Kinglake-350 (21 page)

UNDERWORLD

For the two police officers it has been a journey through hell.

Wood’s sense of time is completely distorted, but he estimates the eight-kilometre trip from Kinglake West takes somewhere between one and two hours.

The CFA crew lead the advance, sawing through fallen trees and power poles. Deputy Group Officer Dave Cooper is in command, Frank Allan is doing the grunt work. He’s unsure how many trees he cuts—at least twenty is his estimate, because he has to refuel three times. And this is not your ordinary chainsaw work: he’s labouring in the dark with trees still falling, fire everywhere around. Often there are two or three trees twisted into one another; sometimes there are burnt-out cars or power lines inside the mess.

It’s hard, hot, heavy work. Frank has already been on the run all day, not to mention being burnt over in Coombs Road; his eyes are aching, his lungs are seared by smoke. As an experienced trainer, he understands exactly how lethal a chainsaw can be and he knows there’s nothing like fatigue to amplify the dangers. One slip or kickback could cost him a leg or sever an artery, and out here they are way beyond the reach of the medical professionals.

By the time they make it into Kinglake he can barely stand, let alone operate a chainsaw.

Wood and Caine follow the CFA vehicle, veering off to deal with the myriad jobs that claim their attention as they drive. And struggling to deal with their own emotions. Wood is still terrified that his own family have perished, and what he sees on the road now only intensifies that fear.

Both men are locals. This is their town, their district: their people. They are stunned at the ferocity nature has turned upon them.

‘We were just saying fuck—can’t believe it—the devastation. There was nothing left. Nothing. Burnt-out cars everywhere. Dead animals. Houses, businesses, bushland, just…gone’ They drive past the Pheasant Creek store, the scene of their earlier rescue, now a nest of twisted steel and black spaghetti, a mangled, smouldering mess. The pine plantation across the road is obliterated. A wash of relief and a silent word of thanks they got those people out when they did.

Kinglake West Tanker One, Karen Barrow in command, catches up with the convoy somewhere near the sports oval. She’s trying to get down Extons Road, where they’ve had a request for assistance from a family trapped in a house. They’re all finding the slowness of the journey maddening but with the number of trees on the road, there’s nothing they can do about it.

Karen shoots a glance at the hunched, blackened figure ripping a chainsaw into a fallen tree. She looks again, is astonished to realise that it’s her partner, Frank.

They notice that the sports stadium is beginning to go up. Karen’s crew have little water to spare but they manage to suppress that fire and save the building—a feat that proves invaluable in the following months, when sport looms as one of the crucial supports for the community’s recovery.

They turn into Extons Road. A woman runs out, waves them down. Her name is Tess Librieri. She has an injured neighbour in her care. She’s called for an ambulance, but none has appeared. Karen goes in to assess the situation and finds the victim, Mick Flynn, has burns to 70 percent of his body. His rescuers are doing all the right things, keeping him in the swimming pool, monitoring his vital signs, but it’s a bad situation. She returns to the truck, gets onto Vicfire, reinforces the plea for an ambulance. The operator assures her there’s one on the way, so they continue on to their job.

When they eventually reach the call-out, they find the family and the home have survived. They extinguish a fire breaking out in a house nearby and then, heading back, decide to check on Mr Flynn. They’re shocked to find the injured man’s condition deteriorating and no sign of an ambulance. They try Vicfire again: the ambulances are still down in Whittlesea, unable to travel up the mountain.

The crew improvise a stretcher from a ladder and transport Mr Flynn back to Kinglake West. By this time it’s nearing two in the morning, some eight hours since he was injured, and although the ambulances do arrive soon afterwards, Mr Flynn dies later in hospital. Karen is left bitterly contemplating the difference it might have made if she’d been given correct information and ferried him down the mountain earlier.

While all of this is happening, the essential services convoy continues its fitful journey into Kinglake. Roger Wood is worried about the power lines snaking all over the road, but Desi Deas, a volunteer from the State Emergency Service, appears and assures them the lines are dead. He’s lost his own property in the fire, but is out on the road straightaway, doing what he can. The fire struck so swiftly and with so little warning that the official SES vehicles were destroyed in their compound, but the SES members have gone out into the community in their own cars.

The coppers spot a group of fifteen or twenty people sheltering in the middle of the oval. The school alongside it is burnt to the ground and Wood realises that these are the people they thought they’d been going to help when they made their frantic dash to the school at Kinglake West.

It turns out most of those on the oval have escaped from the neighbouring hamlet of Strathewen, which has been completely obliterated. They sought shelter in the school. When it burned down around them, they fled onto the oval. Several of them are injured— one has a broken ankle—and they are all shaken, but none of the injuries are life threatening.

Wood, who knows a few of them, moves around checking on their wellbeing. He speaks to Debbie Bradshaw, a fellow parent at Strathewen school. She fled her home just before the fire struck, came racing up the escarpment. She’s had no word from her husband, Darren, who is a CFA volunteer and is still out on a truck. He will come through okay, but when the couple eventually get back to Strathewen they find their home destroyed and a shocking number of their friends dead.

Dennis Spooner, whom Wood also knows from Strathewen, comes over in great distress. ‘Roger, I don’t know what happened to Marilyn and Damien, they were following us up the hill in the other car and they didn’t make it. Can you go and check?’ Marilyn and Damien are his wife and son; Damien is another parent at Strathewen school.

‘Mate, I’ll try,’ Wood puts a hand on his shoulder, ‘but there’s trees down everywhere—don’t know if we’ll be able to get through.’ The two officers do make a brief sortie down Bowden Spur, the long, narrow track that twists up into Kinglake from Strathewen, but find it’s a mess of twisted timber and flame. Impassable.

Anybody who has the misfortune to be down in Strathewen that day is more or less on their own. The tiny CFA crew there are tearing their hair out at the lack of support they are getting. They are reduced to scampering over trees on foot in the moonlight to reach isolated survivors. Other CFA brigades are distressed to hear the Arthurs Creek and Strathewen captain, Dave McGahy, desperately pleading for assistance: ‘Will somebody help us? Anybody? I’ve got critically injured people dying in front of my eyes.’

A year later, McGahy would still be furious at the lack of support his community received in the hour of its destruction. Literally decimated, the town would suffer twenty-seven deaths from a population of around 250. Among the dead were Marilyn and Damien Spooner. Separated from Dennis in their flight, they’d returned to the family home. Their remains were eventually found in the bath.

The group on the oval are hungry and thirsty as well as traumatised. Cameron Caine, who is president of the football club, smashes a window and kicks in the door. ‘Drinks in the fridge. Help yourselves!’

They get back onto the road, transfixed by the endless scenes of destruction unrolling before their eyes. Roger Wood stares out the window at the wrecked cars, once metal and glass, now ferocious, fire-spitting distortions. His heart surges with pity for whoever was in there. And he feels the familiar wave of anxiety for his own family.

Again he punches the number: nothing. Who else, who else? He manages to get a radio message through to one of his senior officers, requests that somebody check on his family’s wellbeing. The operator says they’ll get back to him, but he isn’t hopeful. Every police officer in the region is flat out right now.

The CFA crew have pushed on ahead. Frank Allan focuses on the cutting, grimly determined not to look in any of the cars. The policemen don’t have that luxury: it’s their responsibility to locate victims. They come across numerous vehicles, some they recognise. Finally they get to the four-car pile-up Wood had been trying to reach earlier that afternoon and find a group of people standing nearby. One of them is leaning into a fence. As they come closer they recognise someone they know well: Rossi Laudisio, proprietor of Cappa Rossi’s Pizza Restaurant.

Rossi is weeping. ‘Papa,’ he’s whispering, over and over. ‘Papa.’

‘Oh no,’ Wood murmurs to himself. Rossi’s father, Gennaro, is one of Kinglake’s most loved characters. Wood grew close to the family the year before, when Rossi’s mother died. ‘They’re great people,’ he says. ‘Gennaro was one of nature’s gentlemen.’

The policemen inspect the accident, confirm what they’ve been afraid of: a body in one of the cars. The four vehicles have smashed into one another in the whirling chaos of the fire’s first attack. The old man had been trapped, his legs pinned. His son stayed with him for as long as he could, until he was forced to seek shelter in a nearby house when the flames swept in and the heat grew lethal. So intense was the fire it melted the mag wheels and engine parts.

For Rossi Laudisio the death of his father is only one part of his personal nightmare. He asks the officers if they’ve seen his wife and four children. The family had to flee in separate cars and lost each other in the confusion.

Roger and Cameron look at each other: her red Landcruiser is one of the ones they recognised, smashed into an embankment.

Local knowledge coming to the fore, Cameron pulls out his phone and starts making calls. He works his way through the people they’ve seen on the trip so far, asking everyone about the red Landcruiser. He manages to track down the missing family, finds they’ve taken refuge at the High Mountain water farm and survived.

Rossi sinks to the ground, overwhelmed by relief.

The two officers have no time for the procedures they’d normally follow at a fatal accident. They have to get through to Kinglake. They place flashing beacons around the pile-up and continue with what’s beginning to feel like a journey through the underworld. At one point they come across an open stretch that offers them views all the way to the distant city: a million wheels and jets of flame pierce the darkness. The hills glow with burning stumps and fallen branches. What used to be a manna gum on the edge of the road is a fountain of embers atop a whirling column of fire.

My god, thinks Wood, my family is somewhere down there. How far has the fire got? Has it wiped out half of Melbourne?

They set out once more.

Small things catch the eye, lodge themselves in his memory. Warped images: the cavity where a car-door handle was, now spitting sparks. A red-hot metal chain, a house like a livid skeleton. A sheet of iron wrapped around a steel pole. And the cars; somehow they’re worst of all. You know what’s been in them. They’re scattered at a cacophony of angles: on their sides, in ditches and drains, buckled and blurring into one another. Melted wheel rims. Metal and flesh, fused.

The tension is becoming razor sharp. They’re close to the town now, and both men dread what they’re about to find. But even before that, they come across one more accident, the very sight of which leaves Wood with cold shivers. Maybe a dozen vehicles, including a motorbike, scattered around the intersection, all of them burnt, many of them crushed by trees. Beneath the front wheel of one car are the charred remains of a dog, its teeth a bitter rictus, its back legs smoking. The scene is weirdly illuminated by light thrown out from the burning bush.

‘Jesus,’ he whispers to himself. The driver of the first vehicle must have hit the brakes to avoid the dog and been clobbered from behind; other cars rear-ended them both, blocking the road. He imagines the fearful chaos that must have accompanied this carnage: the swathes of smoke, the headlights looming, panic-driven, the squealing brakes, the photos and teddy bears flying.

There are no bodies that he can see, so by the time the fire swept through, the occupants must have scattered. He hopes so.

The CFA crew are still working their way through this jungle. Frank Allan is discovering levels of exhaustion he didn’t know existed. He’s grateful when a handful of locals loom out of the darkness offering help. Between them they drag the cut-up logs aside, clear a path for the strike teams they hope will be following.

There’s one car completely embedded in the tree-jam. A four-wheel-drive appears, and the police prevail upon the driver to help drag the crushed car out of the way. He does so, but not without a massive effort: the heat was so intense the vehicle has sunk into the melted bitumen.

Wood and Caine edge their way round the scene, make the final descent into Kinglake; they cross the last rise.

Roger Wood stares in silence.

The town he last raced through this afternoon is gone. In its place is a lake of fire ringed by a pool of stars. There is no power, of course: Kinglake is illuminated only by the reflected light from blazing bush and raging buildings. Two jets of flame shoot high into the air.

They brace themselves and head down the hill.

SILENT NIGHT

It’s the silence that hits the hardest, the emptiness. All along the road to Kinglake they’ve been coming across little clusters of survivors, often people they know. There’s been communication—traumatic communication for the most part, but still something to make them feel they were part of the human race.

Making that first run down the hill, they feel like they’re the last men left on Earth.

The wind has settled now, the blood-chilling roar Roger heard before is long gone. There’s an eerie hush broken only by the hum of the engine, the crash of the odd falling tree. The flashing red and blue lights enhance the ominous glow thrown out by the fire. Nobody comes running to greet them, no vehicles are moving. Just about every structure on that western approach is gone.

Wood thinks about the death and destruction he’s already encountered. Wonders if anybody in Kinglake is left alive. Struggles through a sense of sheer astonishment.

‘It was like my eyes were held open with matchsticks,’ says Wood. ‘I was trying to take it all in—everywhere I looked there was devastation—everything was burning. I’d been up in Kinglake for five years and I knew everything, a lot of people, and everywhere I looked it was, Ah shit, that’s gone too. It was overwhelming.’

They enter the main street. The pizza parlour, the hardware store and service station, the vet’s. Houses and houses and houses, all destroyed. The mesmerising geysers of flame turn out to be gas venting from the underground gas tanks at the servo. Wood doesn’t want to drive too close to that: who knows if it’s about to explode?

Amazingly, the police station has survived, although the verandas are beginning to ignite. They extinguish them. There’s a Landcruiser and trailer in front of it, still burning, as if some poor bugger had raced up hoping for a last-minute rescue. They drive into Aitken Crescent, where the CFA brigade is based.

The two men catch their breath.

There are hundreds of people there. That explains the emptiness that greeted them as they entered the town. The residents of Kinglake, those of them who are still alive, have come together for solace and support.

It’s too crowded to drive through, so they get out and walk.

A man comes up and stares at them. Wood thinks he looks like a stock figure in an old cartoon, the feller who’s stuck his finger in the electrical socket: he’s black from head to toe, his long hair smoking and standing on end. People are lying on the gravel, staring up at the sky, holding each other. A chubby bloke in a singlet and shorts sits half out of a car, ash-streaked head in hands, an expression of utter weariness—or grief—on what they can see of his face. As they make their way through the crowd, the two officers—the first figures of authority who’ve made it into town—are bombarded with questions from the crowd.

‘What do we do now?’

‘What’s happening?’

‘Is the fire coming back?’

‘Where are the ambulances?’

They do their best. Try to reassure people, tell them the fire front has passed, promise ambulances and strike teams will be there as soon as possible.

As they draw closer to the CFA building, the atmosphere becomes more subdued. They see yellow-suited firefighters patrolling the perimeter, keeping an eye out for flare-ups. A tree behind the shed is still flickering. They’re disturbed to hear groaning and sobs from within.

‘They looked like zombies,’ comments Linda Craske, ‘the moment they walked in.’

That’s about how they feel: they’ve walked into a horror movie. Where the hell do you start? There are bodies all over the dirty concrete floor. Women are moving among the casualties, giving first aid, applying bandages, fiddling with oxygen tanks and masks, comforting victims who are obviously in extremity. People are crying, holding each other’s hands, staring numbly at the ceiling, cradling heads in hands. A boy with tear-stained cheeks is fondling a puppy.

The worst cases have been covered in silver blankets, but it’s obvious that the Kinglake CFA and their helpers are struggling to deal with an overwhelming number of injuries with virtually no facilities.

Trish Hendrie and Carole Wilson come over and hug both men. They feel as if somebody has thrown them a lifeline. They’ve been battling all night, not just the fire, but the maddening fear that they’ve been abandoned, that the outside world, with its doctors, fire trucks and support systems, has forgotten them. The power is out, the phone lines are down, mobile reception is random and all it delivers is bad news. The CFA radio is so frantic it’s impossible to get a word in.

With the arrival of the local cops, they feel as though an intolerable burden has been lifted from their shoulders.

‘Oh, when those boys walked in,’ says Carole, ‘I thought maybe there’s hope for us yet.’

‘Roger’s from St Andrews,’ adds Trish. ‘He didn’t even know if his own family was alive…A lot of lesser people would have said, this is too much, I’m going home. But they were doing their job. Sticking by the community.’

Somewhere in those first seconds, Trish feels the need to clear the air.

‘I’m sorry, Rodge.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We had to break into the doctor’s. For oxygen.’

He looks around him at the patients on the floor, realising what a remarkable job these women have been doing.

‘Don’t worry about it, Trish.’ He nods. ‘Breaking into the doctor’s? That’s good.’

He receives a run-down of the situation, and it’s deeply troubling. The nurses have prioritised the most critically injured, but some of them will be dead if the ambulances don’t get up here soon.

A fire tanker from St Andrews under the leadership of Kaz Gurney has worked its way up the mountain and arrived on the scene. Several of the firefighters on board are friends or neighbours of Wood’s. Jeff Purchase, who knows him well, has a quick word. He says later that Wood was so intent upon the tasks at hand that he barely registered his existence.

‘He asked how we were,’ says Purchase, ‘what we were planning to do, but you could see his mind was somewhere else, focused on the job, trying to read the situation. His eyes were scoping the crowd. Working out what to do next. He moved around like a butterfly, talking to different groups of people, seeing how they were going, doing a dozen things at once.’

Wood returns to his vehicle and reports the situation to D24, reinforces the plea for help. His heart sags at the response. Ambulances on hold; the trip is still too dangerous. He sits there for a moment, runs his hands through his hair.

Then he goes back into the CFA and speaks to his colleagues.

‘Nobody’s coming up. We’re gonna have to take ’em down.’