Listen to the Interview excerpts
CF240309_SB 19:15-21:30
It think it would have been about four thirty, five o’clock in the morning and I sort of looked out from the ensuite window and I saw a light and there was a gentleman. He was, all these trees along the Trentham road, well, there was, how can I say it? There was trees everywhere. The whole road, virtually half the road was almost, maybe the whole road was completely blocked with trees. And this gentleman who happened to be uh picking up his daughter from, from a dance, uh, in Kyneton, was going home. And with all these trees, they fell all around him and he got trapped. He couldn’t move. So I looked out there and I look, I said ‘Oh is it, lights over there.’ So I didn’t take much notice for the first time. But when I got up about an hour or so later, I looked out there again, the lights were still there. That, and I said that got me a bit curious. So I got dressed, went for a bit of a walk and he, he was sitting in his car for virtually about three or four hours during the storm, with all these trees all around him. So. Yeah.
Were you able to help him?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got him out. We w~ d~ we had to get the chainsaws and cut a few trees out of the way for him, move them out off the road. And a few of the locals had Bobcats and they moved the trees with Bobcats with the big heavy ones. So he ended up, you know, they both, they both were okay. The car wasn’t damaged. They were just trapped between all these trees that, that fell all around them. So.
How was he?
Sorry?
How was he?
How was he?
He’s sitting in the road with these trees falling all around him, feeling a bit trapped!
[laughter] Yeah, well, well he, he uh once I think all these trees fell around him, there was no no there were not too many more could have fallen near him. So, he was quite sober. But uh I did ask him to come inside with him and his daughter to sort of give them a cup of tea or something like that, and, but he, he sort of declined. He just wanted to get home. So we just sort of quickly got him out and I think even when we got him out of the Trentham Road, I think he was, he had to stop somewhere else other than Little Hampton, cos Little Hampton had a few trees down.
So I don’t think, I don’t know if he got, how far he would have got that day.
TrenthamStorm_CF240514_SD 01:14:05 – 01:14:40 (35sec)
When I went outside, I I remember walking through the house and I went outside and I thought ‘Holy fuck, trees aren’t supposed to be doing that.’ And I was watching trees bowing and then actually going around in circles. Like, you’re kidding me?! And all I could hear was wind. I couldn’t hear trees falling because that was all just sucked up in the sound of the wind.
It was, it was really awful. And then the aftermath.
TrenthamStorm_CF240514_SD_2 01:16:36 – 01:17:05 (29sec)
I could actually just feel this tremor inside me. I was really, it was scary. I didn’t, I didn’t really like being on my own. But it’s the aftermath of that because I don’t like the wind at all now. If I’ve got an appointment and it’s a really windy day, I cancel the appointment. I say “Oh no, I’m feeling a little bit more comfortable- !oh… I need to stay home today.”
And that’s been two years?
Yeah.
TrenthamFire_RR240403_PS 01:28:32 – 01:31:41 (3m9s)
And I just remember turning the corner, and the bitumen road, and the strike team leader who’d done a great job. He was just standing there pointing us in the direction, cos he’s like, I’ll meet you at the corner of such and such and and then you go up through there, into the gate, and chase, chase it down. So we’ve turned the corner and here he is, standing about from here, that rock away from big flames going, pointing at the trucks, pointing up the road. That’s the way I want you to go.
Pointing at the trucks, yeah.
Yeah. And we look up and all we can see is flames. There is no road [laughter]. The road’s gone. The flames are twenty, twenty-five foot peeling across the top of the road. So they’ve come off embankment on the other side and they’re just wshh like this. And he’s like, I mean, like do you- you what- you want us to dr- And the driver we had, I can’t remember, he was from, Clint, from Mount Egerton, he just put the foot down, just drove straight through it. But-
Straight through that the wall of flames?
Straight through the wall of flames. And we’ve- we’ve- so we’re on the back. I’ve got um, I had the branch,and it- and I just as soon as I see- has seen going for it, like, oh we’re on. I’ve just pointed the hose straight towards the the flame so I can hit it as soon as I can. So I was hitting it ten metres in advance. So, so-
So were- were you directed to do that?
No.
You did it yourself.
Yeah. Well that- well, that’s- and, and they do- that’s what they teach you, you know.
Yeah.
You don’t hit- or you do hit the flames off the side of the truck,
Yep.
but you want to hit them in front of the truck,
Yep.
so it takes the heat off the cabin. You know, as you’re going past it. But this was next level shit. It was um- yeah. And my- then my initial thought was What? We’re really-? You really want us-? Okay, well that’s what we- that’s what we do.
Yeah.
And just managed to sort of knock it to the point where, you know, we all just buried our heads and we burst through the other side. And we ca- and we, you know, it might have been twenty metres or whatever it was, um, we’d come out the other side. And how we didn’t head on with another truck was.. cos you could not see your hand in front of you. And then we’ve- we’ve come out of the smoke, we see the gate, and then we’re just in and we’re just chasing it. We’re just chasing it around paddocks, back and forward. It was like you put it out here to turn around and start again. Um, but that was that was probably the… not scary, it’s the most intense.
Absolutely, absolutely.
But, um, anyway, we stopped it. We stopped it from jumping the freeway.
CF240406_HS Sample 3 – Trentham Storm
Yeah, a little bit of, devastation is probably a bit strong, but it was a little bit. Like we tried to walk around the house and we couldn’t get around. Went to go to work and saw one tree across the driveway, and then thought about the chainsaw and yeah, I could probably cut that, cut through that, but then I walked out and then the whole street was just covered in trees.
You know, sometimes there was, oh, there was probably about 12 just in front of our property that were right across the road, let alone the properties between us and the, and the main road. So there was no way we could get out.
Interviewer: How far are you from the main road?
Oh maybe 200 metres?
CF240406_HS Sample 4 – Trentham Storm
Well in the morning we went to check on the elderly neighbours next door, with the dogs, just to make sure they were OK. Although I knew there were no trees close to their property and their house is built very well, better than ours. But we went just to see how they were, and the wind was still very, very, very loud. And when we were just leaving their place and I was putting my shoes on the balcony, I think I had my back to the street and our place, and I thought I heard a crack and a thump, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t sure. There was so much noise. There was so much noise. And that was still at 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning.
And then we came back and a massive tree had come down that we’d just walken under, 20 minutes before. And that scared us cause we could have been under that tree and myself, my partner and our dogs could easily have been squashed. It was very, very close. But to give you an idea how loud it was, I didn’t know if I’d heard it or not. And I didn’t know if the tree had been up or not when we walked around. And I looked at photos on my camera just to confirm, because it was that loud and it was only 20 metres away and it was a massive tree. And it came down, yeah, and I didn’t know if I heard it, [laughter], or when it had happened. So it was quite disorientating.