Kinglake-350 (7 page)

CAR ALARM

It is probably about 4 pm. Roger Wood is speeding down the Melba Highway to the Toolangi turn-off when he notices a change in the pitch of the voices from the radio. A greater sense of urgency at Kilmore. Will they need support? Will he be called up there? He can hear voices cutting across one another, his colleagues pleading for information, their bosses issuing orders:

‘What’s it doing now?’ ‘Alert everyone!’ ‘Where’s it going? This side of Wandong?’ ‘Tell people to activate their fire plans!’

Activate their fire plan? Shit, it’s a bit late for that.

The adrenaline is beginning to kick in. Wood’s pulse quickens, his mouth feels dry, his chest is tight. He takes a swig of water, pops a stick of gum. He’s got Murrindindi burning on one side, Kilmore on the other. His immediate concern is the Murrindindi blaze. Which way is it likely to go? Back towards Kinglake? Healesville? Marysville? Wherever it goes, there’ll be thousands of people in its path. A glimpse out the passenger side window: Jesus, it’s going ape out there now, the cloud billowing kilometres into the air.

He reaches the turn-off, gets out of the car and watches the pillars of smoke, miles high, rolling and folding into one another. He feels restless. He should be doing more than this, just standing around waiting. People need to be warned. Granted, if they’ve got any sense they’ll be listening to their radios, watching the sky. Maybe.

Where to start? The Toolangi Tavern is the obvious choice. It’ll be directly in the fire’s path, and it’s a place where people congregate. A meeting place for the locals, a watering hole for any travellers foolish enough to be out bush on a day like this.

It’s only a few minutes down the road; he could keep an eye on the smoke, be back here in no time. He turns east, races down through an avenue of manna gums. Planes of light are filtered through the flickering green leaves.

The houses are deeply nestled in lush bush; the trees tower over them, the scrub creeps up to their back verandas, sometimes seems to be coming out their windows. If the fire does come through, anybody in these dwellings is in deep shit, but there’s no time to warn them all. He can only hope they’re watching events unfold and they’ve got their wits about them: that they’ll be long gone before the fires come.

He pulls into the tavern—a beautiful weatherboard building that wouldn’t last minutes in a fire. Like a lot of other buildings in the area, the tavern is a replacement for a building that burned down years ago. Toolangi’s main claim to fame is as the home of the Australian poet C. J. Dennis—whose house burned as well. This is a region as much defined by its absences as by its presences, and a lot of those absences seem to be due to fire.

There are a dozen or so people congregated there, standing outside, anxiously staring at the hot red northern sky. Michelle Marshall, the owner, looks around when he drives up. ‘What do you know, Roger?’

‘Not good, Michelle. Coming this way, and it’s a monster. Wouldn’t be hanging round if I were you.’

Others in the crowd throw questions at him. He answers as best he can, but they’re all stunned into silence when a car comes belting out of the nearby Murrindindi Forest. An old Holden, lights flashing, horn blaring:
Blarp! Blarp! Blarp!
A couple inside the car, the woman screaming herself blue over the din of the horn.

‘Fire!’ she yells as the vehicle slams to a noisy halt. ‘The forest’s all on fire! Get out of here!’
BLARP! BLARP!
‘It’s coming. We nearly got burnt.’

The man driving catches Roger staring at him and figures, rightly, that the copper is puzzled by the unholy racket emerging from the car. ‘Alcohol interlocking alarm,’ he gasps. ‘Had to short-circuit her to get it going.’ He doesn’t look well: he’s covered in sweat and trembling, a gaping gold-fish mouth. Knuckles white.

Wood starts to speak but the bloke interrupts, shouting to be heard, ‘We woulda died if I hadn’t driven—it was hell in there.’ He glances back at the bush. ‘Fire all over the road.’

Wood follows the fellow’s anxious eyes. ‘How far back?’

‘Dunno. Coupla miles?’ He waves vaguely around him, indicating the raucous vehicle, and yells, ‘Magistrate’ll know I been driving. Can I have you as a witness? We had to get out of there.’

‘No worries.’ Roger bangs on the roof. ‘Go on, off you go now. Get back down to wherever you’re going.’

As the Holden speeds away, still shrieking, Wood turns his gaze up into the forest from which it came, hoping to hell there isn’t anybody else in there. Nobody’d go for a picnic on a day like this. Would they?

There is, in fact, a group of twenty campers—men, women and children—in the forest. They are being rescued at that moment by a team of forest firefighters from the Department of Sustainability and Environment who guide them into the river and shelter them under tarps and blankets as the fire storms over them.

Wood knows nothing of that and wouldn’t have time to help if he did: the Holden is barely out of earshot when he receives another call. ‘VKC Wangaratta to Kinglake-350. Do you read me? Over.’

He picks up the mike. ‘Kinglake-350 reading you. Over.’

‘Kinglake-350, yours is to Whittlesea–Kinglake Road, traffic management point. Over.’

Wood pauses, puzzled. That’s in Kinglake West. The Kilmore blaze is fifty kilometres away. Is there a third bloody fire?

He shrugs, shouts a quick farewell to the crowd at Toolangi— giving them another reminder to be somewhere else as soon as they can—and hits the road running.

FIRST STRIKE

The Kinglake CFA brigade members spot the Murrindindi fire at about the same time as Wood and begin making their calculations. Is Kinglake going to be struck by two fires simultaneously?

The sky over the town assumes an ugly red and streaky yellow luminescence. Carole Wilson, a member for more than thirty years, stands looking at the distant pyrocumulus monsters. ‘If those two meet,’ she says to her friend Trish Hendrie, ‘we’re in trouble.’

Even if they don’t meet, the residents of the town are still in trouble: there’s now no safe way off the mountain.

The Kilmore fire seems to be following a trajectory that will take it south of Kinglake, but fire projection is an incredibly complex task at the best of times. A fire’s trajectory can be affected by a multitude of factors: fuel type, elevation, slope and aspect, as well as variables such as changes in the weather. Unbeknown to the firefighters, Melbourne University scientist Kevin Tolhurst and his team have already developed maps predicting that Kinglake is in danger. But due to poor communications within the inaptly named Integrated Emergency Coordination Centre—there’s little in the way of integration or coordination going right now—the information in those maps is never passed on to the communities at risk.

The CFA crew in Kinglake don’t have long to worry about such things. Soon after the Murrindindi fire breaks out, their pagers start to shriek with the first call-out for the day: an ‘undefined’ fire down on the St Andrews road.

‘Undefined’ means somebody’s spotted smoke.

The trucks are out of the shed almost before the beeping stops. If there’s a mantra to fighting fires in this part of the world, it’s ‘Hit it hard and fast’. The difference between a minor outbreak and an all-devouring inferno can be a matter of seconds.

All four appliances from Kinglake and Kinglake West tear off to the reported location, but it turns out to be a false alarm. Some anxious resident has misread the smoke drifting down from Kilmore, fears the fire is closer than it is.

They trail back to their stations, but the frantic exchanges screaming out of the short-wave do little to reassure them. They can hear crews being despatched hither and yon, then being recalled and sent elsewhere as the CFA’s communication network, Vicfire, struggles to cope with fires breaking out all over the place and moving at what sound like impossible speeds.

Chris Lloyd receives a call from a friend near Wandong, who yells that they are under attack as he speaks.

‘What?’ Lloyd struggles to grasp the speed of the thing. ‘It’s there already? My god—it’s already travelled twenty kilometres…?’ The friend signs off. Soon afterwards he loses his home.

John Grover is on Kinglake West Tanker One when he hears a desperate plea from Ken Williamson, the captain at Whittlesea. ‘More support! We need more support! If we don’t round this up here we’re going to lose it.’ Then, shortly afterwards, the dismal follow-up: ‘Vicfire, we’ve lost it.’

Grover and his driver, Karen Barrow, exchange a grim look. Whittlesea is their nearest neighbour. They’ll be next cab off the rank.

The Kinglake West tankers are barely back at the station when they get another call-out: a fire in Jacks Creek Road, in the nearby town of Humevale. It’s coming closer. They get going, but have barely hit the bitumen when they spot thin plumes of smoke snaking up from Coombs Road, a mere three or four kilometres away.

Their own region. The fire has arrived.

Spot fires, by the look of things, a scatter of wisps being tilted by the wind. Outbreaks ignited by burning debris ripped away from the main front. They have to be tackled at once, before they turn into something worse.

More plumes appear. Both Kinglake West tankers rush out to meet them, calling the outbreak in to Vicfire as they speed out over the asphalt and turn down the dusty tracks.

Frank Allan, on Tanker Two, sees at once they’re going to need support. ‘Make tankers five!’ He radios in for five additional appliances, but no support will arrive until much later that night, long after the damage is done. They’re on their own.

In Kinglake village, the call comes in at around the same time. Code One—lights and sirens—for Eagles Nest Road in Strathewen, a tiny community at the foot of Mount Sugarloaf.

Kinglake Tanker One is despatched, a team of five with Second Lieutenant Dave Hooper in command and Paul Lowe at the wheel. They debate briefly which road to take down to Strathewen: the dirt track along Bowden Spur is the direct route, but it’s more dangerous. All that dust will reduce visibility, and the track descends sharply though thick scrub; a hell of a place to be caught in a fire.

They opt for the bitumen. Given the fire’s subsequent movement, the decision probably saves their lives.

Kinglake captain Paul Hendrie is puzzled when he receives a request for the second tanker, this time for an outbreak in St Andrews. He assumes it’s a mistake: protocol demands that one tanker always remains in its home district. He ignores the call, but then receives another. And another.

There’s a major strike team being formed, and Vicfire clearly want his home-defence appliance to be part of it.

Hendrie and his remaining firefighters mull the question over. It sounds like something terrible is happening down there. The location is Mittons Bridge, on the northern outskirts of St Andrews. Almost in their area anyway. Chances are they’re the closest brigade. He’s loath to leave his town without defences, but, on the other hand, in fighting a fire at the foot of the mountain, they are in fact defending their own community. You fight the fire you’ve got. Hit it hard and hit it early. If they can stop it down there, it won’t come up the mountain.

Hendrie makes the decision: he’ll despatch Tanker Two, but on the proviso that it returns to Kinglake as soon as the rest of the strike team arrive. The vehicle sets out with Lieutenant Steve Bell as crew leader, Ben Hutchinson at the wheel.

The town of Kinglake is now without a fire appliance.

As Ben belts through the town, he’s struck by the normality of it all. People are still going about their business, shopping, filling their cars at the service station, lounging out on the pub veranda. Kids are playing in front yards, drifting up and down on bikes in the way of country kids everywhere. The screaming, flashing tanker seems out of place, a rambunctious intruder in that rural idyll.

By the time they make it back to Kinglake, the town will be in ashes.

ROADBLOCK

As he races into Kinglake West at about 5 pm, Roger Wood wonders about the urgency of the call. His radio is going berserk, but it’s still ‘Kilmore, Wandong, Kilmore, Wandong’. That’s thirty kilometres away. Surely it would take hours to cross that distance? The adrenaline is coursing through his veins.

He reaches the intersection, spots a red four-wheel-drive that has improvised a roadblock in the Whittlesea direction. A trio of yellow-clad firefighters are waving cars down. He wheels about to block off the road.

One of the group comes over. Wood recognises Chris Lloyd.

‘Woody! Thank christ you’re here. They’re ignoring me, the stupid…’

‘Who are?’

‘People trying to run down the mountain.’

The police have the authority to stop traffic. The CFA don’t. It was Lloyd who had requested the police support. He’s just come in from Coombs Road, where the spot fires are breaking out. The Kinglake West tankers are still out there. He knows the main front won’t be far behind. He’s set up the roadblock on his own initiative, been there maybe twenty minutes, trying to keep people from driving down to Whittlesea. Dozens of cars have come racing through. Legally, he’s acting without authority in blocking the road, but he figures he has a moral responsibility.

Lloyd is a fire engineer by profession, has been a CFA volunteer for more than thirty years: he knows what he’s seeing. If the spots have come as far as Coombs Road, then the road to Whittlesea will be a death trap; there’s bound to be fire across it somewhere down the mountain.

Some of the drivers have taken his advice. Others haven’t, have gone barrelling down the mountain. ‘Some of them were very blunt, rude,’ Lloyd explains later. ‘Yelling we don’t have to effin listen to you—people were in flat-spin panic mode.’

Wood recognises the urgency in the CFA man’s voice. ‘Okay, don’t worry about that now, I’ll take over. But is it that bad? Radio’s still talking Kilmore.’

A station wagon loaded up with dogs and boxes comes skidding down a nearby drive. There’s a woman at the wheel. Chris Butterworth, a local teacher, distraught, weeping. She and her husband John live in the middle of thirty-six hectares of dense bush overlooking Masons Falls. Picturesque, but suicidal in a bushfire. John is still back at the property, refusing to leave. The power has gone out, the only other car is locked inside the garage; he won’t be able to get out even if he decides he wants to. She pleads for help.

‘Okay, we’ll go and get him,’ says Lloyd, returning to his vehicle. He glances back at Wood. ‘Please—just don’t let anybody else down that road.’

Wood looks down towards Whittlesea. Trees are swinging wildly in the gale, smoke is whirling, thicker than it was before. But there’s no fire that he can see.

If there’s one thing he’s learned in years of working in critical situations it’s the need for a fallback position. He calls out to Lloyd: ‘If it turns to shit, where’ll you be?’

‘Back at the CFA.’

‘That’s where I’ll be too, then.’

The firefighters disappear into the Butterworth property.

Wood stands there, alone. That sky-tearing wind from the north is getting worse. It’s a weird, freaky, threatening atmosphere. Debris from the forest whips past: shreds of leaf and bark, torn from the trees. He stretches out a hand: a fragment lands in it. An odd looking fragment: it’s buckled, burnt. That doesn’t necessarily mean much; given the ferocity of the wind, it could have come from anywhere.

Cars come scrambling from the Kinglake direction, their occupants anxious to head on down to Whittlesea. Word is getting around. He stops maybe twenty vehicles in ten minutes. Some argue the point, get a little irate.

‘One woman was very shirty,’ he says. ‘In the car with her daughter. Wanted to get back to her house. Didn’t let her through, of course.’ He gives the encounter a moment’s consideration. ‘Good thing for her I didn’t.’

He doesn’t let anyone through. They turn around, head back to town. Some push on eastward towards the Melba Highway, others end up sheltering at the CFA.

There’s a definite smell of fear in the air. The Murrindindi blaze is a vast pyrocumulus cloud roiling the eastern sky. No wonder people are getting rattled: fire on both sides of the mountain. What will happen when the change comes through? If the fires turn at the wrong moment, Kinglake will be caught in a pincer.

There’s a rundown shack on the corner of this intersection. Wood and his crew often set up the booze bus to conduct random breath tests here on a Saturday night. Every night, without fail, a woman comes staggering out of the shack, feet bare, clothes bedraggled, wine bottle in hand, and yells at them to turn those fuckin lights out.

He’s just sent another car on its way when he hears a cracked voice behind him. ‘What’s goin on?’ She’s standing there, holding the bottle, a glazed expression on her face.

‘Bushfires about, Meg,’ he replies. ‘Somewhere down the mountain.’ He glances at her shack: indefensible. Survival time seconds, not minutes. ‘Wouldn’t hang around here if I was you. Might be an idea for you to go somewhere safe.’

‘We’re staying put,’ the woman growls.

‘Dunno if that’s…’ ‘Me husband says we’re stayin, so we’re stayin.’

That’s it, he thinks. He gazes after her as she stomps back to the shack. If the fire does come through I’ll never see her again.

Another car pulls up: locals, judging by the load. Dad at the wheel, kids in the back. Black dog, panting. Chook in a cage.

‘But where are we supposed to go?’ the driver pleads when Wood doesn’t let them through. His options are limited: nowhere on the mountain is safe right now. Officially, he isn’t allowed to tell them anything, but he’s been letting all the drivers know what he plans to do: shelter at the CFA.

‘Your best bet…’ He catches the look on the driver’s face—the dropped jaw, the wide eyes—and spins around.

Jesus.

It’s there. Exploding along the treetops, less than a hundred metres away. He’s seen bushfires before but nothing like this, nothing this big, this close: massive whirls of naked flame, sixty, eighty metres over the trees.

The first wild bolt of fear shoots through his chest. The radio is still screaming: ‘Kilmore, Wandong. Kilmore!’ Still thirty kilometres away! What’s this inferno doing here? How is that possible? There’s been no warning, no mention of Kinglake at all.

There’s been an almighty cock-up somewhere.

Roger Wood has a mental flash of what’s about to happen: chaos is breaking loose. The rules have just flown out the window, and that means it’s every man for himself. Except for him. He somehow has to be there for everybody else. He thumps the roof of the car. ‘Back into the CFA at Kinglake West! Safe as you’re gonna get up here today. Go!’

As they disappear, Wood leaps into his own vehicle, grabs the radio. ‘Kinglake-350 to VKC Wangaratta! Do you read me, over? It’s here now. The fire’s in Kinglake West.’

God help us.

He can’t take his eyes off it.

The CFA vehicle comes back, its reluctant passenger on board. They had a hard time persuading John Butterworth to leave, had to chase him round the house. They finally convinced him to come with them by telling him how distressed his wife was. They beat the fire out by seconds.

Wood goes over and speaks to Lloyd. ‘Chris, when do you want me to finish the roadblock?’

Lloyd nods at the fire. ‘About now, wouldn’t you think?’

Wood isn’t arguing. This location has become suicidal, and his immediate duty—to stop people taking the road to Whittlesea—is done. Nobody in their right mind will be driving into that. He’ll head on into Kinglake West, re-establish the roadblock, shepherd people into the CFA.

Kinglake West Tanker One comes rattling up, John Grover in command, Karen Barrow at the wheel. They’re on their way in from Coombs Road. They’ve driven through a tunnel of fire to get out.

‘What’s happening in there?’ asks Wood.

‘Hell on Earth.’

‘Where’s the other tanker?’ Kinglake West Tanker Two, under Frank Allan.

A flicker of anxiety. ‘They’re trapped in Coombs Road. We lost contact. Radio communication’s hopeless.’

Lloyd nods his agreement. Like Wood, he’s momentarily mesmerised by the fire. ‘People are going to die today,’ he murmurs to nobody in particular. A straightforward enough comment, but there are thirty years’ experience behind it, thirty years of studying the way fire runs, the ways in which weather, humanity and country interact.

There’s been no official warning, but Lloyd has been around long enough to recognise a catastrophe when he sees one coming. He’s spent weeks trying to warn people, alarmed at his fellow residents’ lack of preparation. Coombs Road must be one of the most dangerous settled locations in the world—an overgrown ridge on top of a parched escarpment. He’s been watching aghast as residents fiddled with garden hoses and cleaned out gutters, or stood around wondering what to do.

People are going to die today.

He doesn’t know it at the time but he suspects it, and he’s correct: some of the people who ignored him and went racing down the road before Wood arrived are already dead.