KINGLAKE, AUSTRALIA — Pamela Phoenix had five seconds to flee her home of 30 years where she'd raised her two daughters. That was more time than many here got.
She threw her handbag into the car and tracked the onrushing bush fire in her rear-view mirror: "A fireball chasing me," as she recalled it.
Although Phoenix made it out, many of her neighbors in the Kinglake region, tucked into the Great Dividing Range northeast of Melbourne, did not. More than 130 died, including three members of a family down the road who burned to death 10 feet from the door of their fire bunker and a man who was crushed when the roof of his reinforced fire shelter collapsed on him.
The massive Feb. 7 bush fires that killed more than 200 people and erased several small communities in the southern Australian state of Victoria have prompted a wide-ranging federal inquiry, a criminal investigation and national soul-searching.
Shellshocked survivors such as Phoenix are struggling to comprehend Australia's worst natural disaster. They tell of frustrated homeowners who tried to run police roadblocks and the utter desperation of residents trained to defend their homes who realized that nothing and no one could withstand the wind, heat and flames.
Mental health experts are charting what they term a significant incidence of post-traumatic stress among the thousands of Australians who narrowly escaped the fires and now are bombarded with horrifying images repeatedly broadcast by news outlets.
The death toll has stunned Australians, who have long endured fires but have never witnessed conflagrations so close to housing subdivisions. Mental health authorities say that the emotional scars will prove to be the most difficult to fade.
Sandy McFarlane, a psychiatry professor at the University of Adelaide, studies post-traumatic stress and has examined the aftermath of Australia's 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, which killed 83 people and, until Feb. 7, were the most deadly in the nation's history.
"What is always underestimated is the long tail of these events," he said. "These are events that impact on communities for years. Initially, people believe that they can cope with their distress, that time will get it better, but the evidence is that often it doesn't, and when they come forward wanting help, the specialist services that have been put in place have disappeared. There is a real need for planners not to make that same mistake."
