Twenty years ago I was the general manager at Carrows in Foster City. Twenty years ago, from October 19 – 23, the Oakland Hills were ablaze. Standing by helplessly has never been my strong suit, so we did what we could. The firefighters needed food, and people from all over were helping out.
We made sandwiches. Roast Beef. Turkey. Dry. We’d heard stories of firefighters stuffing sandwiches in their jackets to eat later and getting sick from the mayonnaise. We wrapped cornbread into individual portions. And then we tucked it all in the back of my ’89 Dodge Colt.
It was dark by the time I left the restaurant and as I drove across the San Mateo bridge to head north to Oakland, I saw the hills on fire. The eeriest thing I’ve ever seen.
The effects of that fire are still being felt today and that is something for Sweetie and I to keep in mind as we navigate the aftermath of the air races crash.
As victims began to deal with the trauma of the fire, their dreams also began to change. People dreamed of confronting overwhelming physical obstacles — tidal waves or floods, metaphors for the fire — directly and often successfully. After months of therapy, one heavily traumatized survivor dreamed of fending off environmental terrorists who had invaded his neighborhood.
“As you work out the trauma, there are trial-and-error stages,” Siegel said. “Nine months after the fire, this guy saved his neighborhood from environmental terrorists in a dream. There you can see the evolution of resolution.”
Siegel also found that people who had escaped the fire without significant damage to their homes or their loved ones were wracked with the worst cases of post-traumatic stress. They were bedeviled by survivor’s guilt because the community perceived them — mistakenly, it turned out — to be immune from trauma and fear.
