Colorado Wildfire Survivors Surrounded by Loss and Guilt

In a place where tidy suburbia meets the foothills, where middle-class families came for the view and stayed for the schools, 10 footsteps now separate relief from ruin.

On Vantage Vista Drive, Ernie Storti toes at a line of charred earth so precise it looks as if it had been drawn with black Magic Marker. He struggles to comprehend why his home is nearly untouched from the catastrophic Waldo Canyon fire, yet the house next door — one so close he once joked he could reach over and turn off the sprinkler — was all but vaporized.

Nothing is left there now but a hole in the ground filled with white ash. Piles of nails mark where walls once stood, but the wood has disappeared.

“By all rights this house should be on the ground,” Storti says. “It’s such a weird feeling to be here.”

Peering down his street past the yellow police tape, he sees that the fire’s devastation was nearly complete, incinerating house after house where Christmas lights once hung from rooftops and his children played in neighbors’ backyards.

Yet when he looks the other way he can almost pretend nothing happened. His house, with its telltale heat bubbles on one side, was some kind of a turning point.

Maybe the wind shifted just enough. Maybe salvation came when firefighters pulled down a burning split-rail fence between the two properties. Or maybe it was that awful choice firefighters sometimes make to let one house burn so another can be saved.

He may never know.

As Storti describes his feelings, his voice is filled with awe, but there is a note of something else too. It feels wrong to be happy, feels wrong to now be able to curl up on the couch in front of the TV when so many around him lost everything.

Mental health experts call it survivor’s guilt — a condition of colliding emotions when someone randomly survives and another does not. “It’s this feeling of, ‘What on Earth did I do right?’” says Farris Tuma, chief of the Traumatic Stress Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Often those spared feel undeserving, or at least no better than those who weren’t. The Stortis have certainly batted that feeling around in recent days. “Why us? Why is our house still here?” asks Kathy Storti.

Survivor’s guilt is typically studied in relation to soldiers on the battlefield whose buddies have been killed. Tuma says it is a relatively recent acknowledgment that those who survive a natural disaster have the same feelings.