Months after the fire their senior officer, Acting Senior Sergeant Jon Ellks, was to comment: ‘Those two, they’re smart and they’re sensible, both of them. Good coppers. If it hadn’t been for them, a lot more people would have died that day…They had a plan. Even if they didn’t know it, even if it was formulated in a moment, on the run. Even if they had to bend the rules. They knew their community backwards, they knew the options. All that knowledge and experience came together. They had a plan.’
PHEASANT CREEK
Roger Wood is happy to see Cameron Caine coming towards him. When he gets close enough for speech, though, Cam’s beside himself.
‘Woody, I can’t find Laura and the boys.’ He’s been trying to call his wife, without success. Have they tried to get through, been overwhelmed on the road? Have they even left home? Are they trapped back there?
One of Cameron’s neighbours rolls up: she only just made it out, drove through a wall of flames. No, she hasn’t seen Laura.
Wood puts a hand on his colleague’s shoulder. ‘Mate, we can’t do anything about that right now. The fire’s about to hit. We have to get these people out of here.’
Just at that moment the Caine family car comes racing out of the smoke, the shaken family on board. Cameron rushes over to embrace them, relief telegraphed in his every gesture.
The two officers reconvene to canvass their options. People gather round, hoping for answers. If anybody has any idea of what’s going on, surely it will be them.
If only, Wood breathes to himself. He feels the burden of responsibility pressing down across his shoulders.
The distant roar gives an added urgency to the exchange. The fire is closing fast. The crowd is growing thicker by the second, the tension mounting. They can’t stay here.
As police officers, they have no authority to evacuate members of the public, but this is not a day for following regulations. It’s a day for a good copper to follow his instincts and take the initiative.
But where the hell can they go?
The CFA at Kinglake West was the best option half an hour ago, but is it still safe now? Fires are breaking out everywhere, as far as they can see.
The roar of the fire is a heavy bass thud now, rattling the windows. Embers fall around them. That terrible darkness is descending again. They have no choice.
‘CFA’s our only option,’ says Wood. ‘I’ll go on ahead, check the coast is clear. Give you a call.’ That makes sense: he has the car. ‘If I can’t get through, I’ll come back.’
Cameron will stay behind, shepherd the crowd out when Wood confirms it’s safe.
Wood drives off. Cameron stands in the gravel, fear building in the back of his mind. Time passes; the roar grows louder. Visibility diminishes. Darkness. The fire is almost on them. Where the hell is Woody? The first flashes of orange begin to crackle among the pine trees.
The phone rings. His hands trembles as he answers it.
‘Cam.’
Woody. Thank christ.
‘Send ’em down. Fast. Road’s clear; won’t be for long.’
Caine doesn’t need any more prompting. He runs through the crowd, waving his arms and screaming: ‘Get on down to the CFA! Kinglake West!’
His own family move out. Others join them. The trickle becomes a flood, but he shakes his head in frustration at how slow it is. Don’t they have any idea what’s coming? People are dying out there; he can sense it. He doesn’t want to join them. He doesn’t want any of the crowd from Pheasant Creek—this haphazard mob who’ve suddenly come under his care—to join them, either. There are mothers and babies in those cars, old people, little kids, their eyes up against the window staring at him as they roll past. Some of them are neighbours and friends.
A bloke in a twin-cab towing a trailer is facing the wrong way, takes an eternity to turn around and join the convoy, blocking other people off in the meantime.
‘You!’ Cam roars. ‘You’re holding everybody up!’
The driver doesn’t hear, or doesn’t want to.
The smoke pouring out of the pine plantation is growing thicker by the second. The roar is tremendous. He’s having trouble breathing now, smoke filling his lungs, biting at his eyes. Visibility is going.
The twin-cab finally completes its snail-paced turn, rattles off down the road. Others follow. He runs among them, slapping roofs and tailgates, yelling, ‘Go, go! Move!’
Still it takes forever. Does time stand still in a crisis? He can feel the radiant heat now. He spots flames flickering through the treetops. He shelters behind a bus stop, keeps yelling, trying to kick a bit of urgency into the stragglers. Christ, how many of them are there? Why is it all taking so long? Is he going to burn to death here at Pheasant bloody Creek? More cars come drifting in through the smoke. He waves them on.
At last, there’s only one vehicle left. A white van. He runs across to catch a ride, stares at the occupant. The driver is one of Kinglake’s recalcitrants—‘known’ to the police. They arrested him only last week.
‘Give us a lift out of here, mate?’
The door flies open. ‘Jump in.’
As they bolt out of Pheasant Creek, a terrifying sight looms in the rear window: the bus shelter he was standing in seconds ago is engulfed in flames. A vast wave of fire roars out of the pine plantation, swallowing the store. The explosions begin, the first of hundreds he is to hear this night: bottles and cans burst through the windows. The gas tank out the back goes up in a sheet of blue flame. He’s made it out by the skin of his teeth, by the hairs on the back of his hand.
Maybe. The inferno is throwing out jets of flame, igniting the bush alongside the road, and Caine has the eerie feeling this damned fire is seeking him out, hunting him down. He and his driver find themselves white-knuckle racing through a tunnel of fire. And finally coming out of it.
At last the Kinglake West CFA appears through the windscreen, and Cameron is relieved to spot the familiar figure of Roger Wood out on the road, directing the cars out onto the adjoining oval, making sure nobody panics and heads down the deadly Whittlesea track. He gets out to lend a hand.
The fire can’t be far behind. The CFA brigade members are working furiously, hosing the building down, spreading foam, doing their best to make it safe.
A later count showed that there were more than two hundred people sheltering at the CFA at Kinglake West. Vehicles of every description, trailers and trail bikes, horse floats, a horde of four-wheel-drives and panel vans, a mini-bus.
The atmosphere is quiet but tense. People are crying, passing round bottles of water. Some are punching frantic thumbs at mobile phones, mostly without success. Telecommunication is random at best, hopelessly choked, deteriorating progressively as the transmission towers fall.
There are people in the crowd who already know they’ve lost their homes. Many are rigid with fear for family and friends they’ve left behind. Kids are fretting about pets, although there is a menagerie of them here: cats and dogs, birds, horses, goats. The smoke is growing thicker by the minute. People are spluttering and gasping, passing round smoke masks, pulling shirts over heads. Some are in shock, dazed, their faces blank.
The two policemen assist stragglers, deal with the odd desperate individual wanting to make a run for it. One old man in a ute nearly mows Cameron down in his determination to get away. Cam has little choice but to leap to one side and watch the bloke go rattling off into the smoke.
Wood makes another attempt to reach his own family, again without success. He feels a quiet despair biting at his heart. Tells himself there’s nothing to be gained by thinking about it.
Wood and Cameron mainly stay outside, two tall men silhouetted against a horizon on fire. How can this be happening? Wood asks himself. Let me blink and rub my eyes, surely it will be a dream.
For miles around them, out over the valleys and the flatlands, across the glowing scrub, all they can see is monstrous clouds of fire-laced smoke. They’ve got—what?—a couple of hundred people sheltering her
e. They’re relatively safe.
But there are so many more people out there across the ranges, thousands of them, in isolated farms and leafy towns, from Flowerdale to Pheasant Creek, from Strathewen to St Andrews.
What’s happening to them?
SNAPSHOTS
Fire scientist Kevin Tolhurst would report to the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday fires that they unleashed energy equivalent to 1500 times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. They produced radiant heat capable of killing at a distance of four hundred metres. They generated jets and balls of explosive gas able to travel six hundred metres in thirty seconds.
All that energy, that vaporising radiation, those fiery jets and missiles, those gaseous clouds, are unleashed upon the scattered properties and leafy communities of the Kinglake Ranges as the policemen stand helplessly at the CFA in Kinglake West.
It comes first from the sky. Ember attack, it’s called in the literature, but that’s a feeble term for such lethal missiles. The fires race up the slopes, hit the ridgelines and send a barrage out over the hills and valleys ahead. There are spot fires, hundreds of them, breaking out simultaneously: in the bush, the farms, the roadside reserves, the town streets. Because of the spiral motion of the convection column at the fire front, they can come bursting out of the sky from any or every direction at once, spark fires that take off, coalesce. Nowhere on the mountain is safe.
Phil Petschel, a Kinglake CFA veteran and keen student of fire behaviour, explains what happened: ‘Everywhere one of those fireballs landed there was an immediate big fire. There was no build-up, they just phew!’—he smacks his hands together—‘they’re there! When a fireball the size of a caravan crashes to the ground with that roaring wind behind it, it’s off!’
Petschel is speaking in the back office of the CFA building, the room that was his home for several weeks after his house on Bald Spur Road burned down.
‘That’s what happened all over,’ he continues. ‘That’s why we got caught out at our end. We were assuming it would come up the slope like a regular fire, but it didn’t. There was a multitude of rapidly growing smaller fires starting everywhere and merging—they didn’t have to travel up—they were just there. It was virtually all up the escarpment in one hit.’
That about sums it up.
While a few hundred refugees shelter behind the hoses of the CFA, hell is breaking loose all round them. Along the foothills and up the escarpment, on into the farmlands to the west, in the leafy streets of Kinglake, firebrands are crashing down, kick-starting fires that merge into a monstrous front. A thousand small battles to save lives and homes are being fought.
An appalling number of them are lost.
Snapshot 1:The Zulu Moment
Drew Barr and Angie O’Connor live with their two children, Lucy and Grace, in Lorelei, a historic homestead they’ve lovingly renovated over the past twelve years. The weatherboard house was a memorable sight on the road to Kinglake: white-painted, with wide verandas and a fretwork balustrade, stained-glass windows, a flying fox that arced out of an old oak tree and had given hundreds of hours of joy to young and, occasionally, old.
Lorelei has stood on the site for some 130 years and survived many a bushfire. The family have built up a lush garden upon which Angie, a horticulturalist, has lavished her skills. The garden blossoms with exotic trees: pears, guava, a beautiful gingko they were given as a wedding present.
They’re well prepared: they’ve installed a fire-fighting pump, hoses, spare tanks of water, sprinklers on the roof. The land around their home is mainly cleared farmland and they are situated in a valley. They take the threat of bushfire seriously and work furiously every summer to keep the immediate environs free of debris. Ange has even been up on the roof with a vacuum cleaner. There isn’t a blade of grass, a scrap of vegetation against the walls.
They take the CFA warnings seriously too. On February 7 they’ve been on the go since 5.30 in the morning, cutting back a photinia hedge that runs along the front of the property, trimming branches, chainsawing a row of cypress trees they feared might have presented a threat. Their plan is to leave for the day, but they want to give the house as much chance as possible should the unthinkable occur. As they are felling one of the cypresses, a ring-tail possum darts out, and they find a trio of babies. Lucy makes a nest in the laundry, intending to restore them to their mother as soon as the clean-up is over.
They spot the smoke to the north at around noon. Drew checks the CFA website: a fire at Kilmore, forty kilometres away. Not likely to be any sort of a threat; the cool change should be here well before then. It is a spur, though, a reminder of what can happen; they speed up the work rate. They move combustibles away from the building, coax geese and ducks onto the veranda, don protective clothing. They spend the morning running round clearing decks, hosing walls and roof, flooding gutters. The kids join in; they begin to think of the day as a kind of extended fire drill.
By mid-afternoon they’re wondering whether there’s any point leaving. What Ange describes as ‘indecision evacuation fatigue’ sets in: they realise it would be wise to go, but leaving is such a drag. You have to sort out animals and valuables, drive in the heat, hang around the suburbs. They’ve already evacuated so many times this summer. The change can’t be far off now, and the internet says the fire is still at Kilmore.
‘And we were exhausted,’ says Ange. ‘Maybe we weren’t thinking clearly by that stage.’
By 5.30 they assume they’ve seen the worst of it. Surely the change will be coming any minute now? They take a breather. Drew is sitting out on the veranda, cup of tea in hand, when a charred leaf lands at his feet. He stares at it, suddenly wary. He looks up: the sky is fraught with a screaming yellow intensity, the clouds are low and dark.
The wind dies down, and an eerie stillness descends upon the countryside. Strange. He steps out from the veranda for a better view, then spots the first flames sweeping up from St Andrews.
The change has arrived all right, but it’s bringing the fire with it. Because the fire is to the south of their house, the change is no longer a welcome relief; it’s now a deadly threat.
Ange is hosing down the back of the house when she hears Drew roar: ‘We’re on!’
Her initial reaction is a sense of disbelief. ‘My god,’ she remembers saying to herself. ‘Surely it’s not actually going to happen…’ She looks around, has what she describes as her ‘Zulu Moment’— the scene in the film when the attackers suddenly crest the hill. An angry red tide appears on the top of the rise to the west. It’s coming from two sides at once?
‘We felt like ants,’ she says later, still appalled at the sheer size and fury of the flames.
The air grows thick with embers: strips of swirling candlebark, sparks of grass and branches carried from god knows where whirl by. The couple run around frantically attacking the tiny fires that begin to break out.
They’ve always expected a fire would come as a front, but this one isn’t following the rules: there are outbreaks to the west, the south. Darkness descends. The fires are coming from everywhere.
They don’t realise it at the time, but they are smack in the middle of what fire scientist Kevin Tolhurst describes as an ‘area of fire’. As we’ve seen, the main front, rather than acting like a wave that rolls over you, would send out embers and firebrands that ignite more fires, which are in turn sucked back into the conflagration. This prolongs the danger period. A normal front might last about fifteen minutes, but today any point in the zone could be blasted by lethal radiation and convection for up to an hour.
A bloke races past on a motorbike, disappears into the smoke, travelling north towards Kinglake. The bike returns, goes down towards St Andrews, vanishes again. Reappears, vanishes again; he’s obviously struggling to find an escape route. Drew and Ange are so frantic and afraid themselves that they don’t think of running out to intercept him as he goes racing back towards St Andrews.
A volley of incendiaries shoot
overhead and the pine plantation on the hill behind goes up in a blaze of red and green and wild black smoke.
‘We can’t do this,’ mutters Ange, shivering with fear. But they have no choice.
The youngsters retreat indoors, arm themselves with wet towels and mops. They leash the dogs, begin blocking entrances, do all the things they’ve been trained to do. Their parents stay outside until the front is maybe ten metres away. Drew shuts down the pump and brings the hose inside. They connect it to a gravity-fed tap in the laundry, dash around wetting down the interior.
In seconds the windows are glowing like a mad blacksmith’s forge. Sparks and spikes begin shooting in through gaps, cracks in the walls they never knew existed.
Outside it’s like the air itself has ignited.
‘You’ve seen a fire when someone throws petrol on it?’ asks Ange. ‘That’s what it was like. There’d be a pocket of unburnt gas; an ember would strike it, and boom! Up it went!’
They have always drilled into the kids that if they are ever caught in a fire, they have to fight it: they all understand that to shelter passively can be lethal. But in the chaos of those moments, they don’t realise that twelve-year-old Lucy has remembered the lesson too well. She’s taken the initiative to move around inside the house, checking doors, making sure that the rooms aren’t engulfed. A courageous move that could have ended in disaster if any of the rooms had been in flames.
The sturdy little building does a magnificent job of keeping the conflagration at bay. But as they watch flames hammering at a section under one of the eaves, they realise that the heat is being trapped in there, that the weatherboards are about to ignite.
A sudden shout of alarm from Grace: ‘Mummy, there’s fire inside the house!’
A plume of particularly noxious black smoke puffs through, then bare flames are lacing across the ceiling. They blast it with the hose, but the inferno is making its own entry points now, poking and prodding their defences, threatening to overwhelm them.
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