The longer it takes, the more likely a community will lose key members, or momentum to rebuild may be lost, he said. Another is rebuilding in a way that makes the community stronger, rooted in the new bond of a shared experience that moves them beyond just friendly neighbours. It’s creating a network, this entire web of relationships.” Are they going back? Are they going to continue to have the same relationships they had in the past? Will they disperse and find a new place to live? You know, community isn’t just living next to other people, it’s creating social bonds. “All of a sudden there’s a question mark on this entire community. The collapse of this “scaffolding” shouldn’t be diminished because it’s the frame that supports the routines that make up a life.īut what makes collective trauma particularly difficult, he says, are the more abstract losses. The sudden disappearance of the village centre - the loss of the post office, the grocery store - will have obvious concrete effects, he said. “There’s potential for rebuilding and recreating meaning and identity and relationships,” he said in an interview. It also creates an opportunity for groups to redefine who they are and where they’re going. Hirschberger’s research focuses on larger-scale traumas like the Holocaust.īut he said some of the same lessons can be applied to a localized cataclysm like Lytton’s fire.Ĭollective trauma tears the fabric of society, creating a crisis of meaning, he said. He said that while individuals experience trauma when they have a brush with death, something else happens when catastrophe strikes an entire community. Gilad Hirschberger is a professor of political and social psychologyat Reichman University in Israel. When disaster engulfs an entire community, something happens on another plane that experts say is more than the sum of its parts. When an individual experiences trauma, it can affect the sense of self. O’Connor isn’t alone in wondering about the future of the village. But maybe if I’m here and it grows, and we see it evolve, it will be home.”
“I think it’s going to be a town I don’t recognize. “I have this vision of the town as it was, right? And I know it’s not going to be that,” O’Connor says, as she looks down the street to where the firehall, museum, public pool and Catholic church used to be. Now that she accepts it, she feels an urge to just move forward, and frustration at the lack of progress. The first time O’Connor visited the site it felt like a dream - unreal and impossible. To the right, a cherry tree that O’Connor planted more than a decade ago stands as a charred skeletal monument overlooking the Fraser River. The perimeter of the home is outlined by its foundation and at the centre is a messy pile of red bricks. Mangled, rusted appliances are surrounded by decaying plaster and shards of glass. O’Connor, a retired school principal, surveys her property. Instead, evacuees remain in limbo, saying they’ve received few answers as to why. In the fire’s wake, pledges poured in to build back better, with the village mayor predicting the process could begin in September.
Nearly one year later, most of the town remains a debris field, frozen in time.
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