A year ago, while on a tourist visit to Latvia, Sharon Bard was awoken at 4 am by a buzzing alert from her phone. It was an email from a friend who’d been checking on her home in Santa Rosa, California. Given the alarming news, the email's phrasing was rather gentle: A fire had broken out in the area, officials had ordered evacuations, and Bard’s country house at the end of a road might be affected.

Then came the deluge. Six or seven emails from other folks arrived, with more urgent queries like “Oh my God, are you OK?” So Bard checked CNN, and sure enough, there was the fire. This was not just local news. What neither Bard nor anyone else knew at this point was that what would become the most destructive conflagration in California history, the Tubbs Fire, was well on its way to destroying more than 5,500 structures, killing 22 people, and causing $1.2 billion in damage.

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For three days after that first email jolted her awake, Bard traded frantic messages with friends. People checked in on her, and she checked in on others. Searching online, she found side-by-side aerial images of her property, before and after the fire. “I realized it's gone, it's all gone,” she says, leaning over tea in an upscale cafe in Healdsburg, just north of Santa Rosa. She’s 73, with gray hair that matches her gray hoodie over a Hawaiian shirt of subdued pastels. “I saw my property. There was a main structure and a pool and then a pool house. It was ashes, pool, ashes.”

Yet Bard didn’t cut her tour short and hop the first flight back. Santa Rosa was under quarantine anyway, and air quality was horrible. “I think psychologically, I split into two pieces,” she says. “One part of me tried to stay present because I was on tour, and another part of me there was this sort of thing in the pit of my stomach. I have to deal with this, but I don't know what to do. I didn’t want to face it yet.”

“I was on constant overload and I couldn't process the new information," says Sharon Bard about her mental state in the wake of losing her Santa Rosa home in a wildfire. "I was tired, I felt fragile, I was shaky.” Beth Holzer

The feelings Bard experienced are common in people who have lived through a calamity—even at a distance. Indeed, few things shake the psyche like disaster, yet science is just beginning to understand how mental health suffers in the aftermath of hurricanes or wildfire or earthquakes.

Surveys found that after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast in 2005, one in six survivors met the criteria for PTSD, while half developed an anxiety or mood disorder. Suicide and suicidal thinking doubled in the storm’s aftermath. But there's a dearth of data-rich, large-scale studies on how best to design campaigns to treat populations coping with disaster.