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INSIDE STORY: Cameron Stewart and Corrie Perkin | February
14, 2009
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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."
RELATED LINKS
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
INSIDE STORY: Cameron Stewart and Corrie Perkin | February
14, 2009
