She makes a snap decision: they run out a line, manage to extinguish the fire. As they scuttle back to the shed, a kangaroo comes plodding by, looks up at her forlornly. She finds time to give it a quick, cooling shower. ‘Good luck, feller,’ she whispers. Looks around. ‘To all of us.’
Another house starts to go up nearby. The owner comes running over. ‘Me house is on fire. Can you help?’
It is a horrible feeling, but Di is forced to say no. The building is a just a little too far away; she’s worried about running out of water and abandoning those under their care even for a few minutes.
She manages to put a quick call for help through to one of the Kinglake tankers and asks when they’ll be back.
‘Sorry darling,’ comes the reply, ‘we’re entrapped ourselves right now.’
Entrapped? She realises even down in St Andrews they’re fighting for their own survival, and feels a moment of despair. Is the whole world on fire?
The team on the other side of the shed are having problems of their own. There’s just the two of them: Phil Petschel and Kelly Johnson, the veteran and the novice. Kelly’s day takes a sharp turn for the worse when she looks at one of the pager messages—a house under direct attack—and realises it’s her family home. With the rest of her family in it.
Phil has to talk her out of trying to get back and help them, convince her it’s death out on the roads right now, even if they didn’t have hundreds of people in their care. On that subject, Phil’s main worry is the pub. If that goes up, it’ll cause a conflagration that could spread to the crowd in front of it; if the fire got in among the cars, the chain of fires could be devastating.
Phil and Kelly spend their time scuttling between the two buildings dragging a sixty-metre length of canvas hose. Their immediate worry is whether the fire will spread to the CFA shed, with all those people inside, but they’re alarmed when the motel units behind the pub catch fire. Members of the crowd do their best with buckets of water from the pub’s water supply, a shaky enterprise at best.
The hose will always be their main weapon, but it’s pump-fed: Phil’s worst moment comes when he realises the fire-fighting pump needs fuel. This is bad. The pump is the only thing between them and catastrophe. Operating a hose in those conditions is normally a job for two experienced firefighters, but he has no choice other than to leave his young offsider behind, grit his teeth and feel his way back along the hose.
For Phil, this is the hairiest moment of the whole day. He’s been in plenty of dangerous situations during his twenty-four years in the CFA, but he now finds himself groping his way through pitch darkness guided only by the hose in his hands, fire burning all round, the air rocked by fearsome explosions. Eventually he locates the pump, finds the petrol. Now he has to get it into the tank.
Phil Petschel is a quietly spoken, thoughtful man, self-effacing in the extreme; loath to think of himself as any sort of hero. But his actions during that incident seem to crystallise the courage shown by so many on Black Saturday.
‘It was Kelly’s first fire,’ he explains, ‘so I didn’t dare turn the pump off, for her sake.’ For a firefighter, there are few experiences more dangerous than suddenly running out of water at the fire front; water isn’t just your weapon of attack, it’s also your main defence. ‘Plus there was a chance if I did turn it off, it wouldn’t restart. When I got to the pump there was just the faint red glow of the muffler— because it was an ancient thing it was rattling and shaking—petrol splashing everywhere—hissing and popping on the red-hot metal. I poured the petrol, got most of it in, but there was a pretty good chance the whole lot’d go up.’
Phil is about as no-nonsense a fellow as you could imagine, and he isn’t exaggerating. That night there are several people in the district whose last moments are spent struggling with their pumps.
Once the main front has passed, Kelly comes in to help the people inside the shed.
Phil stays outside for several more hours, dragging the hose around, keeping the spots under control. It’s a job that normally involves two people. When Trish and Carole see Phil later, they’re staggered by how exhausted he looks, a grimace etched onto his mouth, ash and sweat everywhere, tongue between the teeth.
‘But he and Kelly saved the hotel,’ comments Carole. ‘Saved a lot of people too.’
KINGLAKE: INSIDE THE SHED
While a handful of people are fighting a small war for their own lives and everybody else’s outside the Kinglake CFA, those inside the building are caught up in a struggle of a different kind. They know the crews outside are working hard, but have no way of knowing whether the battle is being won or lost.
For the most part they sit or lie there in silence, sipping from water bottles, staring at loved ones. Many of them are in shock.
They can’t see much anyway—the doors are shut to keep the smoke and embers out. But they can hear, and what they hear is terrifying: the roar of the fire, the chain of explosions, the debris enfilading walls, crashing into the roof, echoing through the room. A groan ripples through the crowd when the service station goes up: an ear-shattering roar, the likes of which few of them have ever heard. The gas bottles stored in the back of the service station begin to explode and shoot into the air like rockets: there are more than forty of them, and most of them end up scattered around a nearby paddock. ‘Thank god they were stored around the back,’ commented the young man who’d been working at the store. ‘Anywhere else, the debris could have landed in the crowd.’
There are some three hundred sweaty bodies in the shed and the atmosphere is tense; the temperature is in the fifties, the room is filled with biting blue smoke and animal noises. People have brought in their pets: not just dogs and cats, but lizards, snakes and birds, all confused and terrified. One fellow carries a bird on his shoulder all night.
Trish and Carole struggle to keep people calm, dealing with phones, radios and pagers that are going berserk. They take call after call from locals trapped by the fire, people in cars and houses, sheltering in dams and culverts as the world burns around them. The women do their best to reassure them that they’ll get rescuers to them as soon as possible.
‘The phone was going absolutely wild,’ says Carole. ‘You couldn’t say, “I’m sorry I can’t help you, because we haven’t got a truck on the hill.” You just say keep safe, do this, do that. You do what you can.’ Fearing all the while—and the fears are later proved to be well-founded— that for many this call is the last they’ll ever make.
They are particularly distressed by a string of calls from Wendy Duncan, one of their CFA colleagues and a good friend, who lives down on Bald Spur Road. She’d been about to board a fire truck herself when she heard that fire was threatening her house and asked her captain’s permission to go back and defend it.
Wendy gives them a blow-by-blow account: the fire’s onslaught, the flames engulfing her home, the windows blowing out, the roof caving in. She makes the last call lying on the side of the road, badly injured and struggling for breath, her lungs burnt. Assuming that she’s dying, Wendy is using the last of her energies to warn them that the fire is worse than any of them could have imagined.
They promise they’ll get help to her when they can, but are wrenched by the knowledge that they’ve no idea when that will be. Inside the shed the CFA crew do what they can for the refugees: settle them down, find chairs and stools, attempt to get in touch with missing friends and family. They hand out water and smoke masks; when they run out of masks, they improvise with toilet paper. Trish and Carole neglect to keep masks for themselves, soon find their eyes and throats are giving them hell.
There are no windows in the main body of the shed, which is probably a good thing, since the ones in the office dance with an incandescent glow that gives those who look at them the feeling that they are being cooked. ‘It was like the windows were painted red,’ says Trish. ‘I looked at everybody out there and thought, We’re all going to die together.’
There is little o
r no hysteria, everybody attests to that. People in general remain calm. But there’s an awful lot of anxiety. Nobody has any idea what’s happening outside, many are wondering whether these desperate hours huddled in a tin shed on a blazing mountain are to be their last. In the bitter smoke, the heat and the tension, the very act of breathing becomes difficult. Several young girls faint. Older people are having trouble with heart palpitations and fretting about missing medication.
Linda Craske has only just joined the CFA, is yet to commence her training, but she is a nurse with seventeen years of experience, a qualification that is going to be of more use to the traumatised residents of Kinglake than anything else on this appalling night.
Initially, though, as people come to her with their problems, she feels panic rising in her own chest. I can’t do this, she says to herself. It’s been years since she worked in Emergency, she has little experience with burns, she hasn’t done the CFA first aid course. She doesn’t know where to start.
Hit by her own mini crisis, she doesn’t want the crowd to see. There’s only one place to be alone in this environment right now: the toilet. She goes in there for a moment or two, tries to breathe deeply. I can’t cope with this. What the hell am I going to do?
Then she does something. She walks out into the main room and shouts: ‘If there’s anyone with first aid skills, I need your help!’
The initial response is far from encouraging: somebody who’s done a St John’s first aid course, a nurse who hasn’t practised for years. But the word goes through the crowd, and soon there are some four or five nurses or first-aiders working to assist the growing number of casualties. Months later, nobody seems to quite know who they all were: a single mum from Watsons Road, a woman named Kylie who’d already lost her house. One turns out, most helpfully, to be a nurse from the burns unit at the Alfred Hospital. Another is an off-duty policewoman, Senior Constable Samantha Spencer. In this frantic setting, identities and introductions are unimportant: what is important is that they bring their individual skills to the catastrophe, instinctively melding into a team.
They clear out the back room, transform it into a sick bay. Initially the injuries are minor: cuts and burns, smoke inhalation, sore eyes, people who’ve fainted from the heat and stress. They do their best with what is at hand, dispensing band-aids and reassurance as the roar outside peaks and that evil incandescence lashes the windows.
None of them knows how long it lasts. ‘Maybe an hour’ seems to be the best guess anyone can make. They measure the fire’s progress by how close the explosions sound. But at some stage it feels as if they grow more distant, the glow at the windows fades and the roar of the fire subsides. The sky grows lighter, the smoke thinner.
Is it over?
They decide it’s safe enough to open the doors to give people some relief from the intense, smoke-filled atmosphere. They walk outside. They are staggered by what they see. The town is ablaze about them. Houses, shops, a kindergarten, the petrol station, the pizza shop, the SES compound, the animal hospital, the surrounding bush and paddocks: all burning. One of the cars that’s exploded was full of caged birds; it makes a horrible sight.
Carole and Trish look at other, the relief seeping from every pore in their skin. They’ve survived, the worst of it is over. They hope.
And then the serious casualties begin to arrive.
IN EXILE
While their home station is under attack, the Kinglake firefighters are still kilometres away down the hill in St Andrews.
In Jacksons Road the crew of Kinglake Tanker One, under the command of Dave Hooper, have just refilled their water tanks from the supply brought in by Geoff Ninks when the southerly buster comes sweeping in and the fire explodes away to the north. In an instant the number of fires to be fought multiplies many times over; the entire region between St Andrews and Kinglake is ablaze.
St Andrews captain Helen Kenney is desperately calling for all the trucks she can get. The Kinglake crew respond, and she gives them one of the dozens of jobs screaming for attention: a house is on fire near Mullers Road, four kilometres to the north, two children reportedly inside.
Mullers Road is impassable due to fallen trees, but there are several houses burning in the vicinity. The first two are totally engulfed, beyond salvation. Whoever was in them is long gone— literally, they hope. They find an elderly man still fighting a hopeless battle to save his home while his wife shelters in the car. He’s blistered, badly dehydrated, in shock. And it’s too late to save the house. They persuade the woman to take him back to St Andrews and press on, going to the assistance of viticulturalist David Lance.
David and his wife Cathy have owned the Diamond Valley Vineyards for over thirty years, but David was on his own when the fire struck. Cathy, affected by a chest condition, had followed CFA advice and left early. David was in the winery tackling spot fires among the equipment when the main front passed over. Then: ‘There was a huge gust from the south,’ he says, ‘and it swung around, incredibly strong and full of embers. It was like a blow torch, a horizontal blast of carbonised grass.’
Now his home is under attack and he has been frantic, spraying everything down as the outbreaks he extinguishes keep coming back. Redgum sleepers, veranda posts, they’re all bursting into flame. The garage and the car go up. The house walls and doors are battered by embers; sooner or later one of them will take hold and destroy everything. He sees neighbouring houses completely consumed.
He tries dialling emergency 000; wastes precious minutes waiting for a response that never comes, the line engaged. He pauses to watch his neighbours flee and sags for a moment, overwhelmed. The house is gone.
Then he looks up in surprise as a series of loud horn blasts resound over the fire’s roar and a big red truck comes charging through the smoke. Kinglake Tanker One has arrived.
They swing into action as the vehicle slams to a halt: the crew run out their hoses, begin hitting the fire with a hundred times the volume of water David had at his disposal. The fire in the winery office is emitting a foul black brew, thick smoke laced with toxins from burning plastic. Paul Lowe and Rod Elwers scramble into their breathing apparatus to get in close enough to extinguish it.
Then Paul takes a look around the building. ‘What about the house?’ The smoke inside is so thick they have to keep the breathing equipment on. There’s fire inside the roof, between the plaster and the corrugated iron. They rush outside, attempt to hit it with their hoses but it’s too far away, and their own water is getting low by now. Paul grabs a knapsack from the truck and scrambles up into the roof on his knees.
Even that’s looking borderline, but then another tanker rattles up the drive. A Hurstbridge crew. A quick conference and the two crews rip the iron from the roof and give it a blast that brings the fire under control. Col Evans, a mate of David’s, arrives from Hurstbridge with his own trailer tanker and takes over the night watch.
David is exhausted and seriously dehydrated; in the fury of the battle, he’s forgotten to drink. Cathy has left six litres of water in milk cartons by the door, ready to put on the seedlings. David swallows all six of them in one go and lies down, finished.
The sheer exhaustion of fighting a fire is something that often goes unremarked, but those who’ve done it shake their heads in disbelief when they look back on it. The eyes throb, the throat burns, the muscles reach the point of near collapse. Heads ache and backs spasm, bodies are a mess of burns and blisters, of splinters and wounds. The adrenaline surges crazily: a lot more firefighters die from heart attack than fire.
Surprisingly, the one thing many don’t feel is the heat. They’re out there working furiously in heavy suits and boots, fifty degrees Celsius or more. One firefighter reported his boot soles melted and anchored him to the truck so that he had to unlace the boots and step out of them to free himself. But the adrenaline rush means the heat is barely noticed.
‘You feel it afterwards, though,’ commented another firefighter. ‘I feel crap for ag
es after a big fire. All that smoke and fumes,’ he adds warily. ‘Can’t do you much good in the long run, can it?’
The crew of Kinglake Tanker One draw together to discuss their situation. They’ve been at the winery for an hour, been scrambling so hard all afternoon they’ve only picked up snatches of news from home. But what they hear is deeply disturbing.
‘They were distraught, just about in tears, the Kinglake guys,’ commented a firefighter from one of the other trucks. ‘They started to get calls from their families, telling them the town was on fire, and they were stuck down here, cut off.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Dave Hooper asks his crew. ‘Whatever you choose, I’ll support you.’
They make a collective decision: they’re going home.
The Incident Control Centre at Kangaroo Ground advises them to go round via Whittlesea; the St Andrews–Kinglake Road is impassable. They look up at The Windies: ten kilometres of treacherous cliffs and hairpin bends, engulfed in fire. But quicker. They all have families, homes and friends up there. And if they can get through, maybe they’ll be clearing the way for the ambulances and strike teams that will surely follow.
Dave speaks to Vicfire: ‘We’re going straight up the Kinglake Road.’
Before they leave, he flicks off the outside speaker of the radio. The news coming out of it sounds bad beyond belief but there’s nothing they can do about it. For the next hour they’re going to have to focus all their energies on getting up the hill in one piece.
Kinglake Tanker Two is also on Jacksons Road when the change sweeps the front over them. Now the crew are becoming intensely worried about their homes and families. They’re all desperately trying to call Kinglake, mostly without success.
Kinglake-350 Page 17
