CHAPTER FOUR

THE ‘KILMORE’ FIRE

The afternoon became hotter. At the CFA’s Kangaroo Ground Incident Control Centre, the temperature at noon was 41.3 degrees, with a wind from the north of twenty-two kilometres per hour. The temperature rose to 43.6 at two o’clock and forty-four at three o’clock, while the wind blew stronger, reaching thirty-nine kilometres per hour from the north-west at four o’clock.

On Pinnacle Lane, Jane Calder had watered her remaining vegetable plots, resigned to them not lasting out the summer. Jane did what many did — followed the CFA’s recommendations, but also did something that seemed symbolic of the desire to take action to prepare. She raked up leaves; ‘again’, she added, when she recounted her story. The drought had caused many of her garden plants to drop dried leaves as if it were autumn. Like others around the valley, Jane and Malcolm also filled rubbish bins, wheelbarrows, and gutters with water. Jane Calder underlined the confidence that listeners had in the reports they were hearing on ABC 774, the designated broadcaster: ‘I didn’t ever really feel very worried’, she remembered. ‘I trusted what the radio was saying.’ Early in the afternoon, it was saying that fires were burning twenty or more kilometres away. ‘It wasn’t close to us’, Jane recalled. Although fires were burning, the news evoked no special concern in Steels Creek ‘because Kinglake wasn’t being mentioned, and Steels Creek certainly wasn’t’. Most locals believed that fire would come from the direction of Kinglake: north-west. The reports mentioned the ‘Kilmore-Wandong’ fires, but attempts to learn anything from the fire information number failed — half of Victoria was calling and, as the royal commission later established, the system could not cope with the volume of calls.

As responsible landowners, the extended Calder family had tested their fire preparations a couple of times that summer. They had the right kit — clothing, pumps, and hoses — and they had a plan: Jane and Morgan would take the children, while Malcolm and James would stay to protect their houses and the winery. The men wetted the lawn, concentrating on the north-west, assuming that if fire or embers arrived, they would come from that direction. The children played unconcernedly, troubled only by the heat.

There were, as the premier had foreseen, bushfires about — radio bulletins reported outbreaks across the state. But there seemed to be no fire in or near Steels Creek. At 719 Steels Creek Road, Ivan and Maureen Filsell were listening to the radio, with Maureen plotting reports of fire on a map. Around three o’clock, Ivan saw smoke over the distant ranges to the north-west ‘building rapidly’. But the reports continued to speak of a ‘Kilmore fire’. Around four, Ray Dahlstrom decided that ‘nothing’s happening today’; Bronwyn Dahlstrom, checking the CFA website, agreed.

Guy Williams was at home in his metal-framed concrete house on Brennan Avenue, listening to the radio but not thinking he was in any danger. From about 4.30 p.m., from his position high on the ridge, he could see smoke in the Kinglake National Park to the north-west. He knew that it was too risky to try to get away. ‘You’re in for it … this is it’, he thought, and realised that, as he had planned, ‘the house had to save me’.

At the southern end of Steels Creek Road, as the smoke approached, Michael Boffa and his family dressed in heavier clothes. A neighbour, formerly a member of the CFA, had met him mid-afternoon, advising, ‘You’d better get ready. I think we’re on today.’ Michael — who had made long-term physical preparations such as installing pumps — now readied himself against a more immediate threat. ‘We were psychologically ready for the battle’, he said, echoing the military language that comes so readily when talking about fire in this country.

On Jehosaphat Creek, Hannah Sky decided not to go to the St Andrews market, but remained around the house, raking leaf litter and clearing the block of fuel. Living in an oiled wooden cottage and surrounded by trees, she came to regard her efforts as ‘puny’. After taking a cool bath (in ‘a puddle of water’) after lunch, she went outside. To the north-west, she could see a huge cloud of smoke rising from the Kilmore fire. It was white. This, Hannah knew from her CFA training, meant a very hot fire. She felt the wind gusting, burning her ankles, and noticed that the thermometer in the shade of her verandah registered 47.5 degrees. Obedient to her CFA training and despite the heat, she put on some sturdier clothing, still unsure what to do.

At the top of Hargreaves Road, Keith and Lindy Montell had also been keeping an eye on the smoke that they could see to the north-west. While some residents (such as Lynne James, who lacked both power and adequate piped water) were unprepared for the fire, most others were aware of their perilous situation and were ready. The Montells were ‘as prepared as we could have been’, with sturdy fire hoses and spray packs; and, although living on bushy slopes, they felt protected by the bare, drought-blighted alpaca paddocks surrounding their house. Like many other Steels Creek people on days of high fire danger, they checked their pumps and assembled the hoses, buckets, and other firefighting kit that they hoped they would not need to use. They dug out their boots, overalls, and goggles — signs that they took the threat seriously and knew what to do. Around 4.30 p.m., the Montells began actively to prepare for the arrival of a fire, all the while hoping it would not come. Indeed, when they heard of the arrival of a cool change around Geelong, far to the south-west, they thought that it would bring relief.

An elaborate network of fire towers, control centres, regional headquarters, and units kept the authorities informed of where fires were, where they were going, and what the various agencies could do to warn and protect those in their path. At the top of the tree was the Integrated Emergency Coordination Centre, in Nicholson Street, East Melbourne. It was ‘integrated’ because it supposedly unified command over the resources of the three main fire agencies — the CFA, the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. The urban force, responsible for fires within a boundary best now described as arbitrary, was relatively uninvolved on Black Saturday. The main players were the CFA and the Department of Sustainability and Environment. Their historical rivalry, or confusion — exposed in the wake of the 2003 Gippsland fires — had produced a headquarters that was too small and far from integrated: the CFA and the department shared offices; the police liaison officer shared ‘the corner of a desk’ with a colleague; and Kevin Tolhurst, senior lecturer in fire ecology and management at the University of Melbourne, and one of Australia’s most senior bushfire researchers, worked in a corridor.

Sharing an office does not mean sharing control. As the royal commission disclosed, to the incredulity of those not connected to firefighting, control of a fire (or in the esoteric lexicon of Victorian bushfires, ‘management of a fire incident’) depended on where the fire began. If it ignited on private property, it was controlled by the CFA; if on public land, by the Department of Sustainability and Environment. The distinction was a bureaucratic anomaly rather than a sensible working arrangement. On 7 February, such distinctions extended to the regional control centres: responsibility for what became the ‘Kilmore-Murrindindi Complex Fire’ was split between incident control centres at Kilmore and Kangaroo Ground.

In retrospect, the deficiencies became apparent within an hour of the ignition of that fire, the day’s biggest and most destructive blaze. By 12.30 p.m., Kevin Tolhurst was examining the first readings from aircraft over the fire and — factoring in fuel loads, temperature, humidity, and wind speeds and directions — was drafting maps that suggested the direction and likely pace of the front. His calculations slightly underestimated its rate of movement, but otherwise were spot-on. Sadly, those calculations and predictions did not reach those in the crowded command room. One of the most shocking errors the royal commission exposed was that the CFA’s controllers — whom journalist Roger Franklin called the ‘fire generals’ — remained hours behind the fire’s progress and failed to issue timely warnings to those in its path.

The CFA uses military language to describe what it does and how. It employs ‘water bombers’ and ‘attack aircraft’; firefighters form ‘strike teams’. Members of the public are described not even as ‘civilians’ but as ‘non-combatant persons’. This is, of course, sensible for operational reasons: in order to do its job, the CFA has to control a limited force against a vigorous and unpredictable natural phenomenon. Like a military force, it must gather intelligence and order its members into danger; and it must control its members’ movements and actions, both to do its job and to ensure their survival. But, as Robert Manne argued in The Monthly, the CFA ‘operated like an army without a general’. Despite the technology at its disposal, its staff could neither gather the intelligence they needed, nor make the decisions required, nor communicate them through its chains of command.

In truth, the fire that blasted through a vast swathe of the bush and its communities could not be fought. Fire units could at best have saved individual buildings and properties, but nothing could have stopped or turned the fire as a whole. Still, as Ivan Filsell pointed out, ‘“non-combatants” could have taken more appropriate action with more relevant information’.

Tens of thousands of people listened to the ABC’s 774 radio station. The ABC fielded calls from hundreds of alarmed, confused, or distressed callers every hour, but was often unable to air information from those who wanted to warn. The ABC’s guidelines limited it to broadcasting official announcements, passing along information from what the CFA called ‘non-combatants’ only when they could ‘see flames and are in a position to describe with some authority the precise location and/or direction of the fire’. Besides placing program producers in an impossible dilemma, the restriction further limited the warning available to people living in the fire’s path — the more so because so many were listening to the network in the hope of obtaining reliable advice.

Stephanie Giffard was one of those listening to 774, and she also had the CFA website open. She told her husband, ‘It’s clear. Kilmore.’ ‘That’s fifty kilometres away’, Allan replied. ‘It’s nowhere near here.’

Early in the afternoon, between 1.30 and 2.00 p.m., ‘huge clouds’ came rolling slowly over the nearby ridges, pushed by the wind that was at that moment driving the gathering fire into the ranges north-west of Steels Creek. Around mid-afternoon, friends of the Giffards — Steve Webber and a workmate from the De Bortoli winery — arrived. They said that, from the winery — just off the Melba Highway, on the Dixons Creek side of the low range that separates the Steels Creek and Dixons Creek catchments — they could see ‘huge smoke clouds coming over’. They had thought, ‘Gee, Steels Creek’s on fire’, and had come over to see if the Giffards needed help. ‘No, mate’, Allan replied. ‘Don’t worry. We’re monitoring the website. Everything’s under control.’

In the heat, the Giffards and their children got into the pool. Later, Allan’s brother, Rob, an ex–Royal Australian Navy submariner, arrived, earlier than expected. Allan invited him to join them in the pool, but Rob appeared to be, as Stephanie remembered, ‘a bit toey’. ‘Oh, no, no, I’m right’, he said, looking about, as if worried by something. Within ten minutes, about five o’clock, an ember — a scrap of burnt bark — fell into the pool. That galvanised Rob. ‘Hey, listen, Steph’, he said. ‘Why don’t you get the stuff, get the kids …’ He suggested that she take their children and meet Lisa, Rob’s girlfriend, at the Yarra Glen hotel. The Giffards later realised that Rob’s decisive manner had saved them and their house. They realised that in the swimming pool, ‘in our own little world’, they would neither have noticed the magnitude of the approaching fire nor perhaps been able to leave in time. ‘We would have been totally caught unawares … maybe still in the swimming pool’, Stephanie said.

The fire claimed a victim near Steels Creek even before flames reached the valley. Gareth Jones-Roberts lived with his parents, Gareth and Norma, on the Yarra Glen end of Mount Wise Road. With embers falling on their property at around 4.15 p.m., Gareth drove into Yarra Glen to buy petrol for the house’s generator. On the way back, he lost control of his car and plunged into a culvert. The car burst into flames, setting fire to the verge. Firefighters took an hour to extinguish the blaze. Gareth’s father speculated that his son ‘must have come around the corner and been distracted [by] seeing the smoke and fire, thinking it was his home, and that we were there alone’. Gareth died from asphyxia resulting from smoke inhalation. His parents’ house, though menaced by fire, would survive.

On Steels Creek Road, Ivan Filsell described the experience of fighting fires started by the spot fires starting all over the valley:

4.30 Non stop action from here, time stood still, howling wind, oven hot air full of sparks and smoke, dark as night and the roar of a jumbo jet. Maureen inside with mop and bucket putting out sparks being forced through bedroom windows … Judy [a neighbour seeking refuge] on veranda with hose until power went off … I was outside keeping all gravity hoses running … At the crescendo I had to lie down with hose over me to get air before diving inside …

From about five o’clock, burning embers began to fall from the sky onto Steels Creek. They came as almost a complete surprise. No one, even those who had monitored the websites and listened to the radio all afternoon, had any idea what was coming. The telephone trees linking the valley’s neighbourhoods were unable to provide adequate warning. They were intended to pass on warnings sent from the CFA command, but, on the day, no one in the war room or any subordinate headquarters knew the position of the fire or was organised to disseminate that warning. Neighbours did pass advice and warnings to each other (a sign that the community functioned up to a few minutes before the fire’s arrival), but the formal network broke down. No one in Steels Creek knew anything more than was available through the radio and the internet, or what they could see from the verandah. No one in Steels Creek could have known that a massive bushfire was approaching. Indeed, when Kevin Tolhurst in Nicholson Street had plotted the fire’s likely path, it seemed that the blaze would miss Steels Creek itself — at least unless and until the wind changed.

High on Yarra Ridge, Barry and Helen Richards had been worried all day. By mid-afternoon, Helen was taking photographs of her wilting zucchinis and Barry had unrolled and checked their fire hoses. Aged sixty-nine, Barry decided that he needed help and called his son, Sean, a former CFA volunteer. Aware of the general direction of the wind, they expected that if fire arrived it would come out of the national park from the north-west. Late in the afternoon, though, the Richardses were surprised to learn of the spot fires burning to the east of Yarra Glen, near the Train Trak winery. Then falling embers began to drift down on the paddocks around the Richardses’ house. Soon, they saw flames appear over the ridge to the west. Helen, with her camera still at hand, had the foresight to take several photographs of what she called the ‘pall of rotten, dirty smoke and intense colour just … over the ridge at the end of our driveway’. The time code of the camera (adjusted for summer time) showed it to be 5.53 p.m. Sean, outside readying the hoses, heard the approaching roar and shouted, ‘It’s coming.’ And it was coming — but from the west.