Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt (20 page)

T
HIRTEEN PEOPLE DIRECTLY FACED THE FIRE IN THE
K
IMBERLEY
on 2 September 2011; but it irrevocably changed the lives of many more. The ripples cast a wide circle. At the core were Turia and Kate, the two young women who nearly lost their lives.

Turia, the most profoundly injured, tells her story in this book. Her survival is nothing short of a miracle and her brave determination to live a life that is as normal as possible is inspirational.

Kate spent nearly six months in Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital recovering from extensive burns to most of her body. Like Turia, Kate became infected and because she had very little unburnt skin from which to harvest skin for grafting, the grafting took many months. She has undergone more than thirty operations on her hands, which are clawed due to contracture, and she lost her right index finger. Her doctors wanted to amputate her left leg below the knee but she fought to keep it, though she did lose half her left foot. She also lost most of her ear lobes.

She has not been able to return to work. When she left hospital she had to wear a special vacuum pack weighing 4 kilograms on her foot for eight months. She was finally fitted for a prosthetic foot in January 2013. Her injuries meant her driver’s licence was cancelled; until she got it back she was isolated and had to rely on others to drive her around as she does not live near public transport. Kate was previously very fit and loved adventure events. Today she can’t even ride a bike because she can’t grip the handlebars and can’t reach the pedals. In 2013 Kate had to make an unenviable choice: to have her hand amputated or to have her fingers fused together permanently. She chose the latter.

Because of her high media profile following the fire and a misunderstanding, Kate also distressingly become known as ‘the girl with two boyfriends’. When she decided to enter the race, ten months in advance of the event, she was not in a relationship and on the entry form listed her ex-partner and her mother as next of kin to contact in case of an emergency. At the time of the race she was in a new relationship but forgot to change the next-of-kin details. At Kununurra Hospital she knew she was going into an induced coma and wanted to put her new boyfriend’s name as contact but couldn’t remember his mobile number – understandable in the circumstances.

Dr Brandee Waite contacted the people named on Kate’s form. The ex-partner went to the hospital with Kate’s mother to anxiously await Kate’s arrival from Darwin. Two days later, Kate’s new partner read about what happened to her in the newspaper and immediately went to the hospital. (Kate had been going to stay on in Western Australia after the race and do some sightseeing with her friends Andrew Baker and Hal, so he wasn’t worried that he hadn’t heard from her.) When he arrived at the hospital it was a little confronting for the two men. Kate was in a coma and not able to explain the mix-up.

But a hospital is a hotbed of gossip and word that she had two boyfriends went viral; more than eighteen months later she was still being stopped by people asking: ‘Aren’t you the girl with the two boyfriends?’ Her new partner was very supportive and did whatever he could when Kate left hospital but after a couple of months, Kate felt she could no longer sustain the relationship. She wanted to get on with the business of adjusting to her much altered life.

Michael Hull – now affectionately called ‘Hully’ by the rest of the group – was flown to Royal Perth Hospital. He had a combination of first-, second- and third-degree burns: he suffered burns on both legs from ankle to knee, plus his fingers and ears as well as his arms to the elbow. He underwent skin grafts and wore pressure garments on his arms and legs for many months. He has a long permanent scar on his right leg, where he cut himself while running through the fire.

Hully had ongoing pain and continued to receive rehabilitation in Sydney for nine months after the Kimberley disaster. To focus on something other than his injuries, he began to train for other adventurous events. In April 2012 he did a seven-day trek to the North Pole, dragging a heavy sled; in September the same year he competed in a marathon in the Flinders Ranges in Victoria with Hal. In 2013 he competed in an Iron Man triathlon in New Zealand; the Marathon des Sables, a 250-kilometre ultramarathon in Morocco; and walked the Kokoda Trail with friends.

Martin Van der Merwe suffered thirty-five per cent burns on both calves to mid-thigh and substantial burns to his right hand. He returned to Ghana after three weeks in Royal Perth Hospital. He has recovered well and is running again and playing squash, cycling and swimming. But not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about Turia and Kate and how such young lives could be so tragically affected.

Hal was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and symptoms of reactive depression. Like Hully, he came to the conclusion that the best way forward was to compete again. Two months after the ill-fated Kimberley run he competed in the nine-day Adventure Racing World Championships in Tasmania. In 2012 he did a marathon in the Flinders Ranges with Hully and has competed in two forty-eight-hour adventure races, two ultramarathons of 100 kilometres and another nine-day race in the Flinders Ranges.

Shaun too was profoundly affected by the events of that day in which he thought his father had died. He believes he is a better person now but would not have chosen what happened as a way of learning one of life’s lessons. He values his time with his family more than ever, conscious that he could never know when it might be the last time. After his experience with RtP, Shaun is less trusting of adventure event organisers: he is selective about the events he enters, thoroughly checking out the background of the organiser first. He is disappointed that the event company is still able to operate – apparently not held to account for any of the shortcomings identified by the inquiry in its report.

The negative effects didn’t stop with those who lived through the fire on the ridge; many others were caught up in this tragic, preventable event. The founder of the company, Mary Gadams, herself received second-degree burns to her fingers and the backs of her arms and legs. After being initially treated in Kununurra Hospital she flew back to her home in Hong Kong.

Then there were those who escaped the fire, three of whom saw Turia and Kate engulfed by flames, and some who went to extraordinary efforts to get help. Many competitors were also caught up in the drama and aftermath.

Some of those people have been so traumatised that even today they find it difficult to talk about what happened. The three Newcrest miners, all tough men, went to ground after the initial publicity, deeply affected by what they had seen – and the images they continue to live with. They were hailed as heroes by those they helped after the fire; but that’s not the way they saw themselves. They have all moved out of the region and don’t speak to the media.

Volunteer Lon Croot lives with the image of the fire overcoming competitors and the sounds of the screams. He also lives with the frustrating knowledge that his concerns about the fires burning out course markers on certain parts of the route in the days before the race were not taken seriously by RtP organisers, even though he was a local; at the subsequent inquiry, when asked if there had been adequate risk identification, Lon recounted events from a few days before the race: ‘They said to me that some of the ribbons had been burnt off and they had to go back and re-tie the ribbons along the track. I said . . . “Are you worried about that?” . . . If the wind picks up, I was a little concerned . . . but I was at the bottom of the ladder. I do not think the fires were taken into account enough as a danger.’ One of the questions he was asked during the hearing was if there was any briefing about what to do if there was a fire. He told the committee: ‘There was definitely no briefing . . .’
¹

Ellis Caffin and Heather Scott, who so narrowly escaped the fire, did everything in their power to raise the alarm only to be trapped in an ongoing nightmare. When they finally reached checkpoint two and found it was burnt out, they set off for checkpoint three; they tried to hail a lift and discovered outback hospitality selective.

Cars in the outback are few and far between. A couple stopped and, although Ellis begged for help, explaining the situation, he and Heather were refused a lift; the drivers were not going their way. Ellis and Heather may have looked hot and dishevelled: they were desperate to get help; they had run out of water during their 6-kilometre trek back to checkpoint two and were grateful they managed to find some in a creek. Another man, in a ute, told them he was a landowner and said the fire was a controlled burn deliberately lit to prevent bigger fires during the dry season.

At last two campers in a third vehicle cheerily told them to hop in. As they were driving they came across a large group of people waiting by the side of the road. Ellis and Heather discovered that most were competitors who had been behind them and had all heeded Ellis’s call from the valley to turn around. RacingthePlanet staff had tried to evacuate everyone from checkpoint two at 2 pm but did not have enough transport; eventually everyone was moved to the main road with the help of a passing local resident in a troop carrier; they were left with some water and one race official and told to wait while staff headed off inland towards where they thought the competitors may have been trapped. Someone would pick them up later. It was by then 7 pm.

No one had any means of communication; they did not know if the girls on the ridge had been rescued and had no idea when or if anyone was coming back for them. Among the group were Brenda and Martyn Sawyer and Lon Croot, who had alerted RtP at checkpoint two about the fire and the likelihood of burns victims. Lon was still suffering from shock after witnessing what he believed was someone engulfed in flames but he was frustrated by the delay; he had been keen to go back and see what he could do to help but had been told to stay put by RtP staff and, not being in charge, felt obliged to do so.

For Heather and Ellis, their seven-hour ordeal was not over. They were suffering from smoke inhalation and left the group deciding to press on and walk on to the nearby Great Northern Highway, where they managed to hitch another lift to the nearest town of Wyndham, about a thirty-minute drive away. After Ellis and Heather were treated at Wyndham Hospital, they made their own way back to Kununurra, where they discovered that Turia and Kate had been rescued but their injuries were life-threatening.

Heather has remained deeply traumatised by the events of that day. And for many months afterwards, she cried every time she talked about it. In the statement she made to the police on 6 September 2011, she described how the day after the race she and Ellis returned to the course to retrieve an expensive camera they had dropped, and were guided by a Kununurra local who had been attached to the media team. He mentioned that the media team had been aware of the bush fire about two to three hours before it had come through the area and had made a decision only to film for one hour before moving to safety. The question has gone through her mind so often: why were the runners allowed to go through checkpoint two when so many people already knew that there was danger.
²

Rod Rutherford, who loves extreme adventure events and has competed in ultramarathons in other parts of the world, now has a fear of fire he never had before. He rarely talks about his terrifying encounter with the fast-approaching flames as he finds it difficult to express the raw emotion. He gets distressed when he recalls trickling water into Turia’s mouth while he was on the ridge with the others and cried when the first
60 Minutes
program brought back the memories of it all. He recalls vividly holding back the door of the helicopter while the others struggled to get Turia on board. Rod thinks about Turia and Kate every day.

Helicopter pilot Paul Cripps, who carried out the risky rescue of Turia and Kate, speaks movingly of the experience: ‘Thinking back to the day of the tragedy, it was not until Bryn and I were on our way out to Tier Range that the adrenaline started to pump through my body. I knew from the conversations I had that afternoon with Nathan Summers that it was going to be difficult but it’s not until you are on your way to the scene that you really start to think about just how you are going to tackle such a challenging task. I had done several medivacs in some fairly confined spaces – but not from the side of a cliff with no space to land a helicopter.

‘The high risk of the operation kept going through my mind and I did not want to put more lives at risk, including my own and Bryn’s; I thought of my wife and son back in Kununurra several times that afternoon. I didn’t want to leave my wife to raise our son on her own because I made a stupid mistake or took an unnecessary risk.

‘Apart from the limited performance of the aircraft in the hot conditions in the Kimberley, I also had to consider how many people we needed on board the helicopter conducting a high-risk operation which is why I decided to lift Turia and Kate off the site separately; if something were to go wrong, at least the number of lives lost would be reduced.

‘I often think of that day with a mix of emotions. I feel for Kate and Turia and their long battle to recover. I feel angry that they spent so long out in extreme temperatures, which is essentially due to poor communication. And I think of myself sitting there in my air-conditioned comfortable office while they sat on that cliff with the sun beating down on them, flies and ants crawling over their horrific burns, waiting for someone to come and help them, waiting for someone to take the pain away, or at the very least ease the pain.

‘People say it’s easy to look back and say “what if”, but is it really that easy to look back and realise that perhaps two beautiful girls wouldn’t be facing a lifetime of recovery if the risk of fire had been considered! I don’t think that’s an easy thing to think about at all.’

Turia’s family and friends have been affected for life.

Turia’s mother, Célestine, a spiritual woman with an ingrained positivity, kept it together in front of her precious daughter for a year and a half. In the beginning she dreamt of the ‘old Turia’; Turia would always come into the dream and tell her, ‘Mum, she’s gone.’ The only time Turia saw Célestine cry was the day of that first walk in the Burns Unit corridor, when the sight of Turia shuffling along painfully was just too much to bear.