Crew leader Steve Bell has a quiet word with the strike team leader, comes back grim-faced. ‘Just had it confirmed. The fire’s hit Kinglake.’ Ben Hutchinson looks up the mountain; his house on the outskirts of town will be one of the first to go.
Steve makes the decision to take the crew’s phones off them. ‘Nothing we can do about it now,’ he says. ‘We need to concentrate on the job at hand.’
That job is to provide escort for police officers Gary Tickell and Paul Kemezys from Hurstbridge in a convoy travelling through the burnt-out areas. Their mission, as they understand it, is to search for survivors, or victims. A crew of DSE firefighters in a four-wheel-drive takes the lead, their chainsaws running hard.
Along the way they pass several houses engulfed by fire without stopping to intervene, which leads Ben to suspect that they’re responding to a specific request. But when they come across a forlorn-looking couple in a ute they pause.
‘My house has just caught fire,’ the man says. ‘Can you help?’
The tanker peels off, rattles up the drive. Comes across a brick house well ablaze and way past saving.
‘Can’t we help the poor bugger out?’ asks Ben.
Steve shakes his head. ‘No point wasting the water.’
And that’s the way it goes. Some people can be helped, some houses saved. For some there is just nothing to be done.
At one place they find a young girl, about the same age as Ben’s daughter Aby. She is terribly injured, the sole survivor of her family.
While they wait for an ambulance Ben tries to keep her conscious and talking. But the ambulance doesn’t come. He keeps talking, soothing, encouraging her, and it keeps not coming. From time to time Ben gets up, steps across to his crew leader—‘Where’s that fucking ambulance?’—until eventually the police decide to carry her out themselves.
Ben wants desperately to go with her, but he’s the driver of the truck and can’t leave the crew. Somebody from another crew volunteers to go. The two of them pick her up—Ben describes it as the most gentle lift he’s ever made—and shift her into the back of the police car.
Ben watches them disappear into the smoke, his heart hurting. He doesn’t think she’ll make it.
She does, though.
A year later, when Ben Hutchinson is interviewed, the fire looms like a monster in his memory. He’s had a hell of a year; he did lose his house and is still living in a temporary accommodation centre provided by the government, unsure when he’ll get back into a home of his own. Like a lot of other people wiped out by the fire, he’s been hit hard by rising land values and the shortage of builders, among other things.
He managed to retrieve only one object from the ruins of his house: a small, blackened piece of metal that was once his CFA long-service medal. But he has salvaged something else too, and his voice catches when he speaks of it: the knowledge that, in all of that terrible destruction and loss, he and his colleagues helped save the life of that young girl in St Andrews.
YOU HAVE TO KEEP BREATHING
It is firefighter Chris Lloyd from Kinglake West who brings the first of the really bad casualties in to the CFA shed at Kinglake. Having gone home with his partner Debbie to pick up their pets and a few personal belongings, he was trapped by the fire’s dramatic arrival. He’s managed to save both his own and a neighbour’s house; on the way back he comes across a lump on the road that turns out to be a woman who’s crawled out of a house in flames. She’s terribly burnt. He has no time for first aid: a moment’s delay and they’ll both be dead, such is the intensity of the blaze coming at them. He lifts her into his vehicle and makes a mad dash for the CFA.
When they carry the woman in, Linda Craske is shocked to find the soles of her feet are burnt off. She is conscious, but in agony. Craske sits her in a chair, cuts away the dead skin, applies crepe bandages. The woman’s distress is intensified by the fact that she believes her husband didn’t make it out of the house.
One of the volunteers comes in to tell Craske they have another badly burnt patient outside.
‘Just pick her up and bring her in,’ she says.
‘We can’t touch her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Her skin keeps falling off.’
Paul Hendrie, who went out into the town as soon as the front passed, had come across this woman and her husband in a terrible state. She’d managed to drag herself out of the house as it collapsed around her, then realised that most of the occupants—family members and friends who’d been sheltering in another part of the house—were still in there. It was when she tried to get back in and rescue them that she received those appalling burns, covering more than 40 percent of her body.
They wrap her in bandages, try to retain as much of her body moisture as they can. Her friend stays with her, never leaves her side: ‘You have to keep breathing,’ they hear her whisper, over and over. ‘Your family’s going to need you more than ever now.’
The scratch medical crew are getting seriously worried. The floor of a crowded back room in a dirty tin shed is no place to treat serious cases such as these. A woman in one of the cars has with her a newborn baby who they fear has stopped breathing; a nurse rushes out and attends her.
Then Lorraine Casey brings in Wendy Duncan. To Trish and Carole, who have given up their friend and fellow CFA member for dead, the sight of her coming through that door is an enormous relief. But few of her colleagues recognise her when she’s carried in. She’s stooped over, blackened, gasping for air; her lips are blue. All signs Craske recognises as hypoxia. Wendy’s running out of oxygen. Wendy Duncan’s was one of the more amazing survival stories of Black Saturday. A barrister by profession, she lived out on Bald Spur Road in a house said to be one of the best-defended in the region: it was equipped with automatic sprinklers and water pumps, double-glazed windows. She’d cleared it rigorously, filled the gutters with water, blocked the entrances.
And the fire swept her defences away in seconds. One moment it was a distant glow in the treetops, next a battery of thrashing horizontal hail. Then, as she puts it, ‘the world exploded’.
She’d seen plenty of fires in her ten years with the CFA, but nothing like this. She rushed inside, set about defending herself, threw water around, swatted embers. As the smoke thickened and the heat intensified, the building began to ignite.
‘The heat was unbelievable,’ she says. ‘It was so intense that the woodwork inside the house spontaneously combusted.’
She soon found herself crawling down a smoke-filled corridor searching for a corner of the house that had yet to ignite. She removed a glove, touched a door on the far side of the house from where the fire had come, was astonished when it burned her hand. The fire was everywhere.
Wendy kept her wits about her. Remembering those iconic bush-fire images in which the chimney is the only part of the building that survives, she sheltered alongside hers. She found her phone, put a call through to the CFA, did her best to warn her mates there of how bad the fire was. But her breath was running out, her vision becoming blurred. Finally, when she judged the building was about to collapse, she kicked a metal window frame out with her steel-capped boots. She crawled outside, staggered through flaming air to the road, crumbled into the gutter. Lay there—blistered and burnt, barely able to breathe.
That is, one could almost say, the ordinary part of her story, the part that is repeated by survivors all over the ranges. The amazing part is that she found her phone and managed to get onto a friend over a hundred kilometres away in Gippsland, who relayed the call to another friend, a Kinglake woman named Lorraine Casey. Lorraine immediately set out to rescue her and drove through many kilometres of burning bush to reach her. When the road was finally blocked by falling trees, she did the last few hundred metres on foot, located Wendy, dragged her back up Bald Spur Road into the car and rushed her to the CFA.
Now she’s there, and they’re worried that she isn’t going to make it. Her lungs are so burnt they’re afraid she’ll s
uffocate.
A nurse says she needs oxygen. So do a lot of other patients. One of the helpers has worked in the doctor’s surgery across the road and says there’s oxygen there.
‘Break in and get it,’ says Trish.
‘Don’t we need permission to do that?’
‘You’ve got it.’
Wayne McDonald-Price and his wife Jenny run over, do the break-and-enter and return with a tank of oxygen. It helps stabilise some of the casualties, but the situation is grim and getting grimmer. Wendy’s breathing is steadily growing more laboured.
The nurses have no medical equipment other than small first aid kits. They are dealing with some fifty casualties, several of them critical.
Trish, as Communications Officer, has been desperately trying to raise outside help all night. She’s spoken to Vicfire, emergency 000, other brigades, told them she needed a minimum of twelve ambulances. Earlier on, she’d spoken to Roger Wood, explaining their situation. He’d said he’d see what he could do, but she doesn’t hold out much hope. She’s received a lot of promises that help was on the way, but they all came to nothing. She gathers there are support teams—ambulances, fire trucks—being assembled at a staging ground at Whittlesea, but the road is still too dangerous to bring them up.
‘They told us a strike team was escorting a group of ambulances up from Hurstbridge, and we thought, thank god,’ remembers Carole. ‘Two minutes later they said it’s taken off somewhere else, and Trish and I burst into tears.’
The outside world is yet to comprehend the thoroughness of the destruction wrought here tonight. Again and again, through the long evening, the story is replayed: help is on the way, and then it isn’t. The road is blocked, there are trees and fallen power lines everywhere, massive traffic accidents, it’s too dangerous to send anybody up.
Dave Cooper, from the CFA vehicle, appears. He sees at once that if they don’t get help they’re going to have more deaths on their hands. Trish hears him yelling into his radio in frustration: ‘They need ambulances! They’ve got all these people burnt, they’re going to die!’
Then Roger Wood and Cameron Caine walk into the building.
UNDERWORLD
For the two police officers it has been a journey through hell.
Wood’s sense of time is completely distorted, but he estimates the eight-kilometre trip from Kinglake West takes somewhere between one and two hours.
The CFA crew lead the advance, sawing through fallen trees and power poles. Deputy Group Officer Dave Cooper is in command, Frank Allan is doing the grunt work. He’s unsure how many trees he cuts—at least twenty is his estimate, because he has to refuel three times. And this is not your ordinary chainsaw work: he’s labouring in the dark with trees still falling, fire everywhere around. Often there are two or three trees twisted into one another; sometimes there are burnt-out cars or power lines inside the mess.
It’s hard, hot, heavy work. Frank has already been on the run all day, not to mention being burnt over in Coombs Road; his eyes are aching, his lungs are seared by smoke. As an experienced trainer, he understands exactly how lethal a chainsaw can be and he knows there’s nothing like fatigue to amplify the dangers. One slip or kickback could cost him a leg or sever an artery, and out here they are way beyond the reach of the medical professionals.
By the time they make it into Kinglake he can barely stand, let alone operate a chainsaw.
Wood and Caine follow the CFA vehicle, veering off to deal with the myriad jobs that claim their attention as they drive. And struggling to deal with their own emotions. Wood is still terrified that his own family have perished, and what he sees on the road now only intensifies that fear.
Both men are locals. This is their town, their district: their people. They are stunned at the ferocity nature has turned upon them.
‘We were just saying fuck—can’t believe it—the devastation. There was nothing left. Nothing. Burnt-out cars everywhere. Dead animals. Houses, businesses, bushland, just…gone’ They drive past the Pheasant Creek store, the scene of their earlier rescue, now a nest of twisted steel and black spaghetti, a mangled, smouldering mess. The pine plantation across the road is obliterated. A wash of relief and a silent word of thanks they got those people out when they did.
Kinglake West Tanker One, Karen Barrow in command, catches up with the convoy somewhere near the sports oval. She’s trying to get down Extons Road, where they’ve had a request for assistance from a family trapped in a house. They’re all finding the slowness of the journey maddening but with the number of trees on the road, there’s nothing they can do about it.
Karen shoots a glance at the hunched, blackened figure ripping a chainsaw into a fallen tree. She looks again, is astonished to realise that it’s her partner, Frank.
They notice that the sports stadium is beginning to go up. Karen’s crew have little water to spare but they manage to suppress that fire and save the building—a feat that proves invaluable in the following months, when sport looms as one of the crucial supports for the community’s recovery.
They turn into Extons Road. A woman runs out, waves them down. Her name is Tess Librieri. She has an injured neighbour in her care. She’s called for an ambulance, but none has appeared. Karen goes in to assess the situation and finds the victim, Mick Flynn, has burns to 70 percent of his body. His rescuers are doing all the right things, keeping him in the swimming pool, monitoring his vital signs, but it’s a bad situation. She returns to the truck, gets onto Vicfire, reinforces the plea for an ambulance. The operator assures her there’s one on the way, so they continue on to their job.
When they eventually reach the call-out, they find the family and the home have survived. They extinguish a fire breaking out in a house nearby and then, heading back, decide to check on Mr Flynn. They’re shocked to find the injured man’s condition deteriorating and no sign of an ambulance. They try Vicfire again: the ambulances are still down in Whittlesea, unable to travel up the mountain.
The crew improvise a stretcher from a ladder and transport Mr Flynn back to Kinglake West. By this time it’s nearing two in the morning, some eight hours since he was injured, and although the ambulances do arrive soon afterwards, Mr Flynn dies later in hospital. Karen is left bitterly contemplating the difference it might have made if she’d been given correct information and ferried him down the mountain earlier.
While all of this is happening, the essential services convoy continues its fitful journey into Kinglake. Roger Wood is worried about the power lines snaking all over the road, but Desi Deas, a volunteer from the State Emergency Service, appears and assures them the lines are dead. He’s lost his own property in the fire, but is out on the road straightaway, doing what he can. The fire struck so swiftly and with so little warning that the official SES vehicles were destroyed in their compound, but the SES members have gone out into the community in their own cars.
The coppers spot a group of fifteen or twenty people sheltering in the middle of the oval. The school alongside it is burnt to the ground and Wood realises that these are the people they thought they’d been going to help when they made their frantic dash to the school at Kinglake West.
It turns out most of those on the oval have escaped from the neighbouring hamlet of Strathewen, which has been completely obliterated. They sought shelter in the school. When it burned down around them, they fled onto the oval. Several of them are injured— one has a broken ankle—and they are all shaken, but none of the injuries are life threatening.
Wood, who knows a few of them, moves around checking on their wellbeing. He speaks to Debbie Bradshaw, a fellow parent at Strathewen school. She fled her home just before the fire struck, came racing up the escarpment. She’s had no word from her husband, Darren, who is a CFA volunteer and is still out on a truck. He will come through okay, but when the couple eventually get back to Strathewen they find their home destroyed and a shocking number of their friends dead.
Dennis Spooner, whom Wood also knows from Strat
hewen, comes over in great distress. ‘Roger, I don’t know what happened to Marilyn and Damien, they were following us up the hill in the other car and they didn’t make it. Can you go and check?’ Marilyn and Damien are his wife and son; Damien is another parent at Strathewen school.
‘Mate, I’ll try,’ Wood puts a hand on his shoulder, ‘but there’s trees down everywhere—don’t know if we’ll be able to get through.’ The two officers do make a brief sortie down Bowden Spur, the long, narrow track that twists up into Kinglake from Strathewen, but find it’s a mess of twisted timber and flame. Impassable.
Anybody who has the misfortune to be down in Strathewen that day is more or less on their own. The tiny CFA crew there are tearing their hair out at the lack of support they are getting. They are reduced to scampering over trees on foot in the moonlight to reach isolated survivors. Other CFA brigades are distressed to hear the Arthurs Creek and Strathewen captain, Dave McGahy, desperately pleading for assistance: ‘Will somebody help us? Anybody? I’ve got critically injured people dying in front of my eyes.’
A year later, McGahy would still be furious at the lack of support his community received in the hour of its destruction. Literally decimated, the town would suffer twenty-seven deaths from a population of around 250. Among the dead were Marilyn and Damien Spooner. Separated from Dennis in their flight, they’d returned to the family home. Their remains were eventually found in the bath.
The group on the oval are hungry and thirsty as well as traumatised. Cameron Caine, who is president of the football club, smashes a window and kicks in the door. ‘Drinks in the fridge. Help yourselves!’
They get back onto the road, transfixed by the endless scenes of destruction unrolling before their eyes. Roger Wood stares out the window at the wrecked cars, once metal and glass, now ferocious, fire-spitting distortions. His heart surges with pity for whoever was in there. And he feels the familiar wave of anxiety for his own family.
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