Disaster Unfolds Live On Air

Melinda James

IT WAS JUST BEFORE 7 AM ON NEW YEAR’S DAY. Lyn was on the line from Milton, live to air on ABC Illawarra. ‘Hi Mel, I’m calling from the old phone box on the Princes Highway in Milton. The phone won’t accept coins but I could call your ABC 1300 number for free. It’s the only way to get through.’

Car horns were beeping in the background. Lyn said there was a bank-up of cars trying to head north but they weren’t going anywhere – the road was closed. There was no power, no fuel, no ice. Mobile reception was virtually non-existent. The previous day the fire had reached the Catholic school on the northern outskirts of town before a southerly change had sent the flames north. The change was fantastic for Milton but would have been devastating for Lake Conjola and Yatte Yattah, just ten kilometres away.

In the studio, we were stunned. Milton is surrounded by pasture and cleared land. It’s prime dairy country. How did the fire get so close?

It’s smoky and eerie, Lyn said. People are desperate; there’s no way out.

That morning, everyone was hungry for information. I was back on air after nine hours broadcasting from ABC Illawarra the day before, on a chaotic New Year’s Eve, when soaring temperatures and a powerful early southerly had sent the Currowan fire raging up the New South Wales coast. Shocking images flowed in from further south – Malua Bay, Mogo, Cobargo and Batemans Bay were either ablaze or already destroyed. Lives had been lost, we knew that for sure. But we weren’t sure how many homes had been destroyed and feared it would certainly be in the hundreds.

Our last on-air moments of 2019 had been spent talking to people from the small villages and suburbs further north in the Shoalhaven – Yatte Yattah, Little Forest, Conjola Park. With power and phone lines down, details were scant. Come the morning, calls flooded in from around the country.

Fran in Tasmania grew up in Yatte Yattah. ‘Is there any news?’ she pleaded. ‘My heart is breaking.’

Yvonne was in tears. Her daughter was in Conjola.

Jenny’s grandson was there too. She was frantic.

Another Jenny in Adelaide: her family was also at Lake Conjola. ‘This is a bloody disaster,’ she yelled down the phone. ‘Why aren’t they sending in cruise ships to pick people up? They’re running out of food.’

—

A radio studio can be a lonely place. Sometimes you wonder if anyone’s even listening. But never had I felt the presence of listeners like I did through the peak of this fire. Trust had been built over an already terrible summer and people now felt ownership of the radio. They didn’t just passively listen – they used us. ABC Radio stopped being ‘the media’ and became the community square. A place to talk to each other, share vital information, ask for help, vent, rage. We were a megaphone to warn neighbours the fire was approaching and, when the immediate danger had passed, we were a shoulder to cry on – or cry with. Some callers were lost for words, couldn’t speak. Their voices might have been cracking but they didn’t get off the phone. They needed to talk, feel connected. And there was a palpable sense that thousands of people were leaning in, listening intently, gripped by harrowing accounts of fire bearing down . . . or, later, sharing the grief of someone who had just lost everything.

It’s also rare as a broadcaster to be hearing information for the first time as it goes to air. But this emergency was playing out in real time, live on the radio. There was no crafting and repackaging of information, no censoring or editing of people’s emotions. And there was no time to temper my own. It was raw and real and moving fast. In those dark days between New Year’s Eve and 5 January, with information hard to come by, the intimacy and immediacy of radio came into its own. Which was lucky, because with no power, no internet and unreliable phone reception, a battery-powered radio or the car stereo was all some people had.

—

Information started to flow on New Year’s Day, largely thanks to listeners. Tens of thousands of holidaymakers were stranded. Fire was everywhere in the landscape. The Roads and Traffic Authority’s live traffic website showed thick red lines on all major roads: the Kings Highway linking Canberra to the coast was closed, the Princes Highway to the north was blocked between Milton and Nowra, and there was no going south from Batemans Bay. Smaller local roads, the only way out of the tiny villages just off the highway were also shut. There was no way out for the foreseeable future. But these people needed to get home – they were being told to get out. An even worse forecast was looming: in three days we were expecting temperatures in the mid-40s and, if that wasn’t enough, a violent southerly buster, a set of bellows to push the fire north towards more townships.

Callers told us that staff at the Milton IGA were wearing head torches and leading customers around one at a time to get basic supplies. At Ulladulla, larger than Milton and a few kilometres south, Woolworths was the only place in the area with generator power – and listeners described a mob gathering outside. As word got out, the queue to get in stretched for blocks. Woollies was out of candles. Batteries, long-life milk and bread were running low and locals called in angry that people were walking out with full trolleys. ‘We’re gonna need that stuff,’ they told us.

Still, a vital question hung in the air unanswered – what had happened at Conjola?

The ABC’s Selby Stewart was the first reporter into Conjola Park, a small suburb just off the highway, overlooking Lake Conjola. He arrived at 5 am as the sun was coming up over the smouldering ruins of the town. When we finally got him on air via a satellite phone, he described an apocalypse.

‘The street signs have all melted,’ Selby said. ‘There are cars on the street that have melted. The paint’s dripped and solidified on the road.’ He counted at least 40 houses completely destroyed. There were certainly many more in areas he couldn’t reach. He found people at first light, dazed and calling out for lost pets, searching though rubble to make sure everyone was accounted for. ‘It’s really . . .’ For a moment, words escaped him. ‘The community’s really hurting down here.’

Selby recounted what he’d heard from those who had stayed to defend their homes. ‘The fire was so intense, it became a firestorm. It was pitch-black. The winds were so strong and there were embers flying everywhere.’

People had described to him the sickening sound of animals howling in distress. The horror was so immense, they told him, that if they had their time over, they would not have stayed. Bugger the house, never again.

Selby later told me he had been stopped on arrival by a deeply traumatised and desperate man. ‘I can’t find my elderly neighbour,’ the man had said. ‘She was here. We don’t know where she is.’ Selby helped the man trawl through the ruins and ashes of his neighbour’s home. It wasn’t until that night he heard her family had come and got her out with 20 minutes to spare.

Straight after Selby’s report, a listener named Hayley called in from Ulladulla with an update on what was happening at Woollies. She wouldn’t recommend trying to get in, she said, the queues were enormous.

I asked if she was local. She said, ‘Yep, I’m from Conjola Park.’ It was a jolt that caught me in the guts. We fell into silence. Chances were high she had been listening to Selby’s report while she was on hold. She told me the last she’d heard before she got out was that her front and back yards were on fire. ‘It happened within an hour.’ More silence. All I could say was, ‘I’m so sorry, Hayley. So sorry.’

—

Slowly, more stories emerged of what had happened at Conjola.

Just before 11 am on New Year’s Eve, Brett Cripps had been on the roof of the holiday house he’d been coming to for 50 years, filling the gutters with water. He saw a plume of smoke not far off. At 11.04 am he put a message on Facebook to warn neighbours the fire was coming. A little over half an hour later embers were flying, causing spot fires all around.

‘It just went up within minutes,’ Brett told us. ‘Hit the first house. The second house. Hit our house. A fourth house.’ He ran down to his jetty and took his boat to the middle of the lake. He saw spot fires ‘going berserk’ on the opposite shore near two young families and their caravans. They were about to get in their cars to try to escape. He screamed at them, ‘Get in the boat, get in the boat! I don’t care how you get in, just get in.’

His five-metre boat, built to hold six people, soon had 15 on board, including seven children under ten. Within minutes their nearby cars and caravans were incinerated. For nearly three hours, along with dozens of other overloaded boats and jet skis bobbing on Lake Conjola, they watched as houses burnt. Mini tornados whipped burning leaves and embers into the air. Trees cracked and gas bottles popped. Brett was proud of the kids. ‘They were crying at first,’ he said. ‘But then they were quiet. Really just . . . quiet.’

Shoalhaven mayor Amanda Findley was at the Ulladulla Civic Centre, an evacuation centre powered by generators borrowed from, of all places, a visiting circus. ‘When the news came in from Conjola, it just felt like the blood was draining from your body,’ she said later. ‘It was like a slow burn.’ One family after another, after another. ‘And they’re all people you know.’

Two staff members from the Milton IGA had lost their homes at Conjola Park. Their boss, Shane Wilson, said they turned up to work the next day, one of them in the only clothes she had left. ‘She had a small pair of gumboots on because she had no shoes,’ Shane said. ‘A customer come to me and gives me $50 and says, “Can you make sure that young girl gets that money for a pair of shoes?”’

The final count was 89 homes destroyed at Conjola Park.

‘This has been life shattering,’ Shane told us. ‘And unfortunately we’ve lost a few valuable people.’ He broke down and couldn’t continue on air.

Three local men had died. But there was no time to grieve, not yet.

Mark Williams, incident controller for the Currowan fire, had bad news. ‘We are expecting a similar if not worse day [on 4 January] than we had on New Year’s Eve,’ he said. ‘We are imploring people: if they don’t need to be here, as soon as they can get out they should do so.’

Long queues of cars trying to leave Cobargo, NSW. (Matt Roberts/ABC)

ABC journalist Selby Stewart interviewing Eurobodalla Shire Mayor Liz Innes, Batemans Bay. (Timothy Swanston/ABC)

Over the coming days, evacuating tourists became the priority. But the ongoing threat of fire and falling trees meant fire-ravaged seaside villages were completely cut off. Local roads opened to the Princes Highway, then closed again. The highway itself opened, then closed again. It was difficult to keep up. Police escorted a few cars out at a time.

And the calls kept coming.

Neil phoned in and said people were panicking at Sussex Inlet. There was a three-kilometre queue to get into a service station where fuel had finally arrived. But, tank empty or full, no one could get out anyway.

Michael called. He reckoned 3000 people were trying to get out of Lake Conjola. People with young kids had been sitting in their cars for 24 hours and people were starting to ration food.

Bruce gave instructions to anyone listening on how to get into his caravan at Conjola, where there was a stack of food. He’d fled just before New Year’s Eve because his place near Tallong in the Southern Highlands was under threat from the northern flank of this massive fire. ‘Please, go inside and help yourself,’ he said.

A logjam of cars and caravans stretched 20 kilometres south from Milton. People waiting for the highway north to open were refusing to budge for fear of losing their spot, preferring to sleep by the side of the side of the road. Caravans and cars occupied every inch of the town.

Layla called in and told us that locals had put signs in their gardens offering their bathrooms to travellers. Others were making people cups of tea. Kids were cycling up and down the highway, giving out bottles of water.

Mayor Findley said her daughter’s boyfriend had ridden past a seemingly endless stretch of cars bumper to bumper – and he’d heard ABC Radio leaking out of every car stereo.

The Princes Highway to the north of Milton winds through thickly forested national parks, with the occasional turn-off to remote villages or bushy campgrounds. It’s usually an idyllic and peaceful drive, but flames were still flickering and embers glowing by the side of the road, threatening to flare and again isolate communities. Crews worked all night to fell hundreds of smouldering trees, repair power lines and ensure the roads were safe. Eventually, good news started to trickle in. Roads were opening. People called with reassuring tales of progress. Be patient, they said, you’ll get a clear run if you can make it to Nowra.

Polly called to say she’d made it home – 23 hours from Batemans Bay to Sydney listening to ABC Radio all the way. The same trip would usually take about four hours. For tens of thousands of holidaymakers, a terrifying ordeal was finally coming to an end. But for locals, the horror forecast of the next day loomed like a dark finale.

—

Early on 4 January, it was already stinking hot. I’d swapped the morning shift for the late afternoon to get some much-needed sleep ahead of my eighth day in a row of broadcasting. But today felt different. There were only locals left. We could feel people bracing. Evacuation centres were filling. Everybody just to the north of the Currowan fire’s flank knew it would eventually jump the Shoalhaven River and head their way. One resident of Kangaroo Valley said it was like being sentenced to death but not being told the date of your execution. Finally, the time had come for the community to stare this fire down.

By now well-practised, listeners started calling in to share information. It was 47 degrees at Fisherman’s Paradise; 51 at Kangaroo Valley. White ash was raining on Callala Bay. In Nowra, day became night within minutes. Winds from the east and west collided, creating a convection effect. An enormous pyrocumulus storm appeared on the Bureau of Meteorology radar as a red and black mass about 60 kilometres long. By this point in the summer, Australians were all too familiar with these fire-induced storms, or flammagenitus cloud. They dramatically increase the risk of fire spread, generating dry lightning strikes and wild, erratic winds that can fling embers for kilometres in all directions.

The alert went out at 4 pm. All residents on both sides of the Princes Highway from Nowra to Kioloa, 100 kilometres south, were told to ‘shelter in place’. A similar warning was issued between Berry and Kangaroo Valley to its west. The entire Shoalhaven region – 100,000 people – was told: wherever you are, it’s too late to leave.

The calls flowed in. People were frustrated we couldn’t tell them exactly where the fire was and where it was heading. There were fingers of fire front and new spot fires everywhere. The winds were so erratic, the air so hot and dry, that nowhere was safe.

Grant was well known to us, having called in several times back in early December with harrowing real-time reports of defending his property at Termeil, inland and a little south of Milton. From his vantage point up on the hill, he now described three massive columns of smoke edging their way towards coastal villages.

Chris in coastal Manyana could see flames 50 metres from his house. Water-bombing choppers were circling overheard. He was quite literally under fire, but Chris stayed cool, choosing to talk to ABC Radio. ‘It’s a bit of chaos here,’ he said. ‘As soon as the southerly hits we’ll be right. Until then we’re a bit stuffed.’

I told him he sounded pretty calm, as the wind whipped over the mouthpiece of his phone.

‘Well, Mel,’ he replied, ‘you lose your head, you lose your life.’ Finally, with the fire in his immediate vicinity, he just had to go.

We’d got word some fishermen from Ulladulla had spent the day delivering supplies by boat to communities cut off by fire and were now rescuing people from the beaches at Manyana and Bendalong. Both communities were surrounded by fire. Producer Rory McDonald managed to get through to Ulladulla game fisher George Lirantzis who was on his boat, anchored just off the coast of Bendalong. George said he had room for some more people still stranded on the beach but the southerly had hit and it was too dangerous to head to shore again. ‘These people have been to hell and back,’ he said.

George handed his phone to a woman he’d just rescued. Gay had no idea she was now live on ABC Radio. I explained and apologised, but she said she didn’t mind. ‘I’m just over it,’ she said of the fires, ‘because it’s been going for weeks and weeks and weeks. It’s the southerly that got us this time.’ She paused. ‘Yeah, it’s definitely going over my place at the moment.’

I imagined her craning her head and gazing in the direction of her house, watching the flames surround it. Then she laughed. ‘I’m soaking wet with bare feet and I don’t know where I’m going. But I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.’ To this day I’m astounded by how people like Gay let us into their most vulnerable moments live on air.

Back on land, the southerly seemed to be gathering pace as it hurtled north. For some it was a reprieve; for others almost certain devastation.

Gerard in Lake Tabourie rang in to say that the southerly had eased the threat at his place. I told him I’d lost count of the number of times the fire had menaced Lake Tabourie this summer. Gerard chuckled and told me he was going to sleep on the veranda with the hose in his hand.

It was approaching 8 pm and my shift was coming to end. I was on the line with Superintendent Mark Williams. After weeks of talking to this unflappable firefighter with 35 years’ experience, a man who fights fires in the US and Canada in our off-season, this was the first time I’d heard his voice quicken. He told us the fire had crossed the Shoalhaven River to the north in several places. Fireballs were being flung north faster and further than anyone expected.

I told everyone listening to stay safe and look after one another, and then signed off. Colleagues told me to go home and rest. Don’t listen to the radio, they said. Were they kidding? I tuned in to the radio in bed late into the night. Fitzroy Falls, a village inland not far from my mother-in-law’s home, was ordered to shelter in place as the fire approached. Within a few hours, it was clear more homes had been lost in Kangaroo Valley and also in Wingello and Bundanoon, the latter not even mentioned in earlier warnings. We had thought it was too far from the fire front.

—

The relentlessness of this Currowan fire is still difficult to convey. Since it began one hot day in late November, sparked by a dry lightning strike in a remote state forest, it had terrorised the Shoalhaven again and again, circling around its hills and cleaves. Lives had been lost; hundreds of homes too. Some communities were evacuated two, three or four times. It was dubbed ‘the never-ending fire’.

But it did end. We’d been told from the start that nothing could put this fire out but sustained and heavy rain. Finally, mercifully, rain came, rain like we hadn’t seen for years. By 9 February the fire was out, 74 days after it started, having burnt through almost half-a-million hectares. In a cruel twist of fate, that same rain flooded Lake Conjola and damaged lakeside holiday homes where families who’d lost their properties to fire had been staying.

It was several weeks before I could see the damage for myself. By then the epicormic growth on the dominant eucalypt species had sprouted. Iridescent green shoots burst out along the lengths of limbs. They were a defiant, triumphant display of life in a blackened landscape that stretched as far as the eye could see. Some proud gums had shed their charred bark to reveal white trunks, almost glowing among the blackened stumps around them.

They reminded me of the people I’d met who had lost their homes. Many told me they’d been glued to the radio; despite never having met them before, these people felt like old friends. Stripped of everything, they stood tall, indefatigable.

Rod Hayes, who on 3 December became the first person to lose his home in the Currowan fire, also lost his extensive art collection and thousands of books. An architect in his 70s, he’s now working on an underground fireproof design for a home carved into Boyne Mountain, dug into the same hill where his old place once stood.

At 84, Max Atkins, a former mayor of the Shoalhaven, narrowly escaped death when his Yatte Yattah home went up in flames. A couple of weeks after the fire, he returned to the ashes of his property to find tiny shoots sprouting from his lovingly tended but recently scorched rose garden. Painstakingly, he resurrected those roses and just two months later he took out a swag of blue and red ribbons for Best Rose at the Milton Show.

In Kangaroo Valley, long-time resident Chris Pryor showed me a lump of molten glass that used to be three Pyrex cooking bowls. It’s all that remained of her home. She begged people to consider whether they could withstand the horror of living through a fire that liquifies material designed to melt at 1500 degrees. Are you really ready to defend your property?

Greg Webb had tried to save his family’s place overlooking Lake Conjola. While his wife sheltered in the basement, Greg fought the 40-metre flames. They survived but their home did not. And Greg’s hands were left badly burnt. As we talked, he teared up at the loss of his children’s baby photos and he mourned the smell of his towels and sheets. But he smiled when he told me several of his wife’s hairspray cans were pretty much all that survived. A self-described ‘glass half-full kind of guy’, he was looking forward to getting all his family and friends together to help rebuild. ‘It’ll be fun,’ he said. But then he turned serious. ‘Talk to me again in a year, Mel.’

Two months after the fire ended, ABC Illawarra broadcast from Milton, getting out of the studio to check in on how the community was recovering.

In the local IGA, I overheard a conversation between two blokes near the checkout. ‘I’ve still got that much shit lying around. I thought, fuck it, I’m gonna have a burn-off. Some bastard’s gotta be the first to light a match in this town.’ Everyone laughed, but it was jarring and a bit uncomfortable.

The shop’s owner, Shane Wilson, told me the trauma was still there, just beneath the surface. ‘You don’t have to ask,’ he said. ‘You can tell in their eyes. A lot of people have got that bit of angriness. A lot of people won’t to this day accept any donations or credit because they’re too proud. They want to row their own boat but that has a mental strain and that affects them. We can see that in their eyes.’

Shoalhaven mayor Amanda Findley agreed. ‘So many people are putting on a brave face,’ she said. ‘But inside you know that everything is not OK. There’s some big tough nuts giving you stick and you can see that they’re broken.’

Amanda Findley’s biggest concern is that fear and distrust of the bush will linger. She recalls going into Conjola Park just after New Year’s Eve and finding people preparing for the fire’s potential return. They were tearing down anything that hadn’t burnt – trees, hedges, even rose bushes – and had a large tip truck to take it all away. She said she saw ‘dead-set fear in their eyes’. They were cutting down anything combustible, saying ‘this bastard’s not getting us a second time round’.

The south coast bush is what makes us who we are – it’s where we live, where we holiday, or where we grow up and grow old. But after this fire, called Currowan, which circled like a slow-moving shark, and which by the time it was done had burnt 80 per cent of the Shoalhaven local government area, Amanda Findley was not the only one who wondered whether our relationship with the bush would ever be the same.

Melinda James is a journalist and broadcaster based in Wollongong at ABC Illawarra