Authors: Adrian Hyland
While those at the CFA station in Kinglake West are undergoing their trial by fire, those in Kinglake itself are enduring a situation that is, if anything, worse.
When the fire front comes close, Carole Wilson slams the door and calls out a warning to the people inside. The crowd outside huddle under their blankets or in their cars, stare at the sky, clutch their children. The more active among them swat at the spot fires with whatever comes to hand: blankets, coats, bottles of water.
Everything goes completely black. Some begin to panic. More and more of them seek refuge in the shed; Carole estimates there are around three hundred in there at the fire’s height.
They can trace the fire’s approach by the chain of explosions advancing towards them: gas bottles, cars, buildings, one after another, dozens, hundreds of them. The windows rattle, the wind goes mad, the rain of embers hammering through the air grows thick and fires begin to break out round the shed. Wherever they spring up, one of the CFA scratch teams rushes to extinguish them. So dark and chaotic is the atmosphere, neither team knows of the other’s existence until they swap stories weeks later.
‘I kept seeing people walking in out of the smoke,’ says Di MacLeod. ‘They were injured. In shock. It was like a war movie.’
Her husband Jim is on duty at the side door, letting people scamper inside then slamming it shut: the less smoke in there, the better their chances.
A large eucalyptus ten feet behind the station catches fire; Di, a short woman, is grateful for Wayne McDonald-Price’s longer reach: they hit it with the full force of the hose and extinguish it, but keep an eye on it all night. If the tree goes up, it could well take the shed and its occupants with it.
The service station across the road erupts with an explosion that rattles walls and eardrums, unleashes two mighty jets of flame twenty metres into the air. A car in the main street blows up. The pizza parlour cooks. There’s a four-wheel-drive parked in front of the police station with a trailer load of trail bikes attached. The whole lot ignites.
Di didn’t know either of her companions before this moment, but she’s full of praise for their courage in sticking to the dangerous task. She hears Luke Gaskett roaring at the shed as he dashes from one outbreak to the next: ‘You will not go up! My family’s in there!’ When it is totally black and a hot wind is streaming off the fire directly into their faces, he taps her on the shoulder and yells, ‘At what point do we go inside?’
She gives a wry smile. ‘We don’t.’
They see the block of shops across the drive catch fire, and Di is caught in a dilemma. She can’t leave her charges in the shed unprotected, but nor does she want to see these businesses—which include the doctor’s surgery—go up. If nothing else, the radiant heat they give off will threaten the people in the shed.
She makes a snap decision: they run out a line, manage to extinguish the fire. As they scuttle back to the shed, a kangaroo comes plodding by, looks up at her forlornly. She finds time to give it a quick, cooling shower. ‘Good luck, feller,’ she whispers. Looks around. ‘To all of us.’
Another house starts to go up nearby. The owner comes running over. ‘Me house is on fire. Can you help?’
It is a horrible feeling, but Di is forced to say no. The building is a just a little too far away; she’s worried about running out of water and abandoning those under their care even for a few minutes.
She manages to put a quick call for help through to one of the Kinglake tankers and asks when they’ll be back.
‘Sorry darling,’ comes the reply, ‘we’re entrapped ourselves right now.’
Entrapped? She realises even down in St Andrews they’re fighting for their own survival, and feels a moment of despair. Is the whole world on fire?
The team on the other side of the shed are having problems of their own. There’s just the two of them: Phil Petschel and Kelly Johnson, the veteran and the novice. Kelly’s day takes a sharp turn for the worse when she looks at one of the pager messages—a house under direct attack—and realises it’s her family home. With the rest of her family in it.
Phil has to talk her out of trying to get back and help them, convince her it’s death out on the roads right now, even if they didn’t have hundreds of people in their care. On that subject, Phil’s main worry is the pub. If that goes up, it’ll cause a conflagration that could spread to the crowd in front of it; if the fire got in among the cars, the chain of fires could be devastating.
Phil and Kelly spend their time scuttling between the two buildings dragging a sixty-metre length of canvas hose. Their immediate worry is whether the fire will spread to the CFA shed, with all those people inside, but they’re alarmed when the motel units behind the pub catch fire. Members of the crowd do their best with buckets of water from the pub’s water supply, a shaky enterprise at best.
The hose will always be their main weapon, but it’s pump-fed: Phil’s worst moment comes when he realises the fire-fighting pump needs fuel. This is bad. The pump is the only thing between them and catastrophe. Operating a hose in those conditions is normally a job for two experienced firefighters, but he has no choice other than to leave his young offsider behind, grit his teeth and feel his way back along the hose.
For Phil, this is the hairiest moment of the whole day. He’s been in plenty of dangerous situations during his twenty-four years in the CFA, but he now finds himself groping his way through pitch darkness guided only by the hose in his hands, fire burning all round, the air rocked by fearsome explosions. Eventually he locates the pump, finds the petrol. Now he has to get it into the tank.
Phil Petschel is a quietly spoken, thoughtful man, self-effacing in the extreme; loath to think of himself as any sort of hero. But his actions during that incident seem to crystallise the courage shown by so many on Black Saturday.
‘It was Kelly’s first fire,’ he explains, ‘so I didn’t dare turn the pump off, for her sake.’ For a firefighter, there are few experiences more dangerous than suddenly running out of water at the fire front; water isn’t just your weapon of attack, it’s also your main defence. ‘Plus there was a chance if I did turn it off, it wouldn’t restart. When I got to the pump there was just the faint red glow of the muffler— because it was an ancient thing it was rattling and shaking—petrol splashing everywhere—hissing and popping on the red-hot metal. I poured the petrol, got most of it in, but there was a pretty good chance the whole lot’d go up.’
Phil is about as no-nonsense a fellow as you could imagine, and he isn’t exaggerating. That night there are several people in the district whose last moments are spent struggling with their pumps.
Once the main front has passed, Kelly comes in to help the people inside the shed.
Phil stays outside for several more hours, dragging the hose around, keeping the spots under control. It’s a job that normally involves two people. When Trish and Carole see Phil later, they’re staggered by how exhausted he looks, a grimace etched onto his mouth, ash and sweat everywhere, tongue between the teeth.
‘But he and Kelly saved the hotel,’ comments Carole. ‘Saved a lot of people too.’
While a handful of people are fighting a small war for their own lives and everybody else’s outside the Kinglake CFA, those inside the building are caught up in a struggle of a different kind. They know the crews outside are working hard, but have no way of knowing whether the battle is being won or lost.
For the most part they sit or lie there in silence, sipping from water bottles, staring at loved ones. Many of them are in shock.
They can’t see much anyway—the doors are shut to keep the smoke and embers out. But they can hear, and what they hear is terrifying: the roar of the fire, the chain of explosions, the debris enfilading walls, crashing into the roof, echoing through the room. A groan ripples through the crowd when the service station goes up: an ear-shattering roar, the likes of which few of them have ever heard. The gas bottles stored in the back of the service station begin to explode and shoot into the air like rockets: there are more than forty of them, and most of them end up scattered around a nearby paddock. ‘Thank god they were stored around the back,’ commented the young man who’d been working at the store. ‘Anywhere else, the debris could have landed in the crowd.’
There are some three hundred sweaty bodies in the shed and the atmosphere is tense; the temperature is in the fifties, the room is filled with biting blue smoke and animal noises. People have brought in their pets: not just dogs and cats, but lizards, snakes and birds, all confused and terrified. One fellow carries a bird on his shoulder all night.
Trish and Carole struggle to keep people calm, dealing with phones, radios and pagers that are going berserk. They take call after call from locals trapped by the fire, people in cars and houses, sheltering in dams and culverts as the world burns around them. The women do their best to reassure them that they’ll get rescuers to them as soon as possible.
‘The phone was going absolutely wild,’ says Carole. ‘You couldn’t say, “I’m sorry I can’t help you, because we haven’t got a truck on the hill.” You just say keep safe, do this, do that. You do what you can.’ Fearing all the while—and the fears are later proved to be well-founded— that for many this call is the last they’ll ever make.
They are particularly distressed by a string of calls from Wendy Duncan, one of their CFA colleagues and a good friend, who lives down on Bald Spur Road. She’d been about to board a fire truck herself when she heard that fire was threatening her house and asked her captain’s permission to go back and defend it.
Wendy gives them a blow-by-blow account: the fire’s onslaught, the flames engulfing her home, the windows blowing out, the roof caving in. She makes the last call lying on the side of the road, badly injured and struggling for breath, her lungs burnt. Assuming that she’s dying, Wendy is using the last of her energies to warn them that the fire is worse than any of them could have imagined.
They promise they’ll get help to her when they can, but are wrenched by the knowledge that they’ve no idea when that will be. Inside the shed the CFA crew do what they can for the refugees: settle them down, find chairs and stools, attempt to get in touch with missing friends and family. They hand out water and smoke masks; when they run out of masks, they improvise with toilet paper. Trish and Carole neglect to keep masks for themselves, soon find their eyes and throats are giving them hell.
There are no windows in the main body of the shed, which is probably a good thing, since the ones in the office dance with an incandescent glow that gives those who look at them the feeling that they are being cooked. ‘It was like the windows were painted red,’ says Trish. ‘I looked at everybody out there and thought, We’re all going to die together.’
There is little or no hysteria, everybody attests to that. People in general remain calm. But there’s an awful lot of anxiety. Nobody has any idea what’s happening outside, many are wondering whether these desperate hours huddled in a tin shed on a blazing mountain are to be their last. In the bitter smoke, the heat and the tension, the very act of breathing becomes difficult. Several young girls faint. Older people are having trouble with heart palpitations and fretting about missing medication.
Linda Craske has only just joined the CFA, is yet to commence her training, but she is a nurse with seventeen years of experience, a qualification that is going to be of more use to the traumatised residents of Kinglake than anything else on this appalling night.
Initially, though, as people come to her with their problems, she feels panic rising in her own chest. I can’t do this, she says to herself. It’s been years since she worked in Emergency, she has little experience with burns, she hasn’t done the CFA first aid course. She doesn’t know where to start.
Hit by her own mini crisis, she doesn’t want the crowd to see. There’s only one place to be alone in this environment right now: the toilet. She goes in there for a moment or two, tries to breathe deeply. I can’t cope with this.
What the hell am I going to do?
Then she does something. She walks out into the main room and shouts: ‘If there’s anyone with first aid skills, I need your help!’
The initial response is far from encouraging: somebody who’s done a St John’s first aid course, a nurse who hasn’t practised for years. But the word goes through the crowd, and soon there are some four or five nurses or first-aiders working to assist the growing number of casualties. Months later, nobody seems to quite know who they all were: a single mum from Watsons Road, a woman named Kylie who’d already lost her house. One turns out, most helpfully, to be a nurse from the burns unit at the Alfred Hospital. Another is an off-duty policewoman, Senior Constable Samantha Spencer. In this frantic setting, identities and introductions are unimportant: what is important is that they bring their individual skills to the catastrophe, instinctively melding into a team.
They clear out the back room, transform it into a sick bay. Initially the injuries are minor: cuts and burns, smoke inhalation, sore eyes, people who’ve fainted from the heat and stress. They do their best with what is at hand, dispensing band-aids and reassurance as the roar outside peaks and that evil incandescence lashes the windows.
None of them knows how long it lasts. ‘Maybe an hour’ seems to be the best guess anyone can make. They measure the fire’s progress by how close the explosions sound. But at some stage it feels as if they grow more distant, the glow at the windows fades and the roar of the fire subsides. The sky grows lighter, the smoke thinner.
Is it over?
They decide it’s safe enough to open the doors to give people some relief from the intense, smoke-filled atmosphere. They walk outside. They are staggered by what they see. The town is ablaze about them. Houses, shops, a kindergarten, the petrol station, the pizza shop, the SES compound, the animal hospital, the surrounding bush and paddocks: all burning. One of the cars that’s exploded was full of caged birds; it makes a horrible sight.
Carole and Trish look at other, the relief seeping from every pore in their skin. They’ve survived, the worst of it is over. They hope.
And then the serious casualties begin to arrive.