The Flashbacks of Flame Continue : Scars of Fire Slow to Fade for Those Who Lost Homes

Memories of the fire come back and back again in relentless instant replay.

One man remembers how he had just taken a can of frozen orange juice out to thaw when the police ordered him to leave his home.

A woman keeps seeing the foxes coming up out of the canyon to escape the flames.

Harvey Bodie sees himself and his neighbors hosing down their houses for an hour and a half. Then he watches the structures disappear in three minutes in a 20-foot wall of flame.

“Gee, I loved my house,” Bodie said last week, smiling ruefully through watery brown eyes. “You know, if you like sunsets, I had the most beautiful house in the world.”

Last week, Bodie and hundreds of others who were burned out in the fires that have scoured Southern California began what counselors and therapists say will be a painful but predictable process of disaster survival.

If the patterns seen in victims of hostage-takings, earthquakes and other catastrophes prove valid, many of the fire victims will move from numb shock to hyperactivity and optimism, into depression, anger and grief, the experts say.

Only later will come acceptance and reconstruction. In the end, therapists say, most victims will put their lives back together.

“The question we get most often from people is . . . ‘How am I going to keep this from coming back and coming back?’ ” said Peggy Smith, a San Diego County mental health expert who also worked with survivors of the 1978 PSA airline crash and the San Ysidro massacre.

“We tell them, ‘Honestly, you won’t be able to,’ ” Smith said. “But we try to help them see they’ve had a lot of experiences in their lives, and every experience becomes a part of you. People have a lot of strength they don’t realize they have.”

Immediately after the June 30 fire, Smith’s agency stationed two counselors at a table in the Red Cross service center in Normal Heights. But by midweek, Smith said, only a handful of the several hundred fire victims had stopped by to talk.

Similarly, a group of marriage and family counselors offered free counseling. They distributed leaflets in the neighborhood and in local bars--assuming that at least some victims would be trying to drown their sorrows.

But the offer produced an odd sight one night--a single fire victim and 15 counselors sitting in a circle of folding chairs in the basement of a school for the emotionally disturbed.

“We have found that most people who experience disaster don’t see themselves as being in need of counseling,” said Diane Garaventa Myers, who has worked with flood and mud slide victims in Marin County. “They need money, financial counseling, advice about how to wind through agencies. In the first few weeks, maybe months, people need very concrete things.”

The San Diego fire, which police believe may have been intentionally set, destroyed or badly damaged 102 homes in Normal Heights. Two days later, another fire, also blamed on arson, leveled 53 homes in Los Angeles and left three people dead.

Many of the Normal Heights fire victims were older people. They had lived in their homes for decades and had raised children there. Many seemed to have lost every trace of their past lives: a 69-year-old woman lost her only photos of herself as a child.

Many of the victims have busied themselves putting their lives back together, signing up for “debris collection,” talking to insurance adjusters, going to the store to buy clothes.

Others couldn’t stop thinking about the fire: Lurline Dykes lay awake in a roll-away bed in her son’s home, thinking, “I’ve got to have towels, I’ve got to have pillow cases, I’ve got to have sheets.”

“You just continue to go over and over and over what you don’t have anymore,” said another woman, who said she couldn’t bear to see her house burn down on TV one more time and didn’t want to see her name in print. “And it gets worse.”

Therapists, disaster workers and some psychiatrists who have worked with disaster survivors say most can expect to pass through a number of “phases,” the length and intensity of which will vary from person to person.

First, they say, comes shock or denial--a 48- to 72-hour period in which they wake up thinking the fire was a bad dream. That may coincide with an odd euphoria, brought on by adrenaline and the good will and community spirit brought on by disaster.

But those feelings dissipate when survivors begin to inventory individual losses, counselors say. Then come depression and seemingly irrational anger, often aimed at targets like government officials and bureaucratic red tape.

Dykes, who is 69 and hadn’t insured the contents of her home, took it out on the hedges she had painstakingly trimmed before the fire. “As I told my son, I went over and kicked those hedges yesterday,” she said with some humor Wednesday.

Others, in the absence of any real villain, may feel angry at their neighbors,

“All the really nice places are gone and the grubby things that should have burned are still there,” said one woman who met with the counselors. “You get as angry at them for being there all right as they feel guilty for being in that situation.”

There are physical reactions, too, counselors say, including headaches, nausea, digestion problems and weakness. Psychological side effects may include poor concentration, memory loss and acute sensitivity to stimuli such as slamming doors.

In a small percentage of cases, drug and alcohol abuse and family violence may increase, usually if those tendencies existed before. One counselor said studies suggest that calls to suicide hotlines and hospital admissions for stress-related illnesses may rise six months after a disaster.

Dr. Calvin J. Frederick, a UCLA psychiatry professor who set up the federal government’s program for counseling disaster victims, described an even more detailed pattern he said he has seen in studying more than 2,000 survivors.

Frederick said the initial shock is followed by a “heroic phase” in which some survivors work hard, get little sleep and are buoyed by “kudos from others about how well they’re coping.” Then comes a “honeymoon phase” of confidence in promises of government help.

Frederick said up to 25% of survivors may develop “post-traumatic stress disorder,” a condition some psychiatrists say they see in Vietnam War veterans and former hostages, among others. For those people, the trauma continues to recur in their minds. They may experience “emotional anesthesia” and lose interest in their work and sex life.

A survivor’s reaction may depend upon his or her condition before the disaster, and how well he or she has resolved past traumas. Some counselors say older people may have an advantage, having already survived wars and perhaps other devastating events.

In some people, Frederick said, symptoms surface only months later. All survivors, he said, “need to be helped to recognize that in one sense these feelings are not abnormal. Some people think they are going crazy.”

Unfortunately, family and friends may begin to tire of the subject after four or five days--just when survivors are increasingly able and needing to talk. For that reason, Smith and others say, it is crucial to make counseling available, even if few take up the offer.

The best therapy may be talking.

“You can see how they begin to work through this,” Smith said. “They begin to lighten up and start talking about constructive things they’re going to do. They talk about how they are going to start pulling their life together.”

Because therapists acknowledge there is a stigma attached to the idea of “mental health counseling,” Diane Garaventa Myers, of Marin Community Mental Health Services, said her office deliberately uses the term “disaster recovery.”

Myers and others offered several recommendations for survivors, friends and families.

First, they urged fire survivors not to neglect their family life in the crush of re-establishing the material side of their lives. Take breaks, relax together and get away from the scene, they said. Some said couples especially need time to themselves.

Parents should be patient with their children; after disasters, they often become more dependent and anxious, counselors said. Relax rules to allay their fears, they said. Teachers and bosses should be tolerant of problems in school and work performance.

In the end, counselors said, a small percentage of survivors require medication or long-term counseling. But William O’Callahan, of the Red Cross in San Francisco, said some families have said they were strengthened by disaster.

“They find out that they need each other more than they thought before, and they find out what’s really important,” he said. “It’s the love between family members that really sustains a family, not the house and all the belongings.”

And last week, some survivors found small reasons for rejoicing.

Wayne and Barbara Sevier, whose daughter was living in their home at the time of the fire, said their only real concern was that she got out alive. There was a small bonus, too: she got away with the microwave oven they had given her for Christmas.

Harvey Bodie remembered running back into his burning house past a fireman wearing Bermuda shorts. Finding himself standing upstairs not knowing what to take, Bodie yanked his favorite paintings of the Santa Barbara Mission and the Santa Barbara coast off the wall and ran.

“You know, I feel like I beat the gods,” he said, bemused. “I said, ‘You mothers think you got it all. But you didn’t!’ ”