How the battle with Victoria’s bushfires was fought and lost
Monday, March 2nd, 2009Having lived in Victoria for all our lives except for the last ten, we are very connected to these disastrous fires. Our last home was in the Yarra Valley.
How the battle with Victoria’s bushfires was fought and lost
BRUCE Esplin woke at 6am last Saturday with a gnawing
feeling in his gut. Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner knew the odds
were not good for the 3582 firefighters and emergency workers who had been
placed like toy soldiers across the breadth of his state.
"We were about to face weather beyond our experience, and I just had
this feeling of dread," Esplin says.
Across town, Ewan Waller, the Government’s chief fire officer, was also on
edge. By 7.30am he was already sitting in the Integrated Emergency Co-ordination
Centre in central Melbourne, otherwise known as the "war room", where he would
spend the next 15 hours alongside chief Country Fire Authority officer Russell
Rees. These two men would jointly manage the defence of Victoria against the
worst weather forecast in memory.
Barely 60km to the north, thousands of families scattered across the hillside
regions of Kinglake, St Andrews and Marysville were waking up to a lazy
Saturday. Many of these were tree changers: city commuters who had embraced the
lush forested hills for both lifestyle and financial reasons.
They were mostly young families with young kids, and with the temperature
tipped to hit 44C with strong, hot wind gusts, it was cooler to stay in their
hillside homes than travel.
In Marysville, 20-year-old Lucie O’Meara spent the morning making pancakes for her husband, Luke, and their seven-month-old daughter, Charlotte. She then sat down at her computer and wrote on her Facebook site: “I am so enjoying the viewfrom my desk, Marysville is beautiful.”
Just before 9.30am, Stuart Coombs arrived at the Victorian weather bureau’s headquarters in Melbourne’s Docklands to start his shift.
One of his jobs was to compile thunderstorm warnings. But when he scanned the charts he saw something that disturbed him even more than the “very dreadful” forecast of the previous night. “The thunderstorm conditions (meant) we knew there would be fire activity (from lightening strikes),” Coombs said.
Even so, for the next few hours, the war room was buoyed by what they saw. Although they were concerned by a fire that had jumped containment lines in the Bunyip State Forest, east of Melbourne, fire activity around the state was modest.
The day, which Premier John Brumby had warned on Friday might be the state’s worst, had started well.
“There was a sense of ‘well, we’ve got to lunchtime and so far so good’,” Esplin says. “But we knew the most dangerous part of the day would be late afternoon.”
None of the 60-odd officials from multiple agencies who had gathered in the war room were aware the spark that would set off the worst day in Victoria’s history had already been lit.
At 11.30am, Liz Jackson looked out the window of her house in Kilmore East, a township near the Hume Highway, 60km north of Melbourne, and saw smoke.
It came from the hill opposite her home where a single power pole stood. She called the CFA but the fire spread quickly, fanned by increasingly strong hot northerly wind gusts of up to 125km/h.
WANDONG
In the nearby community of Wandong, former CFA firefighter Chris Isbister says he witnessed the moment when this little fire grew fangs. “Me and my mate headed up the highway to check it out and we saw it go into the pine plantation and get really big.”
He returned home to prepare the house, while watching the fire come closer. Police advised residents to evacuate, but Isbister and two mates stayed and watched the fire’s progress.
“We watched the actual fire roll down one hill and up another,” Isbister says. “The wind was so unbelievably strong, we had to hold on to fences to stand upright.”
Only when the growing wall of flames got closer and jumped the Hume Highway with ease did Isbister realise his mistake in staying. “The fire got into the trees,” he says. “The trees would have been 45 foot high and the flames were twice the size of the trees. There was nothing we could do; we were surrounded by fire.”
He and his mates fled to an already-burnt paddock and sheltered under a wet hessian bag as the house caught fire. They lived; four of their neighbours did not.
The East Kilmore fire swept through Wandong, growing in size and in speed. It was being pushed by mighty wind gusts towards the communities of Kinglake and St Andrews.
* * *
BACK in the war room, no one knew what had happened in Wandong. They had been alerted to the existence of the fire at Kilmore East but it was one of many fires that had suddenly sprung up around the state and were demanding their attention.
There was a new one near Bendigo, one near Beechworth, one near Coleraine, another near Horsham and reports of one near the community of Churchill in Gippsland in the state’s east, near to where arsonists had lit several recent fires.
Even so, Waller, Rees and Esplin say they had a sense of dread early on about the Kilmore fire. “I knew that was a dangerous place for a fire,” Esplin says. ‘A lot of tree changers had moved into areas around there and it is difficult fire-fighting country. I had a feeling of ‘Here it comes’.”
Waller says: “As soon as we saw that Kilmore fire, in a very short time we knew we had a real problem. It was running towards populated areas. You could run a ruler along where it was going to run - you knew straight away.”
The ruler along the map showed the fire was heading directly for Kinglake.
What the war room did not yet fully understand was that this fire was behaving like none other they had experienced. It was much faster, much larger and was behaving more like a series of fireballs than a cohesive fire.
The combination of steep hills - which can double fire speed - with howling winds and a temperatures in the mid-40s were turning the Kilmore fire into a monster.
From this moment, and for the rest of what would become known as Black Saturday, the bulk of the CFA’s fire warnings being relayed on ABC radio trailed the reality on the ground. They came too late to alert many of the communities in its path.
no one was watching the progress of the East Kilmore fire more closely that Jason Lawrence, the 35-year-old CFA incident controller at Kangaroo Ground, who was responsible for shifting fire trucks and tankers around those communities near Kinglake.
Almost immediately, Lawrence knew he was powerless to do anything. “It moved through with such ferocity that there was nothing the local brigades could do,” Lawrence says.The size and speed of the blaze meant decisions about the deployment of fire trucks would have to be made on the ground by each individual CFA town chief. But with the growing confusion about the fire’s progress, they were given no clear warnings of its arrival.
This was not how the system was supposed to work.
KINGLAKE WEST
On the crest of a ridge near Kinglake West, Brian Naylor and his wife, Moiree, were at home on their property, which enjoyed commanding views over a distant Melbourne. Naylor, 78, was a household name in Melbourne having been the dominant newsreader of his era, anchoring Seven’s nightly news for 10 years and Nine’s for 20.
The Naylors had survived the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in this home, but nothing could have prepared them for the Kilmore fire as it roared up the back of their property, away from their line of sight.
It ate the house in an instant. The bodies of Naylor and Moiree were found fused together in an embrace.
At nearby Pheasant Creek, policeman Roger Wood found 50 men, women and children cowering in a supermarket from the advancing fire. After checking the road was clear, he told them all to follow him to the Kinglake West CFA. They arrived just before the fire rolled over them. They survived. The supermarket was burned to the ground.
STRATHEWEN
The still-growing fire heaved southeast towards Strathewen, a small community nestled in rolling hills near Kinglake.
The town was defended by CFA captain and local farmer Dave McGahy, who was armed with three fire trucks and a tanker. His men were up behind the town on Eagles Nest Road when McGahy caught sight of the behemoth coming his way.
‘Realising the approaching fire would gobble up his team, McGahy withdrew them all.
“Even if I had 20 strike teams, all that would have happened is that we would have had 50 dead firefighters as well,” he says.
At least 30 people left in the town had no chance. They died, huddled together in their baths, in cellars, on the cricket oval and in their cars as the fire roared over them at 4.20pm.
The only safe refuge was the home of local resident and CFA member Barrie Tulley, who harboured 19 terrified residents. When they emerged from his house, Strathewen was no more.
ST ANDREWS
By the time the fire bore down on the 250-strong community of St Andrews, it was fully formed and racing. With flames reported to be up to 50m high, it now had the power to kill with radiant heat from 200m away.
The Australian’s reporter Gary Hughes and his wife, Janice, were frantically trying to escape the fire, which he says emerged from nowhere and without warning.
“The firestorm moves faster than you can think, let alone react,” Hughes says. ‘You are fighting for your home and then you are fighting for your life.”
Down the road in Yarra Glenn, Melanee Hermocilla, 23, her boyfriend, Greg Lloyd, 22, and her brother Jason Hermocilla, 21, were house-sitting someone else’s home when the fire engulfed them. They huddled together under wet towels and phoned their parents to say goodbye.
***
BY 4.30pm, it was clear inside the war room that things in the field were going wrong fast, although no one yet knew of any deaths.
“The map suddenly became like New Year’s Eve on Sydney Harbour, there were so many fires,” Esplin says.
A separate fire had emerged near a sawmill in Murrindindi to the north and was travelling parallel with the Kilmore fire towards the south of Marysville.
“We were sure that the fires were taking houses at that stage but we had no idea they were taking lives,” Esplin says.
“I remember speaking with (CFA chief) Russell (Rees) and he said to me, ‘This is not good’.”
Esplin called the Police and Emergency Services Minister Bob Cameron and advised him to come immediately from his Bendigo home to Melbourne.
“I told him we are going to experience losses and we need his leadership,” Esplin says.
The war room was struggling to maintain control of the situation.
A dense blanket of smoke from the fires was cutting off vital intelligence about the movement of the fire fronts.
“It became too dangerous for our planes to fly and to map the edge of the fires so for quite a while we could not get the intelligence we wanted,” Waller says. “We had to rely on bits and pieces - reports from the field and satellite information.”
The war room was also monitoring the local ABC which had arguably the most up-to-date information because people were calling in with instant information about the fires in their area and even in their street. ABC announcer Jon Faine, who took their calls and numerous SMS messages, says: “They were ordinary people in extraordinary distress, they were confused and in desperate straits. And they were listening to the radio. They hoped that by ringing us, they could get information, that we could give them answers.”
With power lost in most towns shortly before the fire came through, battery transistor radios provided the only link to the outside world.
KINGLAKE
About 4.30pm, the fire was bearing down on its most vulnerable victim, the mountain town of Kinglake with 3000 residents. Kinglake CFA chief captain Paul Hendrie had already sent both of his two tankers to fight the St Andrews fire in response to their frantic requests for help. He had no information suggesting they would be needed for Kinglake.
“There was nothing (no fire trucks) on the mountain (when the fire came),” Hendrie says, “(but) you fight the fire you’ve got - you can’t predict the predicament that will come.”
He was not alone. Almost no one in Kinglake had more than a few minutes to realise the fire was almost upon them. Locals say there were no warnings on radio or the CFA website and no sirens.
Nothing.
With a darkening sky and a thunderous roar signalling the approach of the fire, many panicked and took to the road in their cars. For most, this was a fatal decision. The smoke moved ahead of the fire, blinding drivers. Cars collided into each other.
In one of those cars were Alex and Anna Thomson, who were trying to escape with their three young children. With a black sky and flaming embers around them, they dragged their kids from their crumpled vehicle and waved for help.
“We tried to flag down some car - and I don’t blame the four or five that went past - but they just kept going,” Anna says. “Everyone was just doing what they could to survive. I thought we were going to die. I couldn’t look at the kids. I just kept thinking of them burning to death and I couldn’t stand imagining them dying that way.”
She had lost all hope when a car pulled over for her family. Two strangers - Karl and Jayne Amatneiks - bundled them in and took them to a nearby house. They lived.
Another man who tried to drive out, Benjamin Banks, says his car was hit by a wall of flame that almost tipped it over.
The heat melted his car window, causing molten glass to drip onto his hand and also his tyres, forcing him to drive on the screeching metal rims.
He then smashed head-on into another car, and limped out with a broken ankle into a nearby paddock. He also lived.
But many did not survive the dash out of Kinglake. They were incinerated in their cars or cut down as they fled their vehicles.
Arthur Enver died when he tried to drive out of town on his Harley Davidson bike. His wife, who was driving the family car a few metres in front of him, survived.
For those left in Kinglake, survival depended on nature’s lottery: whether the fire chose their house or bypassed it.
“All of a sudden there was this black, the column of fire came virtually over us,” Hendrie says. “We heard cars exploding, the service station went up.
It just got worse and there was blackness all over.”
Karen Rolands, who was in her house with her husband, Paul, and daughters Caitlin, 14, and Nicola, 12, told a family member on the phone, “It’s too late, we’re trapped”, shortly before the flames overwhelmed them.
One of her neighbours, Maryanne Mercuri, was also trapped in her house with her husband and three children. It was so dark she could not see her children to wrap them up properly in towels. They talked about heaven as the fires roared past them and, somehow, spared their house.
After the front passed, local resident Mike Flynn 64, was found by neighbours lying on the footpath, literally smouldering.
They dragged him into one of the few remaining houses and held him in a pool with only his head above water for the next 10 hours until help arrived.
STEELS CREEK
After swallowing Kinglake, the fire thundered down the valley towards the community of Steels Creek, home to 250 people.
Dorothy Barber, 63, lived 500m from her daughter Nicole and her two grandchildren, but the flames came through so fast that Nicole could not reach her mother before she was forced to flee with her own children.
With her house exploding around her and no prospect of rescue, Dorothy curled herself into a square metre cavity beneath her floor. It was six hours before she was found alive amid the ruins of her house.
Leigh and Charmin Ahern were not as lucky. Their neighbour, Dave Twentymen, survived but later found the Aherns’ remains inside the house.
* * *
BY 5.30pm in the war room, no one knew that Kinglake or Steels Creek had been lost and that at least 37 people lay dead in those townships.
Attention was focused on another drama that was unfolding. Shortly after 5.30pm the predicted southeasterly change hit the firefront.
Now the fires that were heading south were suddenly heading northwest, bringing new communities into their range.
“It really worried us because we knew the impact would be immense,” Waller says. “We knew the eastern flank of the fire would now become the front, just like in Ash Wednesday.”
The temperature, which had hit a record 46.4C in the city, fell sharply but the winds associated with the change were gusting at up to 125km/h — more than enough to keep the fires rolling at maximum strength.
By 6pm, massive chunks of the state were ablaze.
Towns such as Horsham and Coleraine were under threat. Also worrying Rees and Waller were reports of fire at Gully Road, Upper Ferntree Gully.
“You can only think what would have happened if we’d had that fire rip up the side of the Dandenongs, given the resource capability we had,” Rees says.
BENDIGO
In the goldfields town of Bendigo, mayor Kevin Gibbins was driving into town to buy some Chinese takeaway just after 6pm when he noticed some low smoke.
“It was very, very dark and I thought: ‘Where’s the fire? It must be very near’,” he says.
It turned out to be a grass fire at Eaglehawk, on the town’s northwest outskirts.
Thought to have been lit by a cigarette butt thrown from a passing car, the fire raced across a vacant block, then into adjoining bushland and along gullies surrounded by housing estates.
It randomly picked its victims, destroying one home but leaving those on either side unscathed.
Fire embers showered the suburb like confetti, setting the house of Kevin “Mick” Kane on fire. Kane, an elderly man with a walking stick, died in his driveway as he tried to escape.
No one said so at the time, but the Bendigo fire rattled the confidence of those in the war room.
If a fire like this could rage within 1.5km of the centre of a city of 95,000 people, was anywhere in Victoria safe?
The Premier had spent the day in Bendigo, having earlier prepared his own property for fire threat.
As the day wore on, Brumby became increasingly alarmed by the news from the fire fronts.
Bendigo was on fire, but Rees and Waller were more worried about events that were unfolding in Gippsland.
CALLIGNEE
In the east of the state the fire that started earlier that afternoon, dubbed the Churchill-Jeeralang fire, had burned without posing any direct threat to lives.
But the southeasterly wind change suddenly turned the firefront around and sent it racing towards the farming communities of Churchill, Koornalla, Traralgon South and Callignee.
At the same time, the communications tower on top of Mount Tassie was burnt out, meaning locals could no longer receive fire warning updates from ABC radio.
Those locals who remained in the ridgetops settlements of Callignee and Callignee North suffered possibly the quickest deaths of anyone on this day. The flames hurtled up the mountain in an instant, incinerating at least 11 people.
On Old Callignee Road, 97-year-old Charlie Richardson had stayed to defend his house. When it started to burn down, he dived into a horse trough wrapped in a blanket until the fire passed. He was found crawling towards the road waving a torch to attract attention.
FLOWERDALE
Back in the Kinglake area, the new wind direction was blowing the fire north across the ridges. In its way was the small settlement of Flowerdale.
The town was defenceless, its only tanker having been sent to fight another fire. Several dozen people sought refuge in the Flowerdale hotel but the flames hit with such speed and force that many did not make it.
A mother with her two young boys abandoned her ute at the height of the flames but was overcome. Rescuers found the body of her 10-year-old son lying on his back, his blue eyes staring at the sky.
Inside the hotel, locals used hoses, mops and buckets to save the building and their lives.
At the same time, Robert Harrop, was carried in after being badly burned trying to save his home. Locals took turns caring for the old man, covering his unconscious body in wet towels and removing his false teeth so they could place water on his lips. They held his hand and spoke to him, but he didn’t make it.
Nathan Sawyer, a volunteer firefighter from Flowerdale CFA, says they were deployed to another town to fight the fire before the inferno hit his home. He said the town’s tanker could not make it back to Flowerdale in time.
“The fire just swept through here like no tomorrow ” he says. “It was just flying. We called it the devil’s breath. It was breathing down our throats.”
* * *
INCREDIBLY, by 6pm, no one within the war room had yet received any confirmation that lives had been lost.
“You live in hope here,” Rees says. “I can remember thinking about six o’clock, if we can get out of here without any lives lost we’ll be very lucky indeed.”
Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon was in the war room.
“We started to watch the wind change and the lights on the board that indicated fire activity started glowing,” she says.
“I though this was going to be terrible, just terrible”.
By 6pm, the smoke plume was 15km high, 5km higher than a normal severe thunderstorm. “It looked more like a volcanic eruption than a thunderstorm,” Coombs says.
The bureau estimated this part of the fire complex was responsible for more than 1000 lightning strikes. No one knew how many fires this may have started.
“You get a sense of dread with something like this, you feel quite sick watching it unfold,” Coombs says.
Amid the dozens of fires being monitored in the war room at that moment, there was one that had slipped largely under the radar. The Murrindindi sawmill fire that had run parallel to the north of the Kilmore fire had also been turned north by the wind change.
It its direct path was the scenic tourist town of Marysville.
MARYSVILLE
Shortly before 6pm, Lucie O’Meara saw the smoke rising above the ridges to the south of Marysville, where she was spending the weekend with her husband and baby daughter.
“The volume of smoke was massive, it looked like a giant marshmallow,” she says.
Locals say that at this moment birds began to fall from the sky, stone dead.
Kay Menzies and Nora Spitzer of Cathedral View Natural Therapies were massaging a couple at Lyall Cottages in Marysville when they heard a tree crash on to a car. The masseurs ran out to see what had happened. They saw the wall of smoke coming towards them, jumped into their car and fled the town. The couple being massaged also escaped.
On the corner of Martin and Falls roads on the top of a hill, 72-year-old Elaine Postlethwaite and her 82-year-old husband Len were having an argument.
Elaine wanted to flee the fire; Len, a former champion axeman and the town’s longest resident, refused to leave.
“Come on, Len; come on, Len,” Elaine implored him as he sat stubbornly on the veranda. Len even turned his chair so his back was to the oncoming smoke. Elaine left him and was saved by neighbours. Len perished.
O’Meara says the fire descended on the township in an instant.
“The air felt like it had been sucked out of us, it was so hot,” she says. “I was screaming like a five-year-old girl.
“People in cars were doing burnouts to get out and I can still see the horror on people’s faces, people running up the street with the flames behind them.”
O’Meara ran to take refuge along with many others at the Cumberland Spa, a five-star spa brick resort with a swimming pool. But at the last minute she was persuaded to run to the local sports ground, Gallipoli Park, where about 60 locals had gathered.
CFA firefighter John Munday was in a fire truck which sped into Marysville only minutes before the fire hit. But when they saw the wall of flame he knew instantly that they could not defeat it.
“We had people banging on the sides of our tanker begging us to go back to houses where they knew there were people trapped but we couldn’t because if we had, we’d all be dead too,” Munday says.
“The whole town died around us as we bunkered down on the outside of the oval ringed by funeral pyres while all around us we had the screaming noise of gas cylinders exploding in homes.”
O’Meara huddled in the oval with her husband and baby and survived the firestorm. The Cumberland spa, where she was originally headed, was burnt to the ground. In an instant, Marysville had ceased to exist. Up to 100 people lay dead under its smouldering ruins.
“That fire was evil, it had a purpose,” O’Meara says. “It was hungry.”
* * *
NO one inside the war room knew about the losses at Marysville. In fact it was not until 8.57pm that Rees was told officially that lives had been lost in Victoria that day. He was told a small figure of “less than 14″.
Even so, with each passing hour it became clearer that the cost in lives was going to be substantially more than the initial figures were suggesting.
“You could see faces and shoulders drop as the news got progressively worse,” Esplin says. At 8.30pm, The Alfred hospital in Melbourne was contacted by the Victorian Health Emergency Co-ordination Centre asking it to prepare for a potentially large number of burns injuries.
The hospital’s director of operations, Andrew Stripp, was advised to prepare for at least 50 to 100 severely burned patients.
“We knew then that this was something in a completely different realm to what we’d ever experienced,” Stripp says.
At 10pm, the Government announced that 14 people had died.
Rees already knew that this was a serious understatement.
“In my heart of hearts I thought in the 30 to 50 range,” he says. ‘I still didn’t know about Marysville and I didn’t know about Gippsland and the extent of lives lost in those places.”
He did know that the fire had “ripped through Kinglake” but did not know the extent of the human cost.
At no stage during the day did he and Waller verbalise their private fears about the likely death toll. It was the elephant in the room.
By late Saturday night, news was spreading through the senior ranks of the Rudd Government about the severity of the crisis.
“It was about 10 o’clock when the phones started ringing and the PM’s office became involved almost immediately,” one official recalls.
At 10.30pm, Kevin Rudd, who had been receiving updates throughout the evening, arrived at his Parliament House office. At 11.30 he met National Security Adviser Duncan Lewis, Emergency Management Australia director general Tony Pearce and his advisers about what emergency measures needed to be taken.
Just after midnight, the Prime Minister talked with Brumby and told him he would fly to Melbourne the next morning.
“It (had) became clear that many, many more people were affected by these terrible fires,” Brumby says. “It was clear that we were dealing with something completely devastating.”
By this time, federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland had already activated the Commonwealth Disaster Plan.
Rudd’s team was also passing the information to his deputy Julia Gillard who had been sitting at her Altona home “glued” to Sky News and ABC radio.
“We were all on edge, and all nervous, and praying for the best but expecting there would be bad news,” Gillard recalls.
Back in Melbourne, it was after midnight when an exhausted Esplin finally left the war room.
“I got a phone call as I was driving home that Marysville had been basically razed,” he says.
“I felt the worst I have ever felt in my career. I was as flat as a shit-carter’s hat. We knew the death toll was substantial and that the fires were still burning. I went home with an absolute dread of what we would find in the morning.”
Esplin got home at 1.30am, and slumped down on the veranda.
He shook his head and turned to his wife Roz.
“The worst has happened,” he said. “The absolute worst that you can remotely imagine.”
He was wrong. The reality was beyond imagination.
As Esplin turned off the light, the official death toll for Black Saturday stood at 14.
In truth, more than 200 Australians lay dead, consumed by the most savage bushfire seen in this country.
Additional reporting: Milanda Rout, Lauren Wilson, Rick Wallace, Ewin Hannan
