. I am describing this as ethnographic because it is an account of my lived observations and actions over five years in this village. In addition to my own observations, I also conducted interviews and discussion groups and took over 2000 photographs of the landscape and the places. I have woven a small sample of these within the text to illustrate aspects of the discussion. Those who participated in the study also provided photographs, letters, diary extracts and poetry. I have also drawn upon a book of experiences that the residents published with a local college and a number of internal reports that the local council provided me with.1,2
Locating the Study
Inextricably linked with my time in Toll Bar is my practice during the same time, as senior government adviser in emergency planning and an emergency planning lecturer, with a specialist focus on ârecovery workâ and the development of the very tools that I critique. This entanglement between my work in emergency planning practice and my time as a research student allowed me to produce something unusual amongst disaster narratives. As both an insider in the development of protocols and plans and an observer of the lived realities after a flood, I have been able to explore not only what local emergency planners were doing but the ways in which this practice was different, specifically, the way in which residents and local responders collaborated to do something other than the official practice. This ethnography has allowed me to explore assumptions and deviations from the perspectives of residents, local responders and also the national planners.3 Reflections on how I placed myself within the study have been discussed in footnotes throughout the book, and further information on my experiences in disaster is included on next page.
My field of study before 2007 was the unwieldy and disparate bodies of knowledge that forms âdisaster studiesâ. This included studies on the âpsychosocial aspectsâ of disaster, the management of disaster by official bodies, risk, risk communication and the legal process which all informed my studies in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management.
My practice and research has gained much insight from the aspects of human geography that relate to meanings of space and place and also house and home. Disaster studies and human geography frameworks combine in the work of Ian Convery on the aftermath of flooding and Foot and Mouth Disease, and Tracy Coatesâ work on case studies of flooding and I draw on both throughout the book. I describe the way in which a number of observational accounts of disaster have also influenced my work.
However, a body of knowledge that has also been most revealing to me has been Science and Technology Studies (STS) and particularly those aspects relating to the use of health technologies and health practices. In this book, I have used STS in a number of ways; I have used John Lawâs approach when discussing order and ordering and his work with Wiebe Bijker on the way that technologies and the social world can be understood together. For the way that knowledges are compromised and subjugated, I drew on insights from Donna Haraway and Anni Dugdale. To help and understand the assumptions that lie beneath plans and the way that humans interact with them, I have used the work of Lucy Suchman, and to define and explain the concept of technologies, I have drawn on the work of Pinch, Ashmore and Mulkay. As I found all of these works to be applicable throughout my discussions, rather than one literature review chapter, I have chosen instead to draw on these texts and others throughout the submission.
Disaster
This book problematises the definitions that officials and specifically emergency planning officials place over complex situations that arise after t...