Kinglake-350 (6 page)

MAYDAY

Earlier in the day at Kinglake West: Captain John Grover is muttering a quiet prayer of gratitude for the new 225,000 litre tank they had installed just a few weeks ago. He still has concerns: the council hasn’t slashed the overgrown roadside reserves to his satisfaction; his superiors have yet to pay adequate attention to his plans for a staging area for strike teams near their shed.

The experts have always warned him to expect a fire from the north, but his real worry is the fire that comes running up the escarpment with a southerly buster whipping it along. Fire accelerates as it travels uphill, doubling in speed for every ten degrees of elevation. The combination of steep slopes and heavy fuel load would mean devastation for the people—his people—at the top of the rise.

But Grover has an experienced, capable crew and is confident that, if it comes down to it, they’ll be able to provide at least a level of protection for the crowds he knows will come in to CFA headquarters seeking refuge.

Many of his members have checked in early. The atmosphere in the stations is relaxed—on the surface. There’s a lot of chiacking, some sorting of crews and rosters, much consumption of cigarettes and coffee. A last check of the equipment, though they’ve done it a dozen times already.

Similar scenes are being enacted at brigades all over the state.

Over at Kinglake they stretch out on deck chairs, keep a vague eye on a television. Di MacLeod cuts up a watermelon and passes it around. Underneath, they’re on edge. Even those who’ve stayed at home until they’re called keep an anxious eye on the sky, an ear on the scanner. They run thumbs over the pagers on their belts, reread old messages, wait for the call-outs. There’s an iron-hard sense of foreboding in the shed. Most days, they manage to get most fires under control before they run wild. But on a day like this, who can tell what will happen? A blaze could be off and running in seconds. And when they get started they tend to keep going until nature intervenes.

Most of the Kinglake firefighters see the smoke plume in the north-west before they pick up it on the radio. The sky grows luminous, the sun a creepy scarlet. They move a little closer to the radio, ears pricked. They hear Region 14 crews being despatched, frantic messages ringing forth from the speaker: pleas for backup and support.

Then they pick up the first Pan calls—‘PAN! PAN! PAN!’— ‘possible assistance needed’. A crew somewhere is getting caught in a desperate situation. More than one, by the sound of it. They stare northwards. What the hell’s happening up there?

Later comes the most disturbing call of all: ‘Mayday! Mayday!’

Not just once, but several times. Distressing: their colleagues on the fire front are being overwhelmed.

‘Hearing those distress calls,’ says Mike Nicholls, ‘it was spine-chilling.’ Particularly for his brigade, Panton Hill, which had lost an entire crew on Ash Wednesday in 1983. He and his members go past the community’s memorial to their lost comrades just about every day. ‘No crew leader would call a mayday unless the situation was life or death. You wouldn’t want your mates to risk their own lives by coming to your aid.’

The Kinglake volunteers sit glued to the radio. It’s excruciating to listen to, but the action is happening out of their area; nothing they can do about it until they are paged.

But their hearts pound a little harder, the adrenaline flows a little faster. Those who smoke, and a lot of them do, are into the fags like they were Minties. The more experienced among them kick at the gravel in front of their brigades, feel that god-awful wind whipping into their faces, think about the lie of the land between themselves and Kilmore and feel the small, hard kernel of fear growing inside them.

They make what preparations they can. At Kinglake West, First Lieutenant Karyn Norbury and her colleagues set up an extra pump, called a Godiva, on the new tank. Karyn is an experienced countrywoman; she and her partner Dave operate a stud farm on the fringes of the town. She’s accustomed to working with both hand and mind.

At Kinglake Paul Lowe and Aaron Robinson take the brigade car up to a vantage point at the top of Bald Spur Road, study the billowing column, make use of a kestrel wind monitor to get a heads-up on what the fire is doing.

They try the CFA website and the local ABC radio station, both of which prove useless. There is virtually no helpful information being given out by the official sources. Hours later, when the town is burning, the website will still blandly advise that there is a ‘grass and scrub fire’ at Kilmore, thirty kilometres away. Bizarrely, the website seems to tell you where the fire has started, but fails to give you the more pertinent information about where it’s heading. There are people on the mountain whose last contact with the outside world will be a computer screen telling them the fire that’s about to kill them is thirty kilometres away.

The fire crews find that the best means of following the unfolding drama is on their CFA radio network. Kilmore is on a different frequency, so they only catch the odd scrap of information, but what they hear sounds chilling. Unlike the CFA website, which is designed to convey general information to the public, their own radio network allows them to eavesdrop directly on their colleagues on the fire ground. They also have a police scanner, and listen in as the coppers around Kilmore shout warnings and rush around trying to get people to safety.

Aaron Westworth, one of their members who works in a pine plantation in Wandong, has been called in to work because of the emergency. He makes a couple of frantic phone calls back to the brigade around 2 pm, gives a running commentary as the fire storms the plantation, one block at a time:

‘Block One’s gone! It’s into Block Two now!’ A final, despairing: ‘Ah shit, we can’t stop it!’ And he signs off, more pressing matters to deal with.

‘I had a gut feeling we were going to wear a nasty fire,’ says Chris Lloyd. He was at Macedon on Ash Wednesday, he’s seen how bad a blaze can be. Based on what little information he can gather from his contacts—the intensity, the speed, the fire’s behaviour in leaping across multilaned highways—he fears it will hit them later that night. Possibly on the Sunday.

Lloyd and his colleagues will be fighting for their lives in less than three hours.

ARSON

It is still early afternoon when Roger Wood drives back up The Windies to Kinglake with an eye on the smoke to the north-west and an ear on the radio. The fire sounds bad, but it’s still miles away. No mention of Kinglake. He’d like to keep in closer contact with the CFA but, due to some inscrutable decision made in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, the CFA and police radio networks are incompatible. He does put in calls to the CFA captains on his mobile, but at this stage they’re doing the same as he is: watching and waiting.

He thinks back to the fire that threatened Kinglake in January 2006, on Australia Day. It had dawdled around for days before fizzling out, getting everybody all stirred up about nothing. Could have been a lot more than nothing though; the fire had started a run on Kinglake before it was suppressed by a heavy downpour. They were lucky then. Maybe they’ve used up all their luck. Perhaps that escape has lulled residents into a false sense of security.

Around 3 pm he receives a call from Trevor Connell, the police sergeant at Yea. They’ve just got word of a fire at the Murrindindi Mill over on the north-eastern edge of the Kinglake region, about forty kilometres away.

This is the first outbreak on Roger’s patch. There’s a chance he’ll have to close the Melba Highway. He dashes out to the car, flicks on the flashing lights.

As he’s racing north-east up the Healesville–Kinglake Road, he spots the plume of smoke in the direction he’s heading. He knows straight away they’ve got no chance of stopping that. It’s only been going for a few minutes but already it’s massive, a storm of angry black smoke churning the atmosphere. The colour is a worry: black means the fire is running fast and furious, moving too quickly to consume the fuel, transforming half-burnt material into the carbon that colours the clouds.

Looks like it’s heading to the south-east, away from Kinglake. But there’s a cool change forecast this evening. What’ll happen when the wind swings around is anybody’s guess. Weird things happen when weather systems collide, he knows that much. Embers can go anywhere, fires can sneak around, stab you in the back.

Is there any chance it could link up with the Kilmore blaze, turn into a megafire? They’re in trouble if it does.

He spots Trevor Connell on a siding near the mill and pulls over. When he opens the door the wind nearly tears it out of his hand: it’s picked up something awful, and is blowing a ferocious gale now. He has to shout to be heard.

The two coppers stand there for a few minutes, discuss the situation at high volume, come up with a plan. Wood’s going to head down the Melba Highway to the Slide—Mount Slide, where the road runs down to dixons Creek. He’ll prop himself at the Toolangi turn-off, keeping an ear on the radio. If the fire looks like coming their way he’ll block the highway to stop all northbound traffic. Trevor’s heading north and will halt any vehicles southbound.

Between them, they’ll keep people out of the danger zone. Try to minimise the number of potential victims. There’ll be tourists, day trippers, locals heading off to the beach or the mall. The rubber-neckers are the worst, stupid bastards. It’s the most dangerous place you can be, out in your car when the fire’s coming, but they always appear.

Wood jumps into the Pajero and heads back down the Melba to the Toolangi turn-off.

As they suspected early on, the Murrundindi fire will turn out to be the work of an arsonist. So were fires elsewhere in the state, at Churchill and Bendigo. Between them, these conflagrations will kill around fifty people.

There are around 54,000 bushfires in the nation each year. Experts now believe 20–30,000 of these are deliberately lit. This is a figure that ought to send a shiver down any Australian’s spine. You live in the most fire-prone region on Earth, and 20–30,000 times a year one of your fellow citizens sneaks out and puts a match to the scrub. And he (for most of them are male) tends to do it in places where his handiwork will wreak the maximum amount of havoc.

One study has shown that deliberately lit fires account for 80 percent of the area burnt in the Port Phillip region, around Melbourne, but only 6 percent of that in the thinly populated northeast of the state. In other words, the fires that break out in remote locations, where they will do minimal harm to humans, tend to be due to natural causes. Where there is a sizeable human population nearby, it’s a different story. Another study showed that 36 percent of deliberately lit fires occurred within two hundred metres of human habitations. On total fire ban days that distance will increase as the arsonist recognises that the extreme weather has amplified his firepower.

Arson is the simplest of crimes, especially when considered in relation to the amount of damage it inflicts: it needs little more than a box of matches, a lonely road and a twisted mind. But it is one of the costliest crimes in Australia, both in purely financial terms and in the immeasurably greater domain of human suffering. Arson in all forms costs the community an average of 1.6 billion dollars a year. It has enormous environmental impact: the 2003 fires, for instance, increased this country’s carbon emissions by a third. It can also have a devastating effect upon our major cities’ water supplies: a big fire can decrease catchment yield by 20 to 30 percent for thirty to fifty years.

And yet despite the threat it presents, arson remains something of a black hole in the public discourse. This psychosis that is causing havoc in our midst has very little place in our cultural imagination. There are no TV series or feature films about arson, no best-selling novels or famous trials. On this single day, February 7, arsonists will kill fifty men, women and children going about their ordinary business, and the public will hear little more about it.

Researchers working in the field are dismayed at the level of ignorance about the crime, which stretches from the person in the street right through their own under-funded ranks to the upper echelons of government. As one delegate to a Monash University conference pointed out, if a fraction of the resources that were available after Black Saturday had been available before the tragedy, its magnitude could well have been reduced.

But we do know a few things. We know the myth that arsonists join the CFA is exactly that: a myth. Whenever a firebug who happens to be a member is convicted it tends to hit the headlines; and doubtless a few slip through the net. But a specifically targeted investigation into deliberately lit fires in New South Wales found eleven firefighters involved—a tiny fraction of a total membership of 70,000.

In more general terms, we know there is a strong correlation between arson and the usual predictors of anti-social behaviour: high unemployment, low income, dysfunctional families—phenomena that could be said to characterise the communities springing up on lyrically named estates on the peri-urban interface.

Studies of individuals convicted of bushfire arson reveal another familiar picture: young, single males with a range of intellectual and psychological problems. Many have prior convictions, not necessarily for arson. Around half of the females are victims of sexual abuse, as are many of the males. Psychologists have identified a range of motivations, including the venting of anger at society, the cry for help, the hunger for recognition (one arsonist saw the admiration afforded to the firefighters of September 11 and wanted a little of that for himself), the desire for stimulation (an arson squad detective recounts the story of a firebug who could only achieve orgasm when watching fire). If there is a common emotion among known perpetrators, it is a sense of powerlessness.

There are some seriously weird people out there: hard-core pyromaniacs, victims of an impulse-control disorder whose gratification at watching flames erupt far outweighs any empathy they might feel for their fellow humans. They will light fire after fire until they are caught, and they are perhaps the most difficult of all criminals to catch: they work alone, in remote areas, leave minimal evidence behind and have usually fled the scene before the crime becomes apparent.

This suggests another problem with the knowledge base. What information we have is based upon interviews with the convicted, but the vast majority of arsonists are never even caught, let alone convicted. There are convictions for a mere 1 to 2 percent of all deliberate ignitions and we have little idea about the motives or mind-set behind the others. The fact that arsonists who are caught have low intelligence, for example, may just be telling us why they were caught. Maybe the smart ones get away.