Kinglake-350

by Adrian Hyland

  Ash Wednesday—February 16, 1983—is remembered for the monstrous cloud of dust five hundred kilometres wide and a hundred deep that blanketed Melbourne the week before. As is always the case, it was the weather that built the stage upon which the tragedy was played out and that dust storm told the tale eloquently: years of drought, desert winds, minimal humidity.

  That fire is still sufficiently close in memory for us to know that the bald statistics—75 deaths, 2400 homes destroyed, more than 350,000 hectares of forest and farmland burnt, 350,000 head of livestock killed—draw but a very thin veil over a deep trough of human misery. We know that a trauma of this dimension will inflict substantial levels of depression, grief and anxiety upon the affected communities. Substance abuse will run rampant, post-traumatic stress disorder (much of it among the emergency services personnel charged with fighting the fire) will affect more than one in ten. Young people are particularly vulnerable to long-term psychiatric difficulties. One study showed that a third of children affected by Ash Wednesday remained preoccupied with fire for years after the event.

  Two other fires, Hobart in 1967 and Canberra in 2003, were ominous pointers to the future. They showed that the so-called ‘bush’ fire can rampage far beyond the bush. The Hobart fire was the first major bushfire to hit a capital city, roaring to within two kilometres of the CBD, incinerating entire suburbs and claiming sixty-two lives. Canberra, though less deadly, was even more significant: a fiery dagger aimed at the heart of the nation. The most significant single site destroyed was the Mount Stromlo Observatory, symbolic, perhaps, of a nation more ready to turn its gaze to the skies than to its immediate surrounds.

  Fire scientist Phil Cheney, who studied both fires, noted a significant difference between them. Hobart was terrible, but it could have been worse. In 1962, the residents of Hobart favoured neat green lawns and exotic plants that tended to slow the fire down. By the time Canberra burned, landscape fashions had changed: the transplanted English garden had been replaced by the volatile native and the fire carried much further.

  Despite this constant threat of attack, our collective memory is short and the atavistic lure of the bush strong. More and more of us are taking the gamble and moving out into the flame zone. Tree-changers are relocating onto the peri-urban fringe, investing their all in flammable dwellings on north-facing ridges or in green glades in the midst of towering forests. Even sea-changers often unwittingly find themselves in areas vulnerable to bushfire: on Ash Wednesday the communities along the Great Ocean Road were among the hardest hit.

  The demographics are startling. One study of three major Australian bushfires found that all houses within seven hundred metres of bushland were in danger and that the highest risk was for those within fifty metres. Four percent of the residents of our capital cities (excluding Darwin) live within that highest-risk area. Twenty percent are within seven hundred metres—that’s more than 1.5 million households in the capital cities alone. If rural towns are taken into consideration, that amounts to some two million households— around four million people—living within striking distance of what their great-grandparents called the Red Steer.

  The predictive map drawn up by Kevin Tolhurst and his team on Black Saturday indicated, as we have seen, that the inferno was poised to descend upon the heavily populated outer suburbs: Greensborough, Eltham, Warrandyte.

  Next time there may not be a wind change to save them.

  THE SCHOOL

  It is early evening when Roger Wood, Cameron Caine and the rest of the crowd gathered at Kinglake West CFA hear that fearful, thousand-engine roar. The wind grows wild, the trees swivel on their roots. A rain of embers begins to batter the building. Firebrands whirl through the air, set off spot fires. People inside the shed glance at each other, tension in their eyes. Mothers hold their children close, whisper and sing to them.

  Outside the firefighters do their best to quell their own anxieties. They put on masks and pull up coat collars, clutch their hoses and wonder whether they’ll have the strength to see this through.

  One of their own tankers has disappeared into the inferno. For hours now, it’s been ominously silent. Will those at the shed fare any better?

  Members of the public take on leadership roles: helping old people, settling kids, swatting at embers.

  The two policemen stare into that nightmare to the south-west the way men and women in authority have stared into out-of-control flame down the centuries. Somewhere inside them a thin voice insists, in the midst of all this chaos, that they have a function to carry out. It may achieve sweet FA, it might be pissing into the volcano—but it’s the reason they’re wearing the uniform.

  They’re astonished to see another police car appear out of the smoke: a Traffic Management Unit vehicle from Epping. To this day, Wood has no idea how they got there; he assumes they came in off the Melba Highway before the town was cut off. He’s glad to see them. He feels his own sense of isolation diminish.

  The four men shake hands.

  ‘You the blokes from Kinglake?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Everybody in Melbourne thinks you’re dead.’

  ‘Just about were, mate, both of us.’

  The new arrivals, Alex Barron and John Liddell, are senior constables from Epping. They will work alongside Wood and Caine for much of the night.

  From the vantage point of the CFA compound, they can see flames whipping along the hills and valleys around them. At least the men themselves feel relatively safe here, under the defensive perimeter flung up by the firefighters. Then John Grover comes over and shows them a pager message he’s just received.

  There are twenty people, including a large number of children, trapped in the recreation room at the Kinglake West Primary School. ‘Where’s that?’ ask the Epping blokes warily.

  Wood and Cam exchange a glance then nod at the school. Just two hundred metres away, but what a two hundred metres: the building is directly in the fire’s path, across the oval. The fire has already got as far as the trees behind the school, is impacting on the buildings. Whoever is in there is in trouble.

  Cameron’s boys attend that school. Chances are he knows the kids inside.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Wood, and they set off running.

  The four men find themselves charging through a barrage of flying debris and the deceptively named ‘embers’, battered by a fusillade of burning sticks and debris that intensifies as they come closer to its source. They’re inhaling painful amounts of smoke, can feel the heat radiating from the blazing bush.

  They sprint across the oval, clear the fence, come to the school. There’s some sort of construction work going on and the front is sealed off by a cyclone-wire fence two and a half metres high, so they dash round the back. Closer to the fire, but there’s no choice. They make it to the rear entrance. Cam knows where the rec room is; they find it empty.

  They split up, make a frantic search of the grounds and buildings, boots crashing down empty corridors. Nobody there at all. Somebody’s got their wires crossed. There are three schools between Kinglake and Kinglake West; must be one of the others. Which is a worry in itself.

  Time to be somewhere else. They make to retrace their steps, but now the pine plantation alongside the school has ignited and is burning ferociously: they’re trapped. They crouch in the shelter of the rec room, look around, desperate to be out of there. The fire spits and surges.

  ‘Run for it!’ yells Cam.

  Roger Wood finds himself moving at a speed he hasn’t managed for twenty years. His heart is going like a jackhammer. The adrenaline rush: it does weird things to your head. Time bends. Light spins. It sends a blast of energy into your brain, gives you powers you never knew you had.

  Speaking months later, he still can’t work out how he did it and doubts he could do it again, but he finds himself flying over that two-metre fence in a single leap and crash-landing on his back.

  The coppers pick themselves up out of the hot red dirt and sprint for th
e CFA shed, the wind from the fire driving them, missiles crashing into their backs.

  They make it to the shed but there’s no time to rest: the grass had been igniting as they dashed across the oval, spreading under the cars crammed together there. If one goes up, others will follow. They alert the CFA people, who tackle the fire while the policemen organise another impromptu vehicle evacuation.

  They find out later the pager message they’d received was wrong, and that the school in question was Middle Kinglake, seven kilometres down the road.

  In the Kinglake West CFA shed the atmosphere grows more and more stressful. Those sheltered inside gaze anxiously at the ceiling, worried that any one of the embers they can hear crashing into the building could take hold. The shed is brutally buffeted by the wind.

  The CFA volunteers remain outside. They’re very aware that whatever concern they show will be magnified in the eyes of those under their protection, and that could spark alarm. As the fire approaches they lay down A-class foam, pounce on the spot fires and brace themselves for the onslaught.

  They don’t have long to wait.

  ‘The wind generated by the fire buffeting the building is what shook us most,’ says Karyn Norbury. ‘I was on a hose out back. Propped myself between the tank and the building—leaned against the shed and thought, I’ll be okay here. But the fire was so strong it blew me over, actually knocked me off my feet.’

  Norbury watches in alarm as it storms down the Whittlesea– Kinglake Road, the heavily vegetated roadside reserve ‘acting like a wick’.

  But John Grover has made the correct decision in keeping the crowd there: an orchard and paddock below the station split the fire front, diminish its ferocity. A house across the road catches fire. This is something the firefighters hate to see: asset protection is an important part of their responsibility. But protecting lives is their raison d’être, and they can’t leave the hundreds of refugees in the shed to fend for themselves. They watch the house burn.

  Norbury’s fears intensify when the fire sweeps around them and carries on into the heart of Kinglake West. Her husband Dave and their two daughters are there at the family stud farm. Nothing she can do about them right now: she has other responsibilities, and can only pray that their resourcefulness and the defences they’ve installed—pumps, a generator, their own water tanker—will see her family through.

  As the roar of the first wave dies down, there’s a slight easing of the tension. But only slight: they’re all worried about unaccounted-for family and friends. Often, as the final casualty figures were to attest, families were split up as the women and kids made a run for it while the men stayed behind to defend the family home.

  There is some contact with the outside world, but telecommunication is hit and miss. Roger Wood still can’t get through to his own family. Others do succeed, but much of what they hear is bad. Rumours fly through the room like sparks through volatile gas: eighteen kilometres down the road, Kinglake is gone: the town centre wiped out, the hotel, shops and public buildings all destroyed. Local musician Ross Buchanan takes a call, and the policemen notice Cam’s wife, Laura, suddenly move to embrace him. The call was from his wife, Bec, and the horror of the message stuns them all: two of Ross’s children, Neeve and Mackenzie—Macca—are dead. They were at their grandparents’ house, only three hundred metres from the town centre. Ross sent them there because it was safer, while he stayed behind to defend the family home in the far more dangerous location of National Park Road.

  Cameron, a good friend, can only hug him. There’ll be a time for tears and consolation, but for the police officers, it isn’t now.

  People are dying in the middle of Kinglake?

  The radio and phones are jammed with pleas for help but there’s precious little information. From what they can gather, the main front has passed. Now, as coppers, they need to get out into the community, assess the damage, coordinate the response.

  They make an initial sortie after a call comes in from Extons Road, closer towards Kinglake, where a family is trapped, fighting for their lives, their house ablaze. They move out onto the main road and are stunned by the devastation that greets them. Night has fallen and the mountain is ablaze.

  Everywhere they look—east, west, farmland, bush, houses and stores, the distant hills—they see destruction. Nothing, it seems, has been spared.

  Progress is hopeless for two police vehicles without water or chainsaws: there are trees burning all over the road, power lines snaking out from fallen poles, frantic animals on the loose, others burnt and bloated in the paddocks. Incinerated vehicles of every description. Chaos.

  They need help. They turn around, make their way back to the fire station.

  As they enter the building the captain comes over and hands them the satellite phone.

  ‘Roger. It’s Carole.’ Carole Wilson, from the CFA in Kinglake.

  ‘Carole. Glad to hear you’re still alive. What’s it like in there?’

  ‘It’s a disaster. Most of the town’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Destroyed.’ Wood takes a sharp breath. It sounds worse than he’d feared.

  ‘We need help,’ says Carole. ‘We’ve got hundreds of people here—some burnt, critically injured. There’s nobody here, Roger— no emergency services, no ambulances, doctors. Nothing. Our trucks are all stuck down the mountain.’

  Wood glances around him. The scene Carole has described sounds like the one in front of him, but worse. At least they have no critically injured at Kinglake West—not yet, anyway. What’s going on in the surrounding community is too awful to imagine.

  ‘I’ve been onto Whittlesea,’ says Carole. ‘We’re begging for help, but they’re refusing to let anybody up the mountain. There’s teams down there, ready to go, but they’re not allowed up. Too dangerous. Roads blocked. Trees still coming down.’

  Wood looks around the room and catches Cameron’s eye.

  ‘We’ll get to you, Carole,’ he says. ‘Not quite sure how but we will. Me and Cam. Just hold on, do the best you can.’

  ‘There’s people gonna die here, Rodge.’

  He replaces the phone, turns to John Grover. ‘We need to organise a strike team.’

  Kinglake West Tanker Two finally limps back into its home station from the ordeal in Coombs Road some time after 8 pm, more than four hours after they set out. Frank Allan and his crew are exhausted, thirsty, badly smoke affected, worried about their own homes and families. At least one member of the crew, Phil Betteley, finds out that his family home is gone. They wouldn’t mind a break. Given the scenes of chaos and despair that greet them, they don’t reckon they’ll get one any time soon.

  They’re right.

  John Grover goes over to the truck. He knows Frank is handy with a chainsaw. There’s a group being formed to cut its way through to Kinglake, he says: he asks Frank to go along and do the grunt work.

  FIREFIGHT IN KINGLAKE

  While those at the CFA station in Kinglake West are undergoing their trial by fire, those in Kinglake itself are enduring a situation that is, if anything, worse.

  When the fire front comes close, Carole Wilson slams the door and calls out a warning to the people inside. The crowd outside huddle under their blankets or in their cars, stare at the sky, clutch their children. The more active among them swat at the spot fires with whatever comes to hand: blankets, coats, bottles of water.

  Everything goes completely black. Some begin to panic. More and more of them seek refuge in the shed; Carole estimates there are around three hundred in there at the fire’s height.

  They can trace the fire’s approach by the chain of explosions advancing towards them: gas bottles, cars, buildings, one after another, dozens, hundreds of them. The windows rattle, the wind goes mad, the rain of embers hammering through the air grows thick and fires begin to break out round the shed. Wherever they spring up, one of the CFA scratch teams rushes to extinguish them. So dark and chaotic is the atmosphere, neither team knows of
the other’s existence until they swap stories weeks later.

  ‘I kept seeing people walking in out of the smoke,’ says Di MacLeod. ‘They were injured. In shock. It was like a war movie.’

  Her husband Jim is on duty at the side door, letting people scamper inside then slamming it shut: the less smoke in there, the better their chances.

  A large eucalyptus ten feet behind the station catches fire; Di, a short woman, is grateful for Wayne McDonald-Price’s longer reach: they hit it with the full force of the hose and extinguish it, but keep an eye on it all night. If the tree goes up, it could well take the shed and its occupants with it.

  The service station across the road erupts with an explosion that rattles walls and eardrums, unleashes two mighty jets of flame twenty metres into the air. A car in the main street blows up. The pizza parlour cooks. There’s a four-wheel-drive parked in front of the police station with a trailer load of trail bikes attached. The whole lot ignites.

  Di didn’t know either of her companions before this moment, but she’s full of praise for their courage in sticking to the dangerous task. She hears Luke Gaskett roaring at the shed as he dashes from one outbreak to the next: ‘You will not go up! My family’s in there!’ When it is totally black and a hot wind is streaming off the fire directly into their faces, he taps her on the shoulder and yells, ‘At what point do we go inside?’

  She gives a wry smile. ‘We don’t.’

  They see the block of shops across the drive catch fire, and Di is caught in a dilemma. She can’t leave her charges in the shed unprotected, but nor does she want to see these businesses—which include the doctor’s surgery—go up. If nothing else, the radiant heat they give off will threaten the people in the shed.