Tag: Black Saturday

Death toll reduced

Originally placed at 210, the total number of fatalities in the February Black Saturday fires in Australia has been reduced to 173.  This is due primarily to some remains being found to be animal bones and others thought to be from multiple victims were actually from the same person.

Reporter’s personal account of Black Saturday

Gary Hughes, a reporter for The Australian, has written a gripping account of how he and his wife escaped their house as it burned around them, and then how they coped in the four days that followed.  Here is an excerpt.

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Surreal. That’s the term we and other survivors like us will begin to use in the days and weeks to come. But this first morning I grope unsuccessfully with a still-numbed mind for the right word to describe what is happening to us.

There have been brief snatches of exhausted sleep haunted by fiery images playing through my mind like an endless video loop. They call it “ember attack”, but the term nowhere near describes the terrifying reality.

On that endless video loop the hail of glowing demons fly at us relentlessly out of the artificial darkness of the smoke. We are trapped, eternally flailing at the embers with wet towels as they hunt for us through every tiny crack and crevasse of our house.

This first morning, having escaped from our house after it was engulfed and consumed by the Black Saturday firestorms, we are still driven by adrenalin. In coming days that adrenalin surge will end, replaced by waves of intense weariness that will plague our efforts to struggle through this first week. But today, adrenalin is our friend.

Wrapped in numbness and disbelief, our priorities are dictated by necessity. We leave the security of the relative’s house where we found shelter the night before to seek medical treatment for superficial burns and smoke inhalation. We had stayed huddled in our burning hilltop home of almost 25 years in St Andrews, just south of Kinglake, until the flames and toxic smoke left us with a choice between staying and certainly dying, or probably dying outside from radiant heat on the run to the car.

But the deepest injuries, as we will quickly discover, are not physical. That run for our lives had been so desperate that we escaped with virtually nothing, not even loose change. The firestorm has stolen our identities, destroying the plastic cards that define who you are in our computerised, cashless world. We are non-people. With cash provided by relatives and wearing borrowed clothes we buy basic necessities such as underwear, a razor, toothbrushes and toothpaste. I am amazed at how little we really need.

I obtain a replacement SIM card and using an old, borrowed mobile telephone I reconnect to the outside world. It’s a move I’ll regret in coming days.

The Australian newspaper has a very interesting, lengthy article about how the “Black Saturday” fires developed and were fought–including some behind the scenes activities in the “war room”. Here is an excerpt.

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.