Nowhere on Black Saturday is the fire any more brutal than here, at the crest of the escarpment, just after the wind change. In the houses and on the rocky roads nearby is where the heaviest loss of life occurs: in Bald Spur Road, twenty-eight people stay to fight the fire and twenty-one of them die. Pine Ridge Road tells a similar story: there are around twenty deaths, nine of them in one house. Ten die right here in Coombs Road.
While there’s water, Frank feels confident that they have a chance. They’ve already been fighting for half an hour, and normally that would be enough. But not today. As the intensity of the storm increases and day turns to night, the floater pump in the swimming pool begins to splutter.
Frank looks at it in despair. It’s running out of fuel. Any second now they’ll be out of water and at the mercy of the fire. He has spare fuel on the truck; he dashes back and grabs it. He’s about to refill when he realises that standing in the middle of a fire with buckshot embers blasting about him and a jerrycan of petrol in his hands is not such a good idea.
He started out thinking they could save the property. Now the sheds are already gone and he’s beginning to wonder if they’ll be able to save themselves. First priority is shelter. ‘Back to the house!’ he yells at his team, then throws both jerrycan and pump into the pool and sets off running.
They are sheltering behind what they assume is a window when it flies open and the owner of the house appears, urging them in. They don’t hang around for a second invitation. Those solid walls offer some protection from the radiant heat. It’s pitch black inside the building. There’s supposedly an elderly woman in here somewhere— the owner’s mother—and a German shepherd, but they don’t see either of them the whole time they’re there.
They make fleeting sorties outside in pairs—to extinguish what they can and to keep an eye on things. They manage to save one of the cars, but come close to losing their own appliance; would have lost it if Frank hadn’t raced out and moved it to a safer location. They watch their hoses burn, their water run out, their defences disappear. Frank considers putting out a mayday, decides not to: he doesn’t want any of his mates driving into this inferno to try and rescue him.
Eventually the storm dies down sufficiently for them to make a longer trip outside. They look around, warily: has the worst of it passed? Looks like it. They manage to rig up a hose capable of spraying a bit of water as long as one of the weightier members stands on it. They black out the area around the house to a stage where they feel it’s safe to leave it in the hands of the owner, then drive back out onto Coombs Road.
What they see there stuns them. ‘Like a lunar landscape,’ comments Frank. ‘Hardly recognisable from the place we’d driven into not long before.’
The blaze has swept over them and roared on towards Kinglake West, but everything is still on fire—every house, every tree, every blade of grass, even the roots of the grass. There isn’t much they can do about it in their present condition; they have to get back to the station, change their hoses.
They are able to respond to an emergency call from Vicfire: a critically injured resident in a dam nearby. They locate the property and find that the Whittlesea captain, Ken Williamson, has already responded in his four-wheel-drive. The victim, Jason Lynn, is in a terrible condition: badly burnt, convulsing, vomiting mud. Williamson is desperately trying to get an ambulance. No success; he and his colleague decide to take the victim out themselves.
Frank sees they’re doing all the right things, knows he has to get back to his own base asap. They leave, clearing the track for the four-wheel-drive behind them as best they can.
The fire truck is only a two-wheel-drive, and isn’t equipped with a chainsaw, so the journey back is rough: every few metres they pull a tree off the road, drive round some obstacle, push their way through another. Often they are forced to cut down fences and go cross-country. Everything is still burning savagely, and with the truck the way it is, a simple stump-hole would leave them in deep trouble.
They come across scattered individuals and groups, and each meeting deepens their concern about the calamity that has hit their community. Survivors are staggering out of burnt buildings, stunned, confused. The firefighters help wherever they can. They encounter a mud-covered couple who were hiding in a dam while their house burned down; all they want is drinking water, which the firies are happy to provide. Others want lifts back to the CFA station, so they make room, bring them aboard. Soon they have a crowd.
They come across a farmer who’s stroppy about them cutting his fence to get through, says he’s worried about his stock escaping. They realise the fellow is in shock, disorientated, having just seen his house burn down. His stock are all dead. But they do their best to accommodate him. They cut just a small section of the fence down one end, and replace it carefully behind them. Push on into the blazing landscape.
HOME FIRES
At the roadblock on the Whittlesea Road, before the cool change hits, Roger Wood gets into the Pajero to follow the CFA crew back to Kinglake West and help defend the station. As he throws the car into gear his phone rings. He glances at the number: home.
‘Roger!’ Jo, his wife. Screaming. ‘Roger, the fire’s here!’
In St Andrews?
‘Can’t be—it’s here. Must be smoke drifting in from…’ ‘I can see flames in front of the house!’
He almost drops the phone. ‘What…’
‘It’s coming right at us.’
In the background he can hear his children screaming. He struggles to collect his thoughts, to control the panic spearing his chest. ‘You know what to do, Jo. Fight the spots for as long as you can, then get inside. Put the kids under wet blankets! Don’t…’ The line goes dead. He stares at the screen, aghast, and frantically dials the number. No answer. Tries again. Nothing.
Christ. What the hell is going on? St Andrews is twenty kilometres to the south. What’s the fire doing down there? How can it be up here on the mountain and down there in the foothills at the same time? Just how big is this bloody monster? And how is it that he, the police officer responsible for the region, has still been given absolutely no warning that the inferno is anywhere other than miles away?
If the flames there are anything like the ones in front of him, his family are doomed.
He hits the road. His natural inclination is to get back home, post haste. The thought of his wife and kids facing this inferno without him hits harder than any Saturday night brawler ever has. He’ll try, but judging from the red angry flashes he can glimpse racing along the slope to his right, getting down the mountain is going to be impossible in the foreseeable future. The serpentine road to St Andrews will be cut off for sure.
And he has a job to do, a job which, he suddenly intuits, is going to be the worst he’s had in twenty-five years.
He curses himself for leaving his family in that position. Everybody knew it was going to be a hell of a day. Why didn’t he tell them to get out when they could?
He’s racing back along the Kinglake road, furiously punching redial, his mouth dry, his heart jumping with each attempt. The phone goes unanswered, the ringtone tolling like a funeral bell. Horrible visions roll through his head: the house in flames, his children huddling…
He thumps the wheel. Puts his foot down.
The fire station at Kinglake West is a scene of furious activity by the time he arrives. The captain, John Grover, is a worried man. Still no word from Frank Allan and the crew of Tanker Two. They’ve clearly been trapped, burnt over, but have they survived? He’s been trying desperately to reach them on the radio, but there’s been not a word. No mayday, which is good. Unless they didn’t have time to make one.
But Grover can do nothing about that right now. Hundreds of lives will depend on his decisions over the next few minutes. He’s always feared that the station would be the last resort of many in the community. It wasn’t designed as a refuge at all; it is, in reality, just an overgrown shed.
Strangely enough there
are no fire refuges, in Kinglake or any other part of the state, in this most fire-threatened corner of the world. Country towns had them until a few years ago, but the policy has been abandoned as authorities shy away from both the direct expense and the complications of a disaster in our increasingly litigious society. The policy now is to shift the responsibility onto the individual—a dubious development, given that so few individuals seem willing or equipped to carry it.
Fire refuge or not, the locals are pouring in. No sign of panic yet, but Grover knows if he’s to keep it at bay he and his brigade will have to lead by example. The fire could be there in minutes: the last thing he wants is people cracking up, doing stupid things. Making a run for it.
He gives the orders, and his members don’t need to be told twice. They position Tanker One in front of the station and hook it up to water, lay 38- and 64-millimetre hoses around the grounds and out onto the adjoining oval. They start up the pumps and generator, and begin hosing things down.
As they work, they keep an anxious eye on the fire: from their reading of the smoke it seems to be running along behind the station, travelling in a south-easterly direction. Will it miss them? Perhaps, but Grover knows there’s a southerly change due. When it arrives the inferno will turn about, come driving up at them.
It adds to the stress of his members that their pagers are constantly shrieking at them, and message after message is the same: members of the public, often their own friends or family, trapped in houses and fighting for their lives. One message says there are forty to fifty people in a single building.
There’s not a thing they can do about any of that. The truck has to stay where it is, protecting the growing crowd. Some firefighters are so stressed by their inability to get to these jobs that they turn their pagers off.
Roger Wood assists where he can, stopping traffic from heading into the fire, doing his best to reassure the public. It’s a drop in the ocean. People are seriously afraid. Many, like Wood himself, are separated from their loved ones. He’s relieved when his colleague Senior Constable Cameron Caine appears, driving his old ute.
Cameron is as Kinglake as they come, a burly, goatee-bearded bloke who was a champion local footballer, still remembered for his role in the forward line in Kinglake’s 1994 premiership. Nowadays he’s president of the footy club, and, at thirty-five, still pulls on the boots, ligaments permitting. He’s come in to work early, has already been down to the station, started up the generator.
They begin to discuss the situation but the conversation is cut short by a call from D24: a four-car collision on Deviation Road, further east, towards Kinglake. Reports of multiple casualties: people trapped in cars, fire closing in.
It sounds like chaos out there.
Caine is staggered. He’s just driven down that road, seen sign of neither accident nor fire. He immediately thinks of his own wife and two children. While driving in, he’d spotted the first flames below the escarpment and rung Laura, told her to take the kids and get out. He assumes she’ll be heading in to Kinglake. If so she’ll be using that same road, the one that’s now apparently slashed by fire and fatal accidents.
Wood runs to the Pajero, sets off in the direction of the crash while Caine follows in his ute. It’s still light enough for Wood to see where he’s going, so he revs it to the max, lights flashing, siren screaming when anybody gets in his way. He hits 120, covers five kilometres in maybe three minutes. No collision yet, but the smoke is growing thicker.
He sweeps round a bend and—christ, he’s plunging into a wall of flame! He slams on the anchors, but it’s too late. He has driven into an inferno: there are flames all over the road (a fallen tree, he later realises) and the scrub on either side is ablaze.
Darkness descends, a thick black mass of smoke envelops him: he can’t see a metre in front, and then it’s behind. Trees are crashing, brands flying about, the roar of the fire enormous. My god, he 102 thinks, I’m about to die.
He grabs the mike. ‘Kinglake-350 to VKC Wangaratta. Urgent! ’
The radio is ringing with frantic exchanges as cops all over the state speak to each other—there are six hundred fires that day, all of them involving police in one way or another—but silence descends upon the network when they hear that word.
Urgent. There isn’t an officer listening who doesn’t understand the gravity.
‘VKC to Kinglake-350. That you, Woody?’
A familiar voice. The operator is John Dunnell, a mate of Roger’s. They worked together at Greensborough years ago.
‘JD, I’m in trouble here.’ He glances away to his right: through the blackness, a terrible red glow. ‘Flames all round the car!’
‘Get out of there, Woody! Get to safety!’
A pause. The glow gets brighter. ‘Trying to, mate.’
He has no choice. To sit and do nothing is to die. To move could be death as well—he has visions of running off the road, tyres melting, immobilised. Fleeing vehicles slamming into his rear, ending up like the pile-up he was heading for.
But least he’ll be doing something, and anything is better than sitting paralysed by this smothering darkness.
He cranes his neck, looks back. Blackness. He reverses a couple of feet. Hopeless—can’t see a thing. The heat is growing, but the inside of the vehicle is relatively smoke free: he thanks the lord and Mr Mitsubishi for the tight seals. But how long will that last? How long before the rubber melts, the windows? It’s the smoke that gets you first, the poisonous fumes. He’s seen burnt-out cars before, incinerated bodies. Doesn’t want to end up like that.
He clenches the wheel, takes a deep breath. Moves at what feels like a snail’s pace into a ten-point turn, worried that if he goes too far off the bitumen he’ll get snagged in the burning debris or melt his tyres. He completes the manoeuvre. Facing what he hopes is the direction from which he entered this hell hole, he inches forward. Smooth surface under wheels. The road?
Further forward. Yes; he sighs. The road.
He accelerates, ever so gently. Moves up to walking pace. Still unable to see past the bull-bar, but more hopeful now that he’s facing the right direction. Further forward.
At last, a streak of light through the swirling smoke. Is he coming out of it? More light. He is. A stretch of time impossible to judge: seconds? minutes? Time is going every which way, but the light is brightening. He breathes again—no flame. Still smoky, but he’s out of it.
He opens the throttle. Races back in the direction of Kinglake West with a battery of emotions storming though his brain. Think, you idiot! There’s a disaster hitting the community. He’s received no official information, but if the storm has come this far, what has it already destroyed? What kind of fury is falling upon the farms and bush blocks? On the heavily populated town behind him?
But what can he do? Not much. He has responsibilities in a situation like this, but he feels a terrible, unaccustomed helplessness. He has no information, little idea of what’s going on. What’s he meant to do—run around and knock on every door? God knows, he’ll do what he can, but there are people all over the ranges, thousands of them. He can only pray that most of them have taken precautions and have either got off the mountain or know how to defend themselves.
And always pumping away beneath his immediate worries is, for Roger Wood, the darkest question of all: what’s happening to his family?
A vehicle comes towards him, driving into the fire. He flashes his lights, slows, winds his window down. ‘Follow me!’ he roars, waving.
The car turns. Others join it. Soon he’s leading a small convoy.
One of the vehicles is a four-wheel-drive towing a horse float, driven by a woman named Lisa Waddell, the owner of a nearby Horseland store. She’s just hitched up the float, grabbed her four-week-old son Charlie and fled the family farm, but everything is burning and she has no idea what to do or where to go. Then she sees that reassuring vehicle.
Lisa recognises Roger later when he comes in to buy some gear and thanks
him. ‘Always be grateful to Roger and Cameron for that day,’ she comments. ‘If it wasn’t for them, a lot more of us wouldn’t be here today.’
As Wood drives, signs of calamity mount up: cars dashing everywhere, an inferno in the rear-view mirror, flashes of flame glimpsed on the surrounding hills. Fire all over the mountain. Spot fires, presumably, swept from the main front by the wind. Soon they’ll coalesce, become a front themselves.
He comes racing up to the Pheasant Creek supermarket, then hits the brakes, groans out loud. ‘Oh god, no…What are you doing here?’
There are dozens of cars parked around the store. People are milling about, huddled in little groups. More vehicles appear, passengers piling out, waving arms and pointing, clutching each other. Some are standing there with stubbies of beer in hand, like they’re watching the New Year bloody fireworks.
He wonders, as he has before, at the primal instinct that drives people together when there’s a crisis. All very well back when the crisis was a sabre-toothed tiger, perhaps; but not when it’s a megafire that could swallow them all and spit out the bones. He thinks about some of the famous photos from Black Friday in 1939, taken not so far from here, back when Kinglake was a timber town. All the bodies—experienced bushmen, timber workers and farmers, their families—clumped together like cords of wood.
He’s pleased to see Cameron running towards him. Time like this, there is nobody he’d rather have next to him.
The rest of the crowd are standing round, some in singlets and thongs. Drifting smoke restricts their vision: they don’t know where to go, what to do. They have no idea of what’s coming. The very fact that they’re hanging around when the air is thick with smoke suggests they’ve broken the first rule of survival in a fire zone: stay or go, but if you do go, leave early.
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