Braidwood region bushfires • Trentham storms and disasters • The districts and their people • CFA · RFS · SES experiences • Local attachment
Listen to the interview excerpts
CathH 23:02-26:01
When he got over there to find that they weren’t there, it was like, Oh my God. Where are they? What? We couldn’t see where they’d been, where the car had gone. At about, three hours later they arrived here at our place. They looked like cooked prawns.
They um, they drove through the fire and got stuck. They had to reverse out of the fire, a tree fell on their vehicle. They, um, you know, they they almost died that night. And we’re just so glad that they didn’t. And they, but they could have stayed where they were, but because the pump stopped, they just didn’t think they’d be able to manage. It’s a, you know, it’s a horrible, horrible thought to think that your neighbours might have died, you know? They could have, well could have. They just looked so, they were in shock. We were all in shock. We all just stood around, and just stared at each other. It was a awful morning. It was a horrible, horrible occasion.
But, you know, it’s a, it’s a definitely a journey and I’m, to be resilient and try and focus on recoveries, you know it’s it’s it’s hard because, like I said, we didn’t get any support from the government. And we felt pretty crap about it for a while, but then we just, we moved on. There’s no use, you know, worrying about that. It really made me angry because we, we did everything they wanted and they still, you know. What? Didn’t we burn enough? I don’t know. So now we’ve, we’ve actually had to, you know, we have used all of our savings to try and rebuild things and get things back on track. But um a lot of it we just won’t be able to do. It’s just not gonna happen. It’s just the way it is. We won’t be able to afford it.
So, you know, we just work. Then we do what we can. Work again. Spend it, keep improving things. Um, we’ll never be in a situation, we’ve kept our prepping up and we’d never put ourselves in a situation where we would be under threat of fire again because we just, we will keep our prep happening and keep doing it, uh, regardless… what year it is, whether it’s a wet year or a dry year, I still do it. I just keep doing it, um, you know, you just, it’s got to become part of your life because I think the way the world’s going, we’ve got to really try and get back to, to that simple stuff in life and actually it’s, almost comes down to a, your life or death. So, you really have to, to do as much as you can for yourself these days.
So, as the world falls around, you know, down around us, that just, um, I don’t know, we don’t want, we wouldn’t want to see that again. But I really worry about the Araluen Valley this year. Um, it still hasn’t burnt. That Berlang Range between Araluen and Krawarree and the, up to Major’s Creek hasn’t burnt since nineteen fifty five. And, um, I think they want to be really careful this year.
OPTION2 for Cath 28:26-30:40
Well I think it must have burnt after I took it off. I must have got, my whole pocket had a, was gone, and all this, a great big hole. And I thought, well, I didn’t even, when did that happen? You know? I didn’t know that I’d was on fire. [laughter]
It was so hot. It was just part of the, you know? And because I was concentrating so hard on what we were doing, you know, like we were, we were under the pump, for that whole seven hours or more that we stood there fighting that fire, we did not, we didn’t say a word to each other the whole time. We, you couldn’t hear each other. It was so loud. It was like a, it was just a roar and it was just, these embers kept coming at us, like horizontal embers. It was just a, and they were big. And the the, the trees, the closer the embers started off coming off the trees out here, in front of us, they were big chunks. They weren’t just little embers, they were massive, big chunks of bark because the the, the wind was blowing so hard. This fire was just, huh, it wasn’t a fire. It was just a, it was like a, a pelting storm, horizontal storm of, of red embers. That’s what it was. And it was black, pitch black, pitch black. You couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t breathe without a mask, you, you know. But even for the days, well, actually, probably two weeks before that fire, we, we were wearing masks outside because we couldn’t breathe. It had, we’d had so much smoke here all that time, you know, it was just a horrible stink.
And, and you know the the the night that we did burn, we managed to make one phone call, and um that was to Firecom. We told them, I sai~ told them it was here. They said thanks for that and hung up. And that was it. We knew that the local fire brigade wasn’t gonna come down here. We didn’t expect them to either. But it’s, you know, we didn’t want to put other people’s lives at danger. Our son wanted to come and stay and we told him don’t bother. We don’t want, we don’t want you to come because this is gonna, this is gonna interfere with your life. And it would have, really badly.
DannyK 21:18-26:28
When we got the page at about eleven AM on the twenty-sixth, um, we knew we had our backs to the wall straight away because um the location that was provided um meant that it was going to take a little while to get there. And during that time, it’s, the fire itself if it’s cranking up, it’s not gonna sit around and wait for us to get there. It’s gonna charge on. So, we had issues of response time where actually to get from station to the location and that was, that was the best part of three quarters of an hour, before we were actually anywhere near getting on site. Um, it’s, in, there’s fire trails to gain access to the area. But when we arrived there, the strike had originally occurred on the western side of um North Black Range Fire Trail. And uh it had already spotted across to the eastern side. So it was, it was already spreading. Um. We had about half a dozen tankers on site at that time. Uh but the biggest limiting factor that we had was was access around the fire. The intensity of the fire at that stage we were already getting flame height five six metres high. Um the dryness of the the fuels was extreme. The v~ quantity of fuel was also extreme. And we had very little water. We only had what we were carrying. We did find one small dam up there which was on the northern edge of the fire at that time. We’d gone through the fire line, And out to the other side, and already it had covered probably about uh, in that stage, probably about three hectares. It doesn’t sound much, but when you’re in a a a heavily forested area like that with very little water, you’re virtually against it right from the get go. Now we did find a small dam there that we could draw some water from. But it was never going to be enough. And once it jumped across onto the eastern side of Black Range Trail, um we had an escalating uh wind from the northwest northwest. And so it was, it was pushing it fairly well eastward. So it was getting well beyond where we could even run hose lines to even try and knock it down. And even if we could knock it down, it was keeping it down so. It was already spotting ahead of itself, um which meant that yeah it was a futile effort to try and do it with the resource that we had on the ground. We ideally would have been been awesome to have ge~ had air support. There was no air support available. To get machinery in there was always gonna take a while. Access was either through the what’s called the, the Mulloon Fire Trail, which is the the road that links from Bombay through to Hoskinstown through Forbes Creek. Or from Forbes Creek side coming in. From the Forbes Creek side, there was a small bridge there which was um which had a weight limit. And so you’re, you couldn’t get anything more than a fire truck across it. Like bulk water carriers, no. Too~ too much weight. Couldn’t get across. So the turnaround time to even leave the fire ground to get water supply in was going to be um about an hour turn around for every every truck. If that was the case. cos of just where it was, um the remoteness of it. And meanwhile it’s it’s escalating so From the initial attack which we made, um, which was a a p~ a pretty solid attack with what we had there, it was never going to be enough. We just didn’t didn’t have a chance. So we had to withdraw and then effectively from there on we were in a, in a defensive mode very quickly. So, defence meant we had to get machinery in there to try and cut in some fire breaks, to be able to have containment lines where we could actually get onto it to, to try and contain it. But it just kept pushing and pushing. So I know on the on day two, well we tried to get dozers there day one. And there was a couple of issues which occurred with getting the machinery in on site um which meant that no machinery actually commenced work until the second day which was, which was the Wednesday. Um. Wednesday’s operations then consisted of endeavouring to cut in some containment lines, which were restricted by terrain. In other words, it was just too steep to be able to put a line directly around it. Um and there was probably some questions about some certain tactics that could have been implemented, but that that was um a case where the containment lines were trying to be put in so you could backburn. Tactically backburning to try and contain it within the the area that it was in?
DannyK Option 2 (short) 36:01-36:40 (39s)
Um. Interesting fire behaviour we witnessed as well, where you would see spots igniting grass fires down in, um, the area west of Farringdon Road. In the vicinity of, um, Bombay Fire Station.
And you’d have the main column of of of smoke pushing eastwards. But then you would see these spot fires where the smoke was going westwards. And what was causing that was basically the main fire just drawing it back in. It’s just sucking in that oxygen ahead of itself. And so you had fire in front of it actually being sucked back into the, the main front. So you had fire running in different directions.
MM250203_JC 19:06-20:50 (1m44)
Need ASR transcript
“It looked just like an atomic cloud, miles up into the sky.”
Gordon on the radio, pyrocumulus cloud, wondered if it was old ordinance exploding, felt like the end of the world.
VeraS/Viola 27:06-31:53
Transcript below incomplete. Not a thrilling excerpt perhaps.
The fires were just phenomenal. They went through Queensland rainforest for the first time ever. And um, I remember on the way up there I drove through Scone and they hadn’t had water for their population for a very long time. They were bringing in, carting in drinking water on a daily basis. They had no water left in any storage. It’s a famous horse breeding area. They had to agist horses elsewhere because everything was absolutely bone dry. And I thought you know, Braidwood and Mongarlowe were bad enough, but at least we still had water in the river. They had nothing.
And so I thought, ooh. You know, when the mighty Clarence stops flowing up, you know, way up north, I thought, oh that’s really serious drought conditions. And then of course, that was the precursor to the fires. And the fires just, you know, they started in that winter. And as I returned to Mongarlowe after that trip in August, um, I knew that things were going to come. So I was not surprised when we had the lightning strikes that ignited the Black Range fires, and then the Currowan fires. And that they travelled so ferociously. And did so much damage.
Yes, I was, I was.
[clare]
I just remember a feeling of um, impending doom. I knew it was coming. I thought, you know, we can’t have this precursor of such profound drought and um reduced water storage. I collected water and was so frugal with my water use. Um, I had as many tanks and of course I had a pump on the river, luckily, the river still had plenty of water in the water holes. It had stopped flowing at that stage. The Mongarlowe had stopped flowing. As had the Shoalhaven. And um, I was just so mindful of having to have as much water around. And, because I’m living on that property on my own, there was only so much that I could do for fire preparation mitigation um because the forest around my place haven’t had a an active fire go through since nineteen thirty-nine. That’s the last time a fire had been through. Yeah. No, there was a lot of um build up of, oh, you know, everything that grows. You know, whether it’s grass, bark hanging from trees, you know, dead shrubbery. Yep, it builds up.
Well I, I felt really um vulnerable, um, When I first moved to Mongarlowe, I did my um basic fire training, but then I I didn’t complete it because my body was letting me know that it wasn’t up to the physicality of it. You know, I did um fire overrun training and just getting up and down from the ground up into the truck. I mean that first step is huge and so I was having difficulty with just the physical movement around the truck and I thought hm I will learn everything I can about um fire behaviour. They had special training courses for women who are living in the bush. Um because I was in Canberra for the 2003 fires, I had fire experience related to that event, and, I just pulled all the little strands of knowledge together, to feed into what I understood I was likely to be able to deal with. I knew that I couldn’t defend on my own and so whenever we had the catastrophic warnings, I evacuated out. That was my plan. My survival plan was to remove myself from my property into a safe haven in Braidwood. And I stayed with friends in Elrington Street. And I think, um during the fires, I evacuated maybe five times. Yeah, and stayed with um friends. Hm. Because I knew that I couldn’t um fight it on my own. But I, I had as much stored water and as many pumps as I could attach to each of those water sources as I could manage. And of course the local brigade comes down to see that you’ve got um, the right stortz fitting so that they can attach their um hoses to pump from water sources. So, I did the best that I could in the circumstances.
VeraS 51:32-52:24
Of course, the Currowan Fire was happening simultaneously down on the, you know, to the eastern side of me. So I could see, and I could watch the progress of both fires on those two fronts for the duration of the fire event, which lasted many months, of course. And so from the top of my place I could scan and from, there were many, many days when, and nights when I couldn’t see for smoke. The smoke was so thick in the air, that I could just see glimmers, glimmers of flame. Um, but of course I was being showered with ash and scorched leaves, when the winds brought, I used to call them, um, you know, Currowan’s calling cards.
VeraS 52:28-55:24
Absolutely. And when um, when the bomber was um offloading, oh [laughter] I call it the bomber, the plane, was offloading all the um, the pink retardant, on the transmission towers, on the top of Budawang, I was watching that and I had memories of New York and all sorts of things. You know, sort of triggering. But I~ yeah, I watched the fire crawling over that range and moving from the um seaboard side across into um the valleys on a, on the western side. Hm. Yeah, so I could see all of that happening. It was like a, a wild beast moving backwards and forwards. Like a dragon. You know, with fiery breath. Clambering all around. So yeah, in the end there was fire from many, many different directions. But like I said, didn’t actually come to my place. Thanks to all the people who fought, fought the fires.
Interviewer: You know what’s amazing about the Mongarlowe story? I just find it so moving the way, so my understanding is that the strategy, and you’d know more about this because you were at the meeting, but the strategy essentially was to set up a massive containment line. And to try and hold back the fire as much as possible and steer it around Mongarlowe, which essentially…
You, that~ that’s~ that’s the plan. And the same thing happened in the Canberra fires. But when you have a fire with fire tornadoes and the fire front spetting, um spotting sixty kilometres ahead of the fire front, a little fire break which is, you know, maybe a couple of road widths wide, is not gonna hold back an inferno like that, for long. But it actually allows uh routes of escape, it allows um, vehicles to work with fire that emerges uh from forest into more open country, so, there were lots of um strategies, but they were being tweaked all the time because a lot of people who’ve been fighting fires all their lives said never in their lifetimes have they fought fires of this severity. Never have they seen, um you know, a fire truck flipped by wind, created by um fire, fire convection currents. I mean, you know when you look at that footage from the Community Under Fire, and think about the intensity and ferocity of all of those um natural forces at play, yeah. We~ lot of~ a lot of lessons were learned. And we’re still learning.
B-010_CathieK_AmyK _3 07:31-11:57
Amy_ItIsWhatItIs
Mum and Dad were sort of just doing their thing down the farm and cleaning up and pottering along and, I think you never kind of think it’s gonna happen to you.
So, you know, they were doing all they could. And I ended up going down what was it, a week before I think, just to help get big, help Dad do big stuff. And they were planning to defend, to stay and defend Dad said ‘Oh yeah, we’ll be fine,’ you know, ‘It’ll probably just go past us,’ and all of that. And then the RFS came down, the Araluen guys, and basically just said you need to leave cos it was coming from both angles. We had the Deua River fire and the other one coming down the hill so we were kind of in the middle of the two and just not knowing which direction it would actually hit us from. They said you need to get out. Like you need to pack up and not stay and defend, cos Dad’s knees were gone. Mum’s back was gone. Dad wanted to stay and defend. I went, well, if Dad wants to stay, then I’m gonna have to help him. And then Mum was like, ‘Well, if you’re gonna stay, I’m gonna stay.’ [laughter] So it just turned into this whole thing of do you or don’t you?
And then when the RFS came down and said, ‘Nup, we recommend that you go,’ um, yeah, we kind of had planned to pack everything up on, I think it was Thursday. I think it was a Thursday. Anyway, I can’t remember what day. So we’d planned to, yeah, my brother was gonna come down and, from Canberra, and we were gonna, you know, pack up, get everything out, bring it all up to my house in town and then still go back down and check on the horses and the chickens and stuff and put sprin~ we put sprinklers on the house and all of that, got it all sort of, did what we could, cleaned up around the sheds, put Sisalation all around the house and just did as much as we could possibly do to sort of protect it.
And then yeah, one of the Araluen guys came down at two o’clock in the morning the day before we were sort of gonna casually pack the cars up and get stuff out, and said he could see it over the next valley from our top hill. So one o’clock in the morning or whatever it was I rang my brother, and said we can see it, from the top hill. And so he jumped in the car and raced down and we literally just packed up, got everything we could, packed it all in the car and then Dad and I kept going, we went down morning and afternoon for the two days after and we were down there the morning that it hit as well, and kind of just getting any extra stuff that Mum would give us a little list, and go, ‘Oh, I forgot to get this,’ and ‘I forgot to get that,’ and yeah. And then went down in the morning, put the sprinklers on and it hit that afternoon. So. Yeah, full on. Like it was hard. But I don’t know, I’m~ I’m pretty, pretty positive person. I kind of just go, well, what do you do? Like, it is what it is . And as devastating as it is, it’s happened and there’s not much you can do about it. And Mum’s very posi~ Mum and Dad are positive as well. Mum’s, she got all of her precious stuff out and you know, the, like, Dad didn’t get his drones out and things like that. And he kept talking about that. It’s like, ‘Well, you got out though, Dad’ You know? So that’s the, that’s the main thing. All these things that you’ve gone and bought and, it’s all just stuff, you know? At the end of the day, it’s stuff, and they’re safe. They got their precious things, the family history, all of that kind of stuff that’s irreplaceable, out, and you kind of just, it is what it is.
Mum’s always, Mum always sort of said, you know, ‘We had forty great years down there, in the middle of the bush, with no neighbours, living the dream. And for the last forty years there’s always been that threat of fire could come through and that’s the risk that you take living in the middle of the bush.’ So, you know, it was either gonna happen or it wasn’t, and it did. And, they had forty years. You know, we had a great childhood down there and, learning to drive tractors and, you know, all the fun stuff that you get to do on a farm. So yeah, is what it is. What do you do? It’s done.