Kinglake-350 (23 page)

CONVOY

As Wood and Caine race out of Whittlesea they raise their eyes to the ranges: the first chance they’ve had to observe the scene from a distance. Only now do they realise how widespread the inferno has been. The hemisphere above them is on fire, a livid, swirling tableau; from the rolling foothills to the craggiest heights, everything is ablaze.

Just past the roadblock they catch up with an enormous convoy struggling up the mountain—maybe fifteen ambulances, half a dozen fire trucks—and at last they have a sense that things are stirring. Our wealthy, advanced society is bringing its weight to bear upon the disaster.

Roger and Cam made their rally-cross scramble down this road a mere twenty minutes ago, but already the road is impassable again. The return is a stop-start crawl that makes them aware just how lucky they were to make it down at all. Wood shudders to think what could have happened if they had been stranded on the way down.

In the short time since they made their descent, trees have continued to fall on the road. There are now so many that, even with a backhoe labouring at the front of the column, it takes them over an hour to complete a trip they’d normally do in ten minutes.

The falling of trees—those gargantuan denizens of the Kinglake forest—is a constant backdrop to everything the emergency services personnel do that night and for a long time afterwards. Trees fall for days, weeks. One of the two emergency services personnel who die in the campaign is killed by a falling tree.

(This in itself is remarkable in comparison with previous disasters: that despite numerous burnovers, entrapments and crashes, only two emergency services workers were killed during the entire crisis. The many, many commentators who were to criticise Fire Chief Russell Rees might think about that. It was on his watch that the advances in training and fire-ground practice that saved the lives of so many volunteers were instigated.)

The convoy grinds its way up the mountain. Metre by blackened metre, tree by fallen tree, the kilometre-long column of flashing lights continues its progress, bringing a skerrick of hope to those who see it. Help is on the way.

Roger Wood opens the throttle and overtakes the convoy, comes across a police car at the front: Terry Asquith and Scott Melville, two colleagues from Seymour. The only vehicle ahead of them is a backhoe heaving the burning debris off the road. They watch the heavy machine reef up flaming trees, power lines and poles, smashing a way through, and wish they’d had a few of those available earlier on. Behind them the convoy stretches off into the darkness.

One of the trucks back there is from Panton Hill and among its crew is a firefighter named Bernie Broom. The Panton Hill tanker has been in the thick of it all afternoon down in St Andrews. They managed to save at least one house and Bernie, tackling his first big fire, thought they’d done pretty well.

Then they enter the fire zone. He and two of his crew-mates are sitting on the back under the roll-over protection canopy. They look back in horror as the vehicle inches its way up the hill, begins to trail past flaming houses and burnt-out cars, the carnage rolling out for kilometre after kilometre.

‘Oh those poor fuckers.’ Tanya, beside him, shakes her head and gives succinct expression to the emotion they all feel. ‘Those poor fuckers.’

Like others, Bernie is struck by the quietness of the mountain: aside from the rumble of their own trucks and the odd crashing tree, there’s an unnerving silence drawn over the scene. The stars are shining brightly, parabolas of embers arc from the trees.

They see few signs of life. They’re observing one of the features of this disaster: there is a relatively small number of injuries. People either escaped or they died. When the figures are eventually tallied, it is found that there were 173 deaths and only 414 recorded injuries. Many of the houses they drive past now will later be found to have bodies in them.

At one stage, while the loader grinds away up ahead, they pull up close to a burning pile of logs. The crew on the back with Bernie notice, with some discomfort, the heat it is throwing out. Even now, six or seven hours after the fire passed through, it is still blasting out an intense radiant energy. ‘Like sitting too close to an electric fire,’ says Bernie. ‘We stopped there for some obstacle up front and it just glowed—it was white hot in the middle.’

When the convoy reaches Kinglake West, the police officers find themselves in an argument with the leader of the medical team, who has been told to go straight through to Kinglake; Wood insists that they spare some of their number for Kinglake West.

The ambulance officer has her orders and sticks to her guns; she wants to push on. But the argument is resolved when members of the Kinglake West CFA flag them down, say they have casualties and need support. The ambo relents and assigns several vehicles to Kinglake West.

When the rest of the convoy finally crawls into Kinglake proper, the Panton Hill firefighters, like everybody else entering the town that night, are stunned.

‘It was like a burning ghost town,’ comments Bernie Broom. Then they reach the CFA building, still lit up by the jets from the service station, and there are people everywhere, dogs, cars. They are quiet, still in shock. After a quick conference with Captain Paul Hendrie, they set out to do what they can around the town.

Wood pulls into the police station. The burning utility and its trailer are still sitting in front of the station, and the building has sustained minor damage—a burnt veranda, cracked plate-glass windows—but the generator is still going and the interior lights beckon.

The two cops climb out, stand for a moment watching the emergency services teams swing into action. The paramedics begin treating people, the fire tankers are setting out in different directions. They both understand that they still have work to do, and traumatic times ahead of them, but, for the moment, it’s simply an enormous relief to know that theirs aren’t the only flashing lights on the mountain.

Wood has been on the move for over fourteen hours. He thinks maybe a cup of tea is in order. He hasn’t eaten a morsel of food all day, and maybe the tannin hit will convince some interior corner of his brain that the world isn’t totally off its rocker.

They give themselves ten minutes. Sit alone in the station kitchen, mostly silent. The light from the burning servo casts its flickering glow across them.

Then they get on the road again.

ON AND OFF ROAD

The policemen’s radios and mobiles are running hot with messages and requests.

The most worrying is a report of a mini-bus gone into a dam off Parkside Road; multiple fatalities. They cruise along the road, sweeping its smouldering margins with their spotlights. A trail of devastation, but no sign of a mini-bus in any of the dams.

They drive into the last property; everything is still burning viciously, impossible to approach. There’s a car sitting there, and a trailer loaded with fire-fighting equipment, both vehicles burnt. They will come to recognise these as ominous indicators. The hoses are laid out, but everything is melted. Whoever was here put up a fight.

They circle the house with their torches, searching for signs of life. Find none. A chilling silence envelops the scene. Nothing to be done, though: whoever was here is either dead or fled.

They drive back out, pause at the corner of Parkside Road to discuss their options and a face suddenly looms in the window. Both men jump: a pair of Indian men are looking at them. They are workers from Singh’s, the market garden Wood visited earlier in the day. The beautiful cool farmhouse he was so impressed by is now a smouldering wreck, but the family and their employees fled for the broccoli paddocks and survived. These men have only minor injuries. The policemen direct them to the aid stations being set up in the town.

They resume their patrol, encountering scattered little groups of desolate individuals, offering what support, solace or advice they can. They receive an urgent message that somebody is lighting fires down in the Hawkins Estate, scream down there, find only a group of locals putting out fires with wet hessian bags, conclude that every nerve on the mountain is shot to hell.

On their way back along Glenburn Road they encounter another of the eerie bushfire sights that will lodge in their memories: an abandoned fire truck. They get out and stare at it, bewildered. You don’t just get up and walk away from a million-dollar vehicle. They check out the brigade name painted on the door: North Warrandyte. It’s about forty kilometres from home. The appliance is badly battered, a windscreen smashed, stuck in a ditch. They poke around, see no signs of life—or death, thank god. Scratch their heads.

They have no way of knowing it at the time, but that vehicle is another indicator of how swift and brutal the fire has been. Later they find out that the North Warrandyte tanker, with Rohan Thornton in command, had struggled up the treacherous Kinglake– St Andrews Road when the fire was at its peak; other CFA members describe them as having almost ‘surfed’ the fire front. They’d come from St Andrews to rescue people trapped in a house, found their escape route back down the hill blocked, Kinglake the only option.

Crawling up the track in virtual darkness, they were battered by flying objects and blasting heat, struggling to see anything other than the lines on the road. Soon their brakes were gone, their drive-shaft snagged in power lines. They spotted at least one body on the side of the road. As they reached the top of the mountain, they had to batter their way past the burnt-out vehicles cluttering the road— presumably cars that had tried to get down before the roadblock was set up.

Suddenly two cars came careering out of the smoke, panicky drivers at their wheels: they avoided one but T-boned the other. Wild fire surging in front of them, they managed a crazy turn by bouncing off a farm gate and drove back the way they’d come. A tree crashed; dodging sharply to avoid it, they plunged into a ditch with an impact so severe it broke Rohan’s back. Immobilised, they put out a mayday as the fire swept over them; they turned on the crew protection system and lay sprawled out in the cabin. Gasping for air, blasted by radiant heat, slipping in and out of consciousness. When their crew protection water ran out they thought they were dead.

Incredibly, another truck, from Wonga Park under the leadership of Andrew Wright, managed to respond to their mayday. They followed the same nightmarish path, battering trees out of the way, inching through that blackness, ultimately locating their colleagues and bringing them back down the other side of the mountain.

Some residents of the ranges were angry that there were no tankers on hand when the fire struck. They felt they had been abandoned; that perhaps the town’s destruction might have been less complete if the trucks had been there. Volunteers from Kinglake West report being abused, and the Flowerdale CFA was graffitied by locals annoyed that the truck was away.

The fate of the tanker that Wood and Caine found deserted like the
Marie Céleste
in Glenburn Road encapsulates why, even if the local tankers not been down the hill trying to defend their hometown against the fire coming up from St Andrews, their presence on the mountain would probably have had minimal effect. Indeed, many of the firefighters interviewed suggest that if they had remained on the mountain, they would most likely have died somewhere along the top of the escarpment as they struggled to intercept the fire.

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic illustration of the fact that, if you are going to make your home in a fire zone, the only person you can rely upon in an emergency is yourself. Like most country towns, Kinglake had hundreds of houses, and only two tankers to defend them. As was seen again and again, from Kilmore East to Kinglake West, from Steels Creek to Marysville, even the best-equipped, state-of-the-art fire appliance is struggling to save a single house when it is under attack from a fire the size of the Black Saturday inferno.

The CFA does its most important work in attacking minor outbreaks before they become conflagrations. Despite the shocking loss of life on Black Saturday, it could have been a lot worse. Around the state there were some five hundred outbreaks that day, and the vast majority of them were suppressed before they did much damage. Experienced firefighters speak with great admiration for the gutsy work done by their colleagues in suppressing a fire in Ferntree Gully in Melbourne’s outer east that, had it got away, could have devastated the heavily populated Dandenong Ranges.

Wood and Caine climb back into their vehicle and continue their ghostly patrol, with the reported mini-bus playing on their minds: they never do find it, but they find a lot of other things, most of them in flames.

They’re troubled by the dearth of survivors. What the death toll is going to be they have no idea. The number of people who found shelter at the CFA gives them some hope, but the forbidding silence that hangs over the burnt-out properties they inspect chills them to the core. And they know it will only get worse. The deaths they’ve already seen are but a forerunner. There will be many, many more and, as the local police officers, they’ll play a critical role in uncovering them. But that will be over the next few days. Right now, most buildings are still too dangerous to approach.

They make a short run down the St Andrews road, but it’s completely impassable: they get about a kilometre down the road before they’re blocked by falling trees. Roger Wood sits staring at the road thinking about his family, somewhere down there on the other side of that inferno.

They’re alive, that much he knows. Or they were a couple of hours ago. But there are still fires burning along Buttermans Track, on the edges of his property. Who knows what the hell’s happening anywhere tonight? Those ruined houses and burnt-out cars are playing havoc with his nerves.

They turn the car around and get on with it; but some time around 4.30 am they get a call from their boss, Senior Sergeant Laurie Parker, in Seymour. He knows about Wood’s situation, orders him to knock off, to get home and see his family. There are other officers on the way up, they can take over.

Wood relents. The urgency of the work to be done here is ebbing, and this driving round in the dark magnifies his feeling of helplessness, his feeling of insignificance in the face of the monstrosity. Time like that, family’s really all you’ve got. His fears about them have been biting away at him all through the emergency. He’s been on the go for eighteen hours and there isn’t much more he can do right now.

It’s time to go home.

He assures Cameron he’ll be back later in the day and sets off in his private car. It has been sitting in the station garage all day and turns out to be unscathed.

Cam takes the opportunity to check up on his family too. He drives back to the Kinglake West CFA, where they are still sheltering; joins Laura for a cup of coffee. While he’s there, Des Deas from the SES comes over and casually asks what happened to Cam’s own house.

Cam looks at him blankly. ‘Dunno, mate. Gone, I guess.’ But he has no idea. In the chaos of the past few hours, he hasn’t given it a thought. They drive round to have a look. Many of the nearby houses are gone, the fences and trees are still alight, but the Caine house is pretty well untouched.

Roger Wood, meanwhile, continues his solitary journey down the mountain. Because of the blocked road, he takes the roundabout way, back down through Whittlesea.

He drives, once more, through livid orange forests, past fire trucks and ambulances; reaches Whittlesea, takes the road that goes the long way to St Andrews.

The sun is coming up as he drives along the curving dirt track to his property. On the left-hand side, to the north, there are scorched paddocks and slopes. On the right, where his home is, the land appears untouched. His family—himself, really—have been saved by the same wind change that turned the fire around and drove it up into Kinglake.

He pulls into the drive. Jo is still awake, as are most other adult residents of St Andrews. All too nervous to close their eyes in case the fire comes back.

She looks up at him, smiles wearily.

‘Kids?’

‘In bed,’ she says.

Arm in arm, they walk into the children’s rooms, where he stands for a moment, watching them, lost in the gentle murmur of their breathing. Then he bends and kisses their sleeping heads.