KINGLAKE, Australia — Pamela Phoenix had five seconds to flee her home of 30 years, where she raised two daughters. That was more time than many here had.
She threw her handbag in the car and tracked the onrushing bush fire in the rear-view mirror: “A fireball chasing me,” she recalled.
Although Phoenix made it out, many of her neighbors in the Kinglake region did not. More than 130 died in the area, including three members of a family down the road, who burned to death 10 feet from the door of their fire bunker.
The massive Feb. 7 bush fires that overall killed more than 200 people while erasing a handful of small communities in the southern Australian state of Victoria have prompted a wide-ranging federal inquiry, a criminal investigation and national soul-searching.
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 long have endured fires but never have witnessed conflagrations so close to housing subdivisions.
Sandy McFarlane, a psychiatry professor at the University of Adelaide, studies post-traumatic stress and has examined the aftermath of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, which until Feb. 7 had been the most-deadly fires in the nation’s history, with 85 fatalities.
“What is always underestimated is the long tail of these events,” he said. “These are events that impact on communities for years.”
More than 5,000 firefighters are still battling a dozen blazes in drought-stricken areas.
Six fires remained out of control Tuesday, threatening homes.
The death toll is expected to climb.
