Kinglake-350 (20 page)

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 ages 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.

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 suffocate.

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.