In the summer of 2014 occurred the worst wild fire in modern times in Sweden; a disaster that sparked many reactions in affected areas and in society at large. Mass media reported intensively about the emergency and the area was subject to a lot of “disaster tourism,” both during the emergency and in the following months. Numerous public investigations were commissioned to document and analyse the disaster event and its public management. In addition, many scientific research projects were launched to study the psychological, social and ecological effects of the forest fire. This article is the result of one of these research projects, but while many of them focus on the actual disaster management or the immediate impact, our research aims at understanding the long-term effects of the wildfire in the affected communities. This article analyses how local stakeholders have managed what can be called the disaster afterlife or the post-disaster, referring to the process of community recovery and reconstruction, or, to use a more recent concept, resilience. Our focus is on how personal memories and moral understandings forge the ways in which public officials, who are set to manage risk, experience this process. We apply an inductive approach to analyse our empirical material collected by semi-structured interviews in 2016.