Kinglake-350 (9 page)

COOMBS ROAD

The Kinglake West fire trucks are racing down Coombs Road, which runs along the top of the escarpment. The crew of Tanker Two encounter local resident Brian Naylor, the much loved Melbourne identity who read the nightly news for many years before his retirement.

He flags them down. ‘The fire’s in there,’ he says, indicating a nearby property. ‘I’ll lead you to it.’

‘What about your own place?’ asks crew leader Frank Allan.

‘We’ll be right.’ That familiar voice, an air of confidence and authority suffusing its every syllable. ‘We’re well prepared.’ Naylor directs them to the threatened house, goes back to defend his own.

From all reports, it was exceptionally well prepared, equipped with the latest in sprinklers and fire pumps. But that will be the last time Brian Naylor is seen alive. His body and his wife Moiree’s will be found in the bath.

Tanker Two swings into the property indicated. Embers are raining down, spot fires are breaking out around the house. The owner comes rushing out, says he’s having trouble caring for his distressed elderly mother.

‘You look after her,’ says Frank. ‘We’ll look after the fire.’

There’s a swimming pool. Good, he thinks, plenty of water. They set up the floater pump, run out three hoses, form a defensive line around the house. They tackle the spot fires, believe they’re making good headway.

Then they detect a shift in the wind. Frank, as crew leader, is acutely aware of his responsibility to monitor threats. While the crew continue to attack the outbreaks, he walks to the rise in front of the house. Then stops, stunned.

The rise affords him a generous view of the valley and plains between Kinglake and Whittlesea. Before him is something he hasn’t seen in twenty years of fighting fires, something he’d heard about and hoped never to see. A tsunami of roiling smoke and dancing flame, fireballs shooting off ahead of it, is surging over the foothills and up the escarpment upon which he stands. The flames are thick and fierce, fifty metres high, smoke pumping kilometres into the atmosphere.

The change has arrived and the fire is storming the escarpment. Frank knows its speed will be magnified many times over by the steepness of the incline. The roads along the top of the rise—Bowden Spur, Bald Spur, National Park, Pine Ridge—are about to be slammed, and Coombs, upon which he is standing, will bear the brunt.

He sees at once what every firefighter caught at the wrong end of that firestorm knows: they haven’t a hope in hell of stopping or controlling it. A hundred tankers would make no difference, much less the single one he has at his command. Indeed, he and his crew will be lucky to survive.

It comes rushing at him, crowning through the treetops, moving up the slopes, jumping gullies, swarming around outcrops. ‘It was incredible,’ he says. ‘A good seven or eight k’s away, but it seemed to hit us in about two minutes.’

Frank wheels around, runs back to warn his crew it’s coming.

Back down in St Andrews, Steve Bell and the crew of Kinglake Tanker Two see the invigorated blaze come screaming at them like a salvo of Katusha rockets. They’ve been fighting to protect a house in which nine people, including two police officers from Hurstbridge, have sought refuge. The policemen, Gary Tickell and Paul Kemezys, had been racing around ahead of the fire, trying to alert and rescue residents.

A battle the firies thought they’d won is suddenly teetering on the brink of disaster. They’ve been filling their tanks at the quick-fill pump, are coming back up the drive, when suddenly there’s a wall of fire racing at them.

‘It was like a jet engine blowing into your face,’ comments driver Ben Hutchinson who, until this moment, thinks he’s seen just about everything the Australian bushfire has to throw at him.

Andrew Brown is on the back of St Andrews Tanker Two. He and his fellow firefighters are on the hoses, blasting the verge of the road, when he looks down and is astonished to see that the dirt road itself is on fire: there are jets of flame as sharp as those from a Bunsen burner shooting out of the gravel. He hits it with the hose, but it flares up again. He repeats the action, with the same result. He taps his mate, Jeff Purchase, on the shoulder: ‘Look at this.’

‘Bugger that,’ says Jeff. ‘Look above you.’

Andrew raises his head, realises that the trees above and around them are blazing wildly. In the fury of the moment, he hadn’t noticed. He looks down Jacksons Road, sees trucks caught in a tunnel of wild flame, crew members running every which way. Then he realises there are flames streaming out from under their own truck. The wind is so furious that the lid of the ‘coffin’—the 120 centimetre long toolbox—is standing upright, the ocky straps taut.

The situation has suddenly become critical.

‘We have to get out of here!’ yells crew leader Kaz Gurney.

But they can’t. They’re boxed in, with trees, trucks and flame all around.

‘Bolt cutters!’ calls Kaz. She runs for the fence, shears it open, directs them into to a blackened paddock. Other tankers follow.

‘God knows what would have happened if she hadn’t had her wits about her,’ comments Brown. ‘We were in real strife there.’

The Kinglake crew are still back at the house. Working in tandem with a tanker from Wattle Glen, Ben Hutchinson and his colleagues begin a desperate battle to save the building and its occupants. They leap from the vehicle, rush out their hoses, form an arc around the northern perimeter of the building. Hutchinson, as driver, operates the pump while the crew hit the fire as best they can.

When the radiant heat gets too strong, they adjust the hose nozzles into the arcing fog spray that is meant to protect them, only to find it driving steam back into their faces.

The fire threatens to engulf the truck. Hutchinson, running out a third hose to protect it, does his best to extinguish a flock of goats that catches fire in an adjacent yard. A year later he shakes his head over it. ‘Goats—catching fire! Never seen anything like it.’

A hose bursts; he struggles to replace it while dealing with goats, gauges and something hot and extremely unpleasant that lodges in his eye.

Now some of the occupants of the house are beginning to panic, trying to make a run for it. Crew leader Steve Bell, a solidly built bloke with a shaved head and a thick red beard, has to kick the door open and shove them back inside. The police officers struggle to free a woman who’s become entangled in a barbed-wire fence.

For a desperate few minutes, as the front blows over them, they find themselves in the middle of a blazing hurricane. Engulfed in thick smoke, they can see little, hear nothing but the fire’s roar. The rattle of the pump, the chug of the truck, the racket of the radio, they all disappear, overwhelmed by that deafening noise—the sound, as everyone says, of a thousand jet engines.

And then it dies down.

The firefighters regroup, surprised that they haven’t lost anybody. Is it coming back? Is this apparent calm another sleight of nature’s hand?

It seems not. The front has passed. They—and their charges— have survived. Ben Hutchinson is glad they were there: ‘If we hadn’t been that house would have gone up for sure.’

But there’s no time to stand around and think about it. The change came from the south, the fire must be heading north.

‘We need to get round that ridge, get after this bastard,’ orders Steve Bell, and they wind up the hoses, scramble back onto their vehicle, refill at the water tank in the driveway.

The operation takes maybe ten minutes. They’re about to head north up Jacksons Road to have another crack at what they assume will be the new front when their personal phones begin ringing. One of the firefighters, Katherine, gets a call from her partner, who’s back in Kinglake with their two little boys.

The news leaves them all stunned. The fire that has just left them has hit their home town, some ten kilometres away. Ten minutes: it seems barely believable.

Their own homes and families are under attack, and their town is without a tanker to defend it.

SCRATCH CREW

Early evening, and CFA captain Paul Hendrie has been watching over Kinglake with a sinking heart and a rising concern. It’s a regular country town, population about 1500, with all of the facilities and services you’d expect: a pub and a supermarket, surgeries and service station, a range of stores. Hundreds of houses. And it’s virtually defenceless. He has not a tanker left, and only a skeleton staff.

Trish Hendrie and Carole Wilson are both long-time members, but not firefighters: Trish is communications officer, Carole in charge of catering. Kelly Johnson is a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who has just finished her basic training. Di MacLeod has been rostered on to the brigade four-wheel-drive with Hendrie; she lost a close family member a few days ago, and requested not to be on the trucks this week, but she’s come in when she sees how bad the situation is. Then there are Phil Petschel and Linda Craske. Phil is one of the older members, a retired electrician. Linda is a nurse who has just joined and is yet to commence her basic fire training.

A scratch crew, if ever there was one: none of them have come to fight. When the fire comes to them, they fight like hell.

By 6 pm the smoke from the Kilmore fire is beginning to roll more thickly over the town. Many locals are still going about their daily business, but more and more are coming in to the CFA, wanting to know what’s going on, where to go.

Hendrie has little advice to give them. He’s received not a word of warning or support from the Incident Control Centre at Kangaroo Ground or the Integrated Emergency Control Centre in the city. With fires reported down in St Andrews to the south and Murrindindi to the east, there’s nowhere safe he can advise residents to go.

And word is getting out: even though there’s been no official warning, people have telephones. And eyes. The informal network is sparking up. They ring friends down the mountain, watch the columns of smoke building. They know something bad is happening down there; the more knowledgeable among them understand that it could be upon them soon.

Within half an hour of his last tanker leaving, Hendrie has maybe two hundred people gathering on the gravel area in front of his shed. Some are seeking shelter, others are wanting to make a run for it. Some call in for advice, don’t like what they hear and head off, out to the Melba Highway or down The Windies.

Hendrie receives another pager message: there’s a fire at Olives Lane, down on the St Andrews Road. That’s getting awfully close. He calls for police to block the road but figures, correctly, that the only cops on the mountain just now probably have their hands full. He thinks about the cars he’s seen heading in that direction, decides he’d better investigate. He and Di MacLeod set off in the brigade vehicle.

They’re approaching the reported location when suddenly—
bang
—the blaze is there in front of them, burning on both sides of the road. They see a house engulfed, fresh fires springing up all round. The change has arrived, the fire is running up the mountain and it’s imperative that they get back to town before it does. The fire station will provide little enough support as it is; if there’s nobody there to organise the defence, to operate pumps and generators, it will provide none.

Hendrie does a rapid turn-around. A ute bursts through the flames and Hendrie waves the fellow down. ‘What’s the situation down there?’

‘I thought I was dead.’ The driver is gasping and shaking at the wheel. No information to be had there.

‘Get up the mountain!’ orders Hendrie.

They sprint up the road, overtaking anybody in their way, just about running off the road.

‘Not so fast,’ pleads Di. ‘We can’t do our job if we’re dead.’

They come across others trying to come down, and their response to every encounter is the same: a frantic wave and an order to the occupants to move their arses up to Kinglake.

‘Go! Go!
Go!
’ they yell to anybody close enough to hear them. They see fires breaking out around them as they make the ascent. The fire is hot upon their tail, at times they fear it’s overtaking them. Embers go shooting overhead. There’s a burning log on the tray of the ute ahead; not much they can do about that. Just hope the driver notices before the vehicle explodes.

They come across a trio of cars that has had a minor collision, the occupants standing on the side of the road, scratching their heads. There’s little visible damage, so they yell, ‘Follow us! Fire’s just behind,’ and keep going. They reach the top of the rise, are horrified to see fires already beginning to break out in the surrounding scrub. Where there are spots the main front won’t be far behind.

Di rings through to Carole, tells her to get the quick-fill pump set up at the station and send a set of bollards down to the intersection: they need to stop people heading down into that twisting death trap.

They wheel their car sideways at the roundabout to block off the road. While Hendrie jogs off on foot to do what he can for the town’s defences, Di remains at the intersection, stopping cars. She estimates that at least thirty vehicles, most of them full of people, pull up, their drivers desperate to get down the mountain. None go through. She can’t tell them where to go—she can only say where not to go, and the St Andrews road is suicide right now.

Most of them join the crowd gathering on the gravel driveway in front of the CFA brigade.

Di spots her husband, Jim, cruising into the petrol station to fill up. He comes over, and as he does so they notice small fires beginning to break out in the town itself; the most threatening is between the service station and the pizza place.

‘The front’ll be here any minute,’ she yells to him.

‘Jesus.’ He races back to their home down the Glenburn Road, hoping to pick up their pets and a few treasured objects.

The captain’s daughter, Sally, arrives with the bollards. They fling them across the road and Di breathes as deep a sigh of relief as she can in the circumstances. Nobody in their right mind will be heading down there now; she’s done all she can. She has to get back to the multitude of other tasks she knows will be screaming for attention.

Back at the CFA, Di is relieved to see Phil Petschel setting up the pumps. It’s going to be all hands on deck for the foreseeable future, and there aren’t many more capable hands than Petschel’s. A stalwart of the brigade for many years, he’s handy with a wide range of equipment, a smooth operator with a cool head that will stand them in good stead over the next few hours.

Phil’s home is down the Bald Spur; he’d been intending to go down and attempt to defend it, but ran out of time while setting up the pumps. A good thing, he realises later when they take to calling him Lucky Phil: if he had made it back to the house he would probably have died. Most of his neighbours did.

All afternoon the smoke has been billowing in the western sky, miles high. But now it changes elevation and direction, comes churning out of the trees, through houses and power poles, into the eyes and mouths of the dismayed observers.

Hendrie is horrified to see people crowding into the pub: it’s an old weatherboard building, put up to replace one that burned down years before. It’s a death trap. Some idiot even wants to hide in the cool room. He rushes through the building, yelling, ‘Get across to the CFA! This is no place to shelter!’

He looks out over the main street: people everywhere, frightened, confused, clustering together. Many of them already in the shed, hundreds more outside. Cars blunder about, lights glaring, occupants unsure of what to do, where to go.

Chaos.

The spot fires around the town are growing in intensity. The wind rips: the flag on the pole in front of the station is going crazy. The sun is a blood-red disc. From the south comes a pipe of thick, black, lowering smoke that tells Hendrie the main fury of the fire is about to fall upon them.

Di MacLeod, frantic with hoses and pumps, sees it as well and thinks, My god, it rushed up the mountain at unbelievable speed. Di is relieved when Jim arrives back: one less thing to worry about. He’s rushed home, collected their animals, has had a nightmare return journey. The road was completely engulfed, he barely made it through.

Trish and Carole, friends and brigade members for more than thirty years, look at that column of churning smoke; know what it means. They say goodbye to each other.

Linda Craske rings her husband, begs him to tell the children she
80
loves them.

Kelly Johnson feels the hose shaking in her hands. ‘I don’t want to die,’ she says to her captain, and he takes her by the shoulders.

‘I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.’

Visibility is diminishing rapidly. Soon, Hendrie knows, he won’t be able to see his hands in front of his face. He takes command, as much as anybody could in a situation like this: he has only minutes left. He issues orders, allocates jobs. He’ll need people inside and out. Those inside the shed will need to keep order and deal with the casualties, those outside will have to fight for all of their lives.

Hendrie bellows into the crowd, ‘We’re going to need help here! Can anybody give us a hand?’

Two men respond: Wayne McDonald-Price and his stepson, Luke Gaskett. They’ve come in from Kinglake West, where their house has already burned down. They clamber into yellow protective gear and join Di MacLeod, who has taken up a position on the east side of the shed with a 38-millimetre hose in hand. On the other side of the building are Phil Petschel and young Kelly Johnson.

These five people remain outside, through blinding smoke, impenetrable darkness and blistering heat, for the duration of the fire’s passage. One team is working from a rickety old pump behind the hotel, the other from a pump and tank behind the shed.

Trish Hendrie steps outside. A surreal vista appears before her. Figures loom in the half-dark, their faces fraught with anxiety, smoke reflected in their eyes. A fireball shoots overhead, a tumult of flame thrashing the trees behind it. She jumps back in, slams the door and calls to those inside:

‘Brace yourselves! It’s going to hit us now.’