by Pitt, Turia
No one had any means of communication; they did not know if the girls on the ridge had been rescued and had no idea when or if anyone was coming back for them. Among the group were Brenda and Martyn Sawyer and Lon Croot, who had alerted RtP at checkpoint two about the fire and the likelihood of burns victims. Lon was still suffering from shock after witnessing what he believed was someone engulfed in flames but he was frustrated by the delay; he had been keen to go back and see what he could do to help but had been told to stay put by RtP staff and, not being in charge, felt obliged to do so.
For Heather and Ellis, their seven-hour ordeal was not over. They were suffering from smoke inhalation and left the group deciding to press on and walk on to the nearby Great Northern Highway, where they managed to hitch another lift to the nearest town of Wyndham, about a thirty-minute drive away. After Ellis and Heather were treated at Wyndham Hospital, they made their own way back to Kununurra, where they discovered that Turia and Kate had been rescued but their injuries were life-threatening.
Heather has remained deeply traumatised by the events of that day. And for many months afterwards, she cried every time she talked about it. In the statement she made to the police on 6 September 2011, she described how the day after the race she and Ellis returned to the course to retrieve an expensive camera they had dropped, and were guided by a Kununurra local who had been attached to the media team. He mentioned that the media team had been aware of the bush fire about two to three hours before it had come through the area and had made a decision only to film for one hour before moving to safety. The question has gone through her mind so often: why were the runners allowed to go through checkpoint two when so many people already knew that there was danger.2
Rod Rutherford, who loves extreme adventure events and has competed in ultramarathons in other parts of the world, now has a fear of fire he never had before. He rarely talks about his terrifying encounter with the fast-approaching flames as he finds it difficult to express the raw emotion. He gets distressed when he recalls trickling water into Turia’s mouth while he was on the ridge with the others and cried when the first 60 Minutes program brought back the memories of it all. He recalls vividly holding back the door of the helicopter while the others struggled to get Turia on board. Rod thinks about Turia and Kate every day.
Helicopter pilot Paul Cripps, who carried out the risky rescue of Turia and Kate, speaks movingly of the experience: ‘Thinking back to the day of the tragedy, it was not until Bryn and I were on our way out to Tier Range that the adrenaline started to pump through my body. I knew from the conversations I had that afternoon with Nathan Summers that it was going to be difficult but it’s not until you are on your way to the scene that you really start to think about just how you are going to tackle such a challenging task. I had done several medivacs in some fairly confined spaces – but not from the side of a cliff with no space to land a helicopter.
‘The high risk of the operation kept going through my mind and I did not want to put more lives at risk, including my own and Bryn’s; I thought of my wife and son back in Kununurra several times that afternoon. I didn’t want to leave my wife to raise our son on her own because I made a stupid mistake or took an unnecessary risk.
‘Apart from the limited performance of the aircraft in the hot conditions in the Kimberley, I also had to consider how many people we needed on board the helicopter conducting a high-risk operation which is why I decided to lift Turia and Kate off the site separately; if something were to go wrong, at least the number of lives lost would be reduced.
‘I often think of that day with a mix of emotions. I feel for Kate and Turia and their long battle to recover. I feel angry that they spent so long out in extreme temperatures, which is essentially due to poor communication. And I think of myself sitting there in my air-conditioned comfortable office while they sat on that cliff with the sun beating down on them, flies and ants crawling over their horrific burns, waiting for someone to come and help them, waiting for someone to take the pain away, or at the very least ease the pain.
‘People say it’s easy to look back and say “what if”, but is it really that easy to look back and realise that perhaps two beautiful girls wouldn’t be facing a lifetime of recovery if the risk of fire had been considered! I don’t think that’s an easy thing to think about at all.’
Turia’s family and friends have been affected for life.
Turia’s mother, Célestine, a spiritual woman with an ingrained positivity, kept it together in front of her precious daughter for a year and a half. In the beginning she dreamt of the ‘old Turia’; Turia would always come into the dream and tell her, ‘Mum, she’s gone.’ The only time Turia saw Célestine cry was the day of that first walk in the Burns Unit corridor, when the sight of Turia shuffling along painfully was just too much to bear.
Célestine kept her tears for the night, sobbing into her pillow. John, her comforting rock, would sometimes slip into another room to get some sleep so he could get up for work at 5.30 am. Célestine staved off her major emotional meltdown till the day Turia and Michael flew to France for Turia’s specialist treatment in March 2013. She was immobilised for two weeks: she couldn’t cook, eat, talk or sleep – only stand in the shower for hours and sob.
Genji, the strong, gung-ho military man, still cries over what happened to his beloved little sister. Turia’s younger brothers, Heimanu and Toriki, were heartbroken about their ‘Sissy’. Happy teenage years went on hold. Turia’s survival and recovery became everyone’s focus and the boys had to mature very quickly. In 2012, Heimanu turned sixteen; he didn’t like to ask if he could have a birthday party in the middle of such sadness but he asked anyway. Célestine was too distracted to think about parties. Finally she thought, ‘He must have his party.’ And Célestine gave him one – for eighty guests – friends and family.
Michael took his daughter to the Xtreme Fitness gym in Ulladulla wearing her black face mask and worked with her to help her regain muscle strength. He saw tears in the eyes of grown men working out as they saw her determination and her pain and effort. He too cried but not in front of Turia; he had to remain strong and supportive – the dad who had always encouraged her to do more, to try harder. While having his golden girl damaged to this degree was enormously sad, infuriating and frustrating, he was nevertheless uplifted by her tenacity and her willingness to forge ahead with her irrevocably altered life.
And the love of Turia’s life, Michael Hoskin, thinks about what happened every day; he has been totally shattered about what happened to his girl. He has learnt to stay sane and deal with his emotions by running and swimming. He does not cry in front of Turia. Sometimes he goes alone to the beach and sits on the sand looking out at the waves and tears roll down his face. After several minutes he will push the memory away and refocus on their future.
Every time Turia has surgery, he wishes he could lie on the operating table for her; his stomach churns until he gets the call to say it’s over and the surgery went well. There is a part of Michael that has been scarred forever from witnessing first-hand the trauma Turia has endured.
Michael’s parents too, the calm and easygoing Gary and Julie, felt an overwhelming sadness during the year Turia lived with them. Turia never saw Julie cry but others did. Janine Austen did when Julie asked her to be Turia’s physiotherapist. Every day for months, when Julie struggled to keep her feelings around Turia in check, she would walk with two friends late in the day. And she’d walk, talk and cry. Turia didn’t see Gary cry either, but cry he did. Gary and Julie watched with admiration Turia’s determined struggle to become independent and took pride in their son’s patient and devoted care of her. At the same time they had to deal with insensitive comments from a few local people who asked why Michael, such a good-looking young guy, had stuck by Turia.
Turia’s best friends, Briggs and Nicola, live with the image of their friend, her head the size of a football, lying unconscious in the Concord Intensive Care Unit early in the morning aft
er she arrived from Darwin. These two positive, happy young women, still devastated by that image, now focus on their belief that the Turia they know will ‘get on top of it’ because ‘that’s Turia’.
So many people affected. So many questions about how it came to be that an international event company could have put the lives of its competitors, volunteers and staff in danger.
EIGHTEEN
HOLDING RESPONSIBILITY
LIKE TURIA’S FAMILY, KATE SANDERSON’S FAMILY WANTED answers. Kate’s older brother, Ian Sanderson, an IT specialist at a Perth university, took up the baton to hunt for the truth and make sure such a preventable tragedy was never repeated. The more questions he asked and the more he discovered, the more determined he became to push for a formal government inquiry, especially as the event had State Government sponsorship. Western Australia is one of only two States in Australia in which the coroner does not have the power to investigate a fire unless there is a death. Fortunately Ian’s sister, Kate, and Turia did not die but he felt someone should be held responsible for what he saw as deeply flawed event organisation.
In the months immediately following the catastrophe, he regularly appeared in the media calling for accountability and became a constant thorn in the side of the Western Australian Government. Ian, a former military man, said on one TV appearance that had he still been in the army, and had he organised an event with an outcome such as the September 2011 Kimberley Ultramarathon, he would have been court-martialled.
He flew to Hong Kong in January 2012, met Mary Gadams of RacingthePlanet at the airport and put to her a series of questions relating to the event, most of which she declined to answer.
In the weeks after the race, Western Australia’s Fire and Emergency Services Authority (FESA) and the Western Australia Police Arson Squad conducted a joint investigation into the fire, during which more than forty witness statements were taken. Given Turia’s and Kate’s life-threatening injuries, it was thought prudent to collect this information in case of a coronial inquest if either woman died.
The cause of the fire wasn’t established but it was found to have started about five days beforehand, around 12 kilometres southeast from where the competitors were burnt. It had ‘meandered’1 slowly until it reached the Tier Gorge, where its intensity increased significantly, assisted by a wind change plus a very high fuel load: because it was also the hot season in the far north, the grass was tinder dry and easily combustible. Its spread accelerated as it climbed the walls of the gorge, which provided a tunnelling effect for the prevailing easterly winds.2
As communications, or lack thereof, was emerging as a serious issue, Ian probed further. He found RtP used a mixture of Iridium, Thuraya and other systems for satellite phones. This was confirmed by Mary Gadams when Ian met her in Hong Kong – one of the few questions she did answer as she was confident that RtP had covered its communications well. She was probably unaware of how knowledgable Ian was in this area – in his previous career he had been heavily involved in IT and communications support for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. In this role he had evaluated Iridium, Thuraya and the Inmarsat BGAN systems.
Next Ian did some fact-finding with Telstra and was told they recommend Iridium as the only reliable sat phone for use in outback regions in Australia such as the Kimberley. Where Thuraya uses geostationary satellites, which cause significant time delays in voice calls in an outback situation, Iridium uses low earth-orbit satellites, which have time delays closer to that of ordinary cellular phone calls. Thuraya is also more expensive to use in Australia, as Telstra has discounted air time with Iridium. After gathering this information, Ian doubted that RtP had fully understood the technology.
Telstra maintains a pool of Iridium handsets for loan, which would have been available to RtP if they had requested them. Ian found that if Telstra had been asked, its advice would have been to only use Iridium. He knew that RtP had brought some Iridium handsets with them, although not enough to equip every checkpoint and every mobile member of staff.3 Introducing Thuraya handsets into the mix had added significant complexity and risk to communications because of the difficulties of getting Thuraya and Iridium to work together. However it could have been useful if every checkpoint and vehicle had carried both types of sat phone and had an agreed protocol for the use of each.
Ian also came across some discontent from local volunteers over the way the event was organised in the week prior to the race. One volunteer told him in an emotional email that RtP constantly put him ‘on the spot’ because of its ‘cost-cutting’, which was ‘a big issue for us locals as it gave us hurdles to cross on a daily basis’. The volunteer said he personally had a top-of-the-range Iridium sat phone but RtP didn’t want to hire Iridium sat phones because they were given some ‘useless Thuraya phones’ by the Western Australian Government as part of its sponsorship arrangement. He says RtP officials told him on a number of occasions throughout the race preparation week that the Kimberley was one of the only places in the world where RtP didn’t have phone reception.
Initially Ian encountered a great deal of government resistance to a formal inquiry. He had meetings and corresponded with members of parliament, in particular the Deputy Premier, Dr Kim Hames, who held the twin portfolios of Tourism and Health, and the Premier, Colin Barnett. Many reasons were offered – and documented in letters to Ian – as to why the government didn’t have the jurisdiction to conduct an inquiry. Dr Hames also suggested that the push for an inquiry was really about compensation for the victims;4 compensation was not something Ian had raised with anyone. The possibility that the government’s tourism arm, Tourism WA, could be found to hold some responsibility for the event’s dreadful outcome was never articulated.
Ian’s dogged persistence found a sympathetic ear with the Labor Opposition, in particular the Member of the Legislative Assembly who held the Opposition’s tourism portfolio, Michelle Roberts. Mrs Roberts, with the backing of the Opposition, came up with a plan to ambush the House on the opening day of the new session of parliament – the last before the forthcoming State election. Premier Barnett gave his opening speech, after which it fell to the Opposition to respond. Labor had just elected a new leader, Mark MacGowan, so there was a great deal of media interest in how he would perform at the opening session.
To the Government’s surprise, Mark MacGowan ceded the floor to Michelle Roberts. She got up to speak and opened with the words, ‘A grave injustice has been done to a group of people who participated in an event in this State last September. I am of course referring to the Kimberley Ultramarathon. The injustice is that the Western Australian Government has failed to call an independent inquiry into the event . . .’5 She continued her speech, outlining in detail the injuries to the young athletes, how the events unfolded during the day and the rescue; she also read a statement from Kate about what happened to her. The usual background House chatter gradually stopped until you could have heard a pin drop.
‘The race had a number of points spread over a long distance. What specific medical or safety preparations were made by organisers, including local medical and retrieval services, in the preparation phase and how effective was communication between race staff, competitors and those services during the race itself? Only by holding an inquiry will the Government move beyond the weasel words of false compassion. Only by holding an inquiry will the Government reassure visitors to this State that if they come and compete in an event and are seriously injured, through no fault of their own, that they will have some measure of justice . . .’6
The thirty-one-minute address to the House concluded: ‘Only by holding an inquiry will the Government begin to act with proper authentic compassion to two young women whose lives have been so terribly changed and to their families and friends.’7
Debate followed, during which the Government’s argument against an inquiry became weaker until it finally collapsed; the Opposition was acknowledged to have made its case.
Ian Sanderson, sitting in the galler
y, had watched with interest, noting that Kim Hames, looking uncomfortable, left the chamber during a large part of Mrs Roberts’ speech. Afterwards, when she turned, looked up and gave Ian the victory thumbs-up, it was all he could do to choke back the tears. It was the day Kate left hospital after nearly six months and one of the most emotional days of his life.
Two weeks later, the five Legislative Assembly members that made up the Government’s Economics and Industry Standing Committee were tasked with investigating RacingthePlanet’s 2011 Kimberley Ultramarathon. The committee was given three months to report to the House of Representatives. Michelle Roberts was co-opted to sit on the committee, bringing its number to six.
The 2011 ultramarathon of 2 September was the second event the Hong Kong-based RtP had organised in the far north of Western Australia. In April of the previous year it had held a 250-kilometre seven-day event in the same Kimberley region. In the ten years prior to the 2011 event, RtP had staged more than thirty-three foot races in eight countries.8
For the 2011 race, RtP had secured a sponsorship arrangement with Eventscorp, the Western Australian Government’s events agency and a division of Tourism WA. The sponsorship money came from an allocation of funds from the tourism body to foster adventure sports in Western Australia. The sponsorship agreement with RtP, which gained final government approval on 22 August 2011, was for an amount of up to $105,000 for one year with an option for a further two years provided certain contract milestones were met (one of which was a minimum number of competitors). RacingthePlanet signed off on the sponsorship agreement on 1 September, the day before the race.9