So very OT - Australian Bushfires

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

I have copied an article from our main newspaper about the

devastation in a little town not far from us called sville. I'm

not sure how much news about us you get in the US and elsewhere in

the world but I just need to share this with you. It is the most

devastating thing to ever happen in our state, probably in the

history of our country.

Don't read it if you're feeling emotional - but if you can, please

read and send your thoughts and prayers to all those affected. This

is only a snapshot of these recent bushfires that started a week

ago. There are a number of towns still burning and scores of people

still missing. My grandparents lost their home but came out of it

with their lives. My mum used to work in sville and live just

out of it and she has lost a number of friends and has no word on

others. This is just a tragedy that the world needs to know about

not that anything can be done now. I don't know what else to ask of

you, just your thoughts and prayers, please.

Kate

THE sville Bowls Club hums with chatter. It's open, finally, for

the first time in 12 months. About 15 bowlers roll on the new drought-

resistant grass.

Colin , 83, a crack rifleman who served in World War II, watches.

He is armed with walking sticks. A recent fall has slowed him down.

is the oldest bowls club member. Like the youngest member, who

is a year 9 student, he has less than eight hours to live.

The bowlers play a couple of games. It's 11am on Saturday. The sun is

heating up.

Cartwright, 78, goes home and gazes at the photo of his wife,

Jean, on the lounge room wall. This is his daily ritual. She died a

decade ago from cancer.

Jean is 19 in the shot, taken when they first met. Cartwright has

never really recovered from her loss.

They were married in the 1950s, two locals in the " honeymoon town " to

which Melburnians would bus for a weekend of tea and scones at

English-style guesthouses.

The relics of the era endure. As does the mood.

sville, according to the official guff, is a " place to relax and

unwind " .

Once a sawmilling town that was a gateway to forests of mountain ash

and waterfalls, it has also come to embrace tourist lurks, such as

arts and crafts.

Still, it sags in the wider rural malaise. No jobs for young people.

The footy and tennis clubs are gone. The local CFA boasts a tanker, a

pumper and about a dozen volunteers.

Once there were 14 timber mills, and a big bell in the middle of town

that rung terror in children's imaginations when smoke was seen.

Nature has been kind to the hamlet. Even the 1939 fires flew over the

leafy basin.

Now, there are no mills, and a CFA siren in Barton Ave that, for

reasons not yet clear, will not be heard by many residents this

afternoon.

Today, it's too hot for tourists or anyone else.

Leigh Jowett has been fixing a neighbour's slide door. The builder,

56, goes home to close the blinds and do some paperwork.

His son-in-law and a mate pop in to borrow something. He can't

remember what. They walk out, then walk straight back in. It's about

4pm.

" Oh s---, " they call.

" Come and look at this. "

No one guesses at the twilight ahead. How could they? History offers

no precedents.

The storm that will blow and burn sville's 146-year history to

rubble, sparing only a crooked chimney here and there, a bakery, a

motel, a cafe and the odd house, passes before many people grasp it

has arrived.

After bowls, Cartwright watches a Peck flick. He'd prefer the

races, but the Caulfield meeting had been postponed until the next

day. Damn heat.

About the same time, the town's doctor, Lachlan Fraser, has returned

from puffing up a nearby hill.

Like all ultra-marathon runners, he's a bit mad - recently, he

finished a 220km run to Mt Kosciuszko.

Fraser, 46 and " looking for a lady " , is training for a 50km jaunt the

following Sunday. His training partner, the blue heeler Indi, is

starting to tire.

Fraser doesn't push.

He, too, is feeling unnaturally hot for the morning.

The town's first resident doctor since it was founded in 1863, Fraser

came to sville so he could be close to the snow.

He goes home. Reads a medical magazine. Measures the house - new

insulation paid for by the Federal Government would be welcome on

scorchers like today.

He flicks on a taped episode of The Simpsons but never finishes it.

" It was going to be another hot day, when you can't do much outside,

much inside, and you don't want to eat anything, " he says.

Mark , 48, the president of the bowls club, fills up the car

with petrol then settles in at home.

He notices the smoke about 3pm, but it's a long way away. Still,

he'll keep an eye on it and cancels a trip to Werribee. Just in case.

Local radio station UG-FM gives regular fire updates in the

afternoon, interspersed between country music songs.

The playing of tunes frustrates Fraser - it lacks the requisite

urgency demanded of the threat.

He drives to a higher point to gauge the smoke.

He rings the bushfire hotline and waits 20 minutes before someone

comes on the line.

Murrindindi, maybe 30km northwest, officially starts burning at

2.57pm. Its flames fly southeast, towards Narbethong, fuelled by

towering mountain ashes, thick undergrowth and wind that some say

gusts to 120km/h.

In sville, as the ex-CFA captain Cartwright suggests, people try

to look on the bright side.

" You always believe that the worst will not happen, " he says.

Others aren't as convinced.

Fraser takes another drive after the power goes out about 5.15pm.

He has watched the Channel 10 news, which led the bulletin with the

Bunyip fire.

He looks across to Narbethong, about 12km away, from Keppel Falls

Lookout, about 10 minutes from town.

Narbethong is spotting with flames.

The wind rises in sville, hot and roaring, like a million hair

dryers set on high.

Fraser returns to discover a road accident on the corner of Lyell and

Sedgwick streets.

A gum tree has squashed Beverley McGearie's car. She's all right, but

shocked - she keeps asking how she got here.

In the first of many dreadful ironies, Fraser notices the advertising

on her car - " relaxation therapist " .

Two masseurs stop at the scene, fresh from client jobs.

Fraser can't compute this. Fire threatens to zap a town surrounded

by, and filled with, trees. And people are getting massages?

sville has had fire warnings, of course, but it appears that

confusion shrouds the town before the smoke rolls in.

The FoodWorks supermarket, for example, remains open after

authorities start plotting evacuation strategies.

ine Harrow, the CFA radio operator, has taken a call from the Mt

Gordon spotter, 3km west, at about 4.30pm.

Flames are still three mountain ridges away, but it's suggested to

Harrow that evacuations begin.

She relays this information to the local SES.

" I said to (the SES), 'you better start evacuating', but she had only

three members there, " Harrow says.

" People could see smoke coming into the town and I think they were

starting to evacuate their families. "

How many get away is unknown, but Jowett says the SES and police get

around to many residents, who head off north to Buxton.

By 5.50pm, a convoy of cars is banked back into town. For the CFA's

Munday, of the nearby Acheron crew, it suggests people have,

belatedly, decided to flee.

He glimpses a vision that will haunt him. A father standing in the

middle of the road with two small children.

They wear shorts and T-shirts and expressions of utter bewilderment.

Behind them, the smoke darkens and that orange glow everyone will

talk about starts to show.

" It was pandemonium, " Munday says.

A man in a 4WD stops his tanker and begs the crew to save an elderly

couple trapped in their house up the hill.

Munday has to refuse. He knows the full blast is about to hit.

He cannot think about saving anyone else. Saving his crew will be

tricky enough.

" This was just so far off the scale of anything, " he says.

" It may be that this was the worst fire day in the history of the

world, well, at least the history

of Australia.

" Five hundred Elvises and 1000 tankers would have made absolutely no

difference. "

He says it was clear-cut that sville was doomed from the start.

" There was no way anything was going to get through it, " he said.

Harrow bunkers down with sville CFA chief Glen Fiske and seven

others.

Fiske's son, Kellan, 18 or 19, is in a tanker crew that heads to Yea

about 4.30pm.

The family are well-liked. Fiske's forebears, who date back to 1800s

sville, used to run the lands guesthouse.

Married to Liz, with two sons and a daughter, Bronte, Glen works in

an andra timber mill.

The family is known for its " s--- stirring " of one another. They're

good people.

In the corrugated iron CFA building, cut into the hill, as smoke

pours in, Harrow will peek from a window when " everything " catches

fire in Barton Ave.

Her wider family will lose six houses in the next 15 minutes,

including her daughter, Leah, who with husband Luke is supposed to

move into a new home in Steavenson Close on Monday.

" I just started panicking, " she says. " The urge to run was pretty

strong. We did the best we could, but lives were lost, and obviously

it wasn't good enough.

" (But) I don't think it would have mattered if we had had 100 trucks

there. It wasn't going to stop it. "

The sun is about to hide. Birds are about to fall out of the sky.

And something wicked is about to roll down the hill from the west,

engulf Our Lady of the Snow Church, and rumble through a town so

shaken it may never breathe again.

It arrives about the time that Jo Hall introduces the 6pm Channel 9

news, and leaves before she signs off.

Its roar will be likened to jet planes and freight trains.

There will be reports of the sorts of fireballs that visited Dresden

and Tokyo in 1945.

Embers will swirl like lit matches in a clothes dryer.

Lawnmowers will explode. Tyres will pop, gas tanks will blow, and 30m

gums a metre wide will be ripped out by the wind.

People will draw smoke for their last breaths and perhaps wonder how

and why they could be taken so fast.

Some, it seems, will fall where they stand, to resemble those

petrified bodies at Pompeii.

What emerges in these tales of survival in sville is that no

matter how thorough the preparation, no one could properly prepare

for the fire ahead.

Something else becomes clear, too. Luck is not only handy; today, in

sville, it is everything.

Untended houses still stand, defended houses burn down. And

conventional advice, such as staying inside and filling baths with

water, is shown to sometimes offer the thinnest veneer of protection.

Time. There isn't enough of it before the fire hits sville.

And once the fire does, time distorts so that 10 minutes feels like a

day, and the rest of your life hinges entirely on getting that next

bucket of water right bloody now.

" We knew it would be a bad day, " Cartwright says. " Everyone was

warned the day before. But if you took notice of every fire danger

day, you'd be leaving every week in fire season.

" This wasn't a fire, this was an inferno. Fires and infernos are two

different things. "

Lachlan Fraser has a methodical way. Patients like that in doctors.

He fills the bath, wheelie bin, sinks and bottles with water.

He is as prepared as he can be, yet his frantic efforts, which lead

to a burned face and sliced tendons in his hand, will be futile.

He runs about with a bucket of water like a confused contestant on a

game show.

Dousing spot fires, at the front and back, that spark and multiply

when he puts them out and looks the other way.

The neighbour's place (they are away) erupts like a blowtorch. His

dogs, Indi and Lani. He must save the dogs. He ties them to furniture

inside.

He is armed with a hose when the jasmine trailing up the side of the

neighbour's house catches light.

Embers shower. He tries to splash the neighbour's home. Too late.

Suddenly, despite his panic, he realises he needs to relieve himself.

He lets go in his pants, which helps keep him wet.

" Two birds with one stone, " he says.

Fraser's eaves catch alight. He slips on the veranda and puts his

hand through a window.

Toilet paper stems the flow of blood, but he knows it will need

surgery - assuming he survives.

He wets his windbreaker and breathes through it.

He grabs the dogs, telling them over the roar that they will survive.

And, right then, Fraser gives up on saving his house.

Mark , the bowls club president, leaves a tap running before

ushering the family into the hallway and donning a tea towel like a

baddie in a cowboy movie.

Mark, partner Sue, and his sons, Ben and Beau, get on the floor.

" It was like a foundry when it actually hit, the amount of embers and

sparks, it was just like you see in the movies or working in a

foundry, " he says.

You could hear the windows shaking and buckling at one point when it

was really ferocious. I could see smoke coming off our drapes. "

They play a waiting game. If the brick house withstands the blast

outside long enough, they have a chance.

If toxic fumes enter too soon, forcing them outside, they will die of

radiant heat or smoke inhalation.

The fire box, an opening for gathering wood, becomes the fear. It

burns and smoulders and, finally, after maybe 20 minutes, opens.

Also, a window finally shatters.

They will die if they stay in the house. They will probably die if

they dash for the lawn, where they can hose each other in water.

notices the neighbours' weatherboard house.

The couple are home, their daughter's not.

Well, notice isn't the right word. comprehends that the house

is no longer there. Its raised floor presumably allowed ember

slurries to form underneath.

His quick summing up? Nothing anyone could have done.

His family takes turns spraying one another on the blackened lawn.

Beau almost collapses, but revives. The house crackles to a pile.

They move to the horse paddock next door, chattering about the fate

of others, and ready themselves for the next perceived threat -

lightning.

It's raining. They're cold.

Cartwright is hoping his good friends, the , will swing

by to pick him up.

There is a problem - their three cars are destroyed, including Beau's

2004 Commodore, which presents the family with a fireworks display

that all, except maybe Beau, find rather intriguing.

Cartwright has stayed inside, watching fence palings flare like

flaming matchsticks, one after the other.

He ventures outside to put out the eaves - no outside water.

He rings Wayne, his son, as windows crack. Wayne tells him he can't

survive in the house. Cartwright says he can't survive outside the

house.

But it gets too hot. Ash whooshes in. Better to cook outside than

inside.

Cartwright is making it up as he goes along.

This is how it is when you're about to die, he thinks.

Or is it? He's never been about to die before.

Cartwright grabs a bucket of water and a tea towel, forgets his dodgy

hip, and staggers through smoke to the empty swimming pool of the

motel next door.

He sits on the bottom step and wipes embers when they settle on him.

This is where he will be found four hours later.

Cartwright has watched his house burn down.

He has also pondered the loss of every photo he possesses of his late

wife, Jean.

Six days after the blast, Leigh Jowett, the builder, still will not

have checked a Tattslotto ticket he buys on Saturday.

He isn't hopeful of winning.

He reckons he has used up his good fortune.

" I don't think I have a chance as long as my bum points to the

ground, " he says.

His house survives the fire, perhaps because it is sheltered by a

hill. He isn't there when the blast comes through.

Fearful of falling gum trees, he parks at the golf club and waits

an " eternity " before the radiant heat dwindles enough to open the

door.

He later sees the logging truck, abandoned beside him in the car

park, melted to the ground.

The newly laid neighbouring bowls green, a lingering source of

community kinship, is untouched. It's not much. It's something.

Jowett's cat, Old Taz, leaps from the car during the worst of the

blast. Jowett gives up on him.

Three days later, Old Taz will turn up meowing at the door, looking

for breakfast and sympathy for a burnt paw.

Lachlan Fraser sits on the road, hugs his dogs, and cries.

The house, the fruit trees, everything, is lost.

His phone rings. It's someone called asking about a planned

group dinner in Melbourne tonight.

" The house is on fire, the town is on fire, speak to me next week,

bye, " he tells her. It's unclear what makes of this.

A few hours later, Fraser rings his mother Barbara in Eltham on a

satellite phone (all other communications are out).

" I'm alive, " he tells her. " The dogs are alive. The house is gone.

The town is gone. "

" What? " replies Barbara.

Like the rest of Australia, she doesn't know that sville isn't

there any more.

Through busted fences and around fallen trees, survivors head to the

football oval at Gallipoli Park.

It will be a long night of burning eyes and no sleep.

It stings to even blink. Fraser treats people as well as he can. He

has replaced the toilet paper on his wound with a bandage.

He checks the clinic - it's gone. He sees signs everywhere, signs

marking piles of burning rubble. Television footage later shows a

front door and nothing else, except a no-smoking sign hung on it.

These signs speak of a " before " that, regardless of rebuilding

efforts, can never be recreated. But it's no time to start dwelling

on the chances for an " after " .

Not yet. Fraser makes do with the medical kit he carries for

marathons in his glovebox. Eyedrops. Anti-nausea medication.

Panadeine Forte.

He offers the worst piece of medical advice he will ever give to an

overweight patient: " Eat as much as you like tonight. "

Around the oval, gas cylinders keep exploding, such as the big one at

lands guesthouse, which flames like the fiery geysers at Crown

casino.

The pavilion smoulders. Someone, somewhere, somehow, starts snoring.

Melbourne will not grasp the dimension of the tragedy here for days.

Dozens, perhaps more, die in sville before knows they

are gone.

And over the coming week, sville will loom as the site of most

deaths.

The name will take on a sinister echo.

The town is a morgue. How many dead bodies here lie untended under

sheets of corrugated iron and on the sides of roads?

Its crime scene status, which quarantines the town from visitors,

will allow ugly rumours to baste, such as the supposed death of 100

people in the Anglican church.

Yet right now, no one here at the oval munching on biscuits and cakes

taken from the sville Bakery (the absent owners won't mind) is

trying to grasp the magnitude of the disaster.

They can't make sense of it. Not now. Maybe never. They have lost

their homes. They don't know where their friends are.

Everyone knows everyone in sville. There are about 20 or 30

people here (and a lot of dogs) from a permanent population of about

500.

Where is Kirstie Nilsson, 39, the cheery mother of two who runs the

Christmas shop?

Where is Len Postlethwaite, once a champion woodcutter, who comes in

heavier than 18 stone?

Where is Marie Walsh, the tree-changer who moved here with her

retired dentist husband, Dan?

Where is Jefferson, the waiter two weeks from giving birth,

and fiance Bowker?

Where is the wife of one of the local policemen? She got in the car.

But then what?

Where is everyone else? They must have moved " bloody fast " , as Fraser

puts it, to have got out before the flames. Or . . .

Among the gathering are Glen Fiske and his son, Kellan.

Kellan is told about the death of his mother, Liz, and his brother,

Dalton, in their Lyell St home.

Dalton, who is 14 or 15, is the bowling club's youngest member.

His brother falls to the ground. He cannot breathe.

" Two people trying to save their town, and losing part of their

family, " Cartwright says.

" And then to see the boy puffing to survive, but still there wanting

to save more people.

" That's bravery, isn't it? "

It's perhaps 2am at the oval. Earlier, Rod Liesfield had come in,

distressed. He and his family took over Nanda Binya Lodge a week ago.

" He said to somebody: 'Liz and the kids are gone', " Fraser says.

" This person said: 'That's good'. And he said: 'No, they're gone. "

It's unclear what has happened to his wife and their two boys,

and .

Liesfield is inconsolable.

In coming days, talk will move to a tree falling on the spa the

family were huddling in.

It's after dawn on Sunday. Fraser wanders the sville streets.

He's strangely curious. He wants to search for any relics of his

home.

Others will later count - 32 houses stand where there were once a few

hundred. He wonders how long the rebuilding will take - and there has

to be a rebuilding.

Five years? Ten years?

Flames lick a couple of fence palings. Fraser kicks them over to stop

a carport going up.

He walks past the Fiske home in Lyell St. Glen Fiske is in the

driveway. He has been inside.

His wife and son, it's said, have been found arm in arm.

Fraser puts his arm around him.

Fiske does not - cannot - say anything. Fraser, too, struggles for

words.

" Oh God, " he manages.

The only memento Fraser has found from his home is a Swiss cow bell,

lying under ash about 10m from where it once hung in the kitchen.

He keeps walking, with the dogs, the cow bell clanging in rhythm to

each step.

" It's this lonely, grey, ash landscape, " he says.

" It's like a nuclear bomb has hit. And this cow bell keeps ringing.

It's like For Whom the Bell Tolls. "

Fraser turns the bell upside down and chokes the hammer.

[Guest guest]

Here in Canada we have been hearing about the fires, but this article

illustrates how devastating they truly are. It's hard to imagine how

fast these fires are moving and my heart goes out to those who have

lost family and friends. My prayers go out to all of you Aussies that

you and your country finds peace and solace during this tragic time.

Deb

Canada

Crohn's 1999

PSC 2006