young Kelly Johnson.
These five people remain outside, through blinding smoke, impenetrable darkness and blistering heat, for the duration of the fire’s passage. One team is working from a rickety old pump behind the hotel, the other from a pump and tank behind the shed.
Trish Hendrie steps outside. A surreal vista appears before her. Figures loom in the half-dark, their faces fraught with anxiety, smoke reflected in their eyes. A fireball shoots overhead, a tumult of flame thrashing the trees behind it. She jumps back in, slams the door and calls to those inside:
‘Brace yourselves! It’s going to hit us now.’
GODSPEED TO YOU ALL
To the members of the public who stare at that fire coming in, it seems that the gates of hell have opened. But what does it look like to the professionals?
There is at least one experienced, qualified, professional fire manager who’s positioned himself directly in the path of the inferno: Acting Ranger in Charge of the Kinglake National Park, Tony Fitzgerald. And even for him, a man who’s been working with fire for more than twenty years, it’s a frightful experience, one that comes close to claiming his own life.
Around 5.30 pm he’s standing on Mount Sugarloaf with one of his team, Aaron Redmond, staring out over the hills and valleys below. Wondering how long they have left. Aaron is nineteen; he’s only recently joined the DSE, but has been a member of the CFA since he was twelve. He knows fire. The two men have gone up there to get an idea of what it is doing, are horrified at the situation unfolding before their eyes.
They are looking directly down upon the destruction of Strathewen. They see the inferno rolling over the town, the spot fires and fingers of flame heading in their direction. They hear the local CFA captain, Dave McGahy, as he sends his crews into action.
‘Godspeed to you all.’
‘Godspeed? Not the sort of language I’ve ever heard on the radio,’ Fitzgerald comments later. ‘It sounded like something you’d say to someone when you feared you were never going to see them again.’
‘Doomsday language,’ adds Aaron.
Appropriately so, as it turns out: of the 120 houses in Strathewen, only sixteen will survive. One of the twenty-seven victims in the town is a member of McGahy’s crew.
There are experienced emergency services personnel in Kinglake West who cannot speak highly enough of the DSE’s work on Black Saturday. Fitzgerald was the first to warn them of what he feared was coming, and he and his crew risked their lives to defend their section of the community. Frank Allan from Kinglake West CFA rang the Kangaroo Ground Incident Control Centre around 2 pm to get more information on the plume of smoke he was watching from the driveway of his brigade, and was stunned that nobody there seemed to be aware of it. He assumes they were so busy looking at screens they hadn’t even stepped outside to look at the sky.
Tony Fitzgerald wasn’t relying upon computers or other equipment but on his own awareness—a knowledge of the way fire works, of the topography, the fuel loads, even his reading of the winds to predict the timing of the change.
It was an awareness based on more than twenty years of making fire his business. He understands fire at a theoretical level, with a degree in ecology, majoring in botany and geography from Melbourne University. But more importantly, he’s been working at the coal—or fire—face since 1983. He was recruited to Kinglake primarily to work as a fire manager, and in the fifteen years he’s been there has managed controlled burns on thousands of hectares, as well as holding command roles in some of Victoria’s biggest bushfires.
It isn’t until Fitzgerald comes into the Kinglake West station and tells them that according to his gut instinct the fire is going to hit them in about two hours—which it does—that the CFA has the first inkling of what they are in for. They make good use of the warning,
These five people remain outside, through blinding smoke, impenetrable darkness and blistering heat, for the duration of the fire’s passage. One team is working from a rickety old pump behind the hotel, the other from a pump and tank behind the shed.
Trish Hendrie steps outside. A surreal vista appears before her. Figures loom in the half-dark, their faces fraught with anxiety, smoke reflected in their eyes. A fireball shoots overhead, a tumult of flame thrashing the trees behind it. She jumps back in, slams the door and calls to those inside:
‘Brace yourselves! It’s going to hit us now.’
GODSPEED TO YOU ALL
To the members of the public who stare at that fire coming in, it seems that the gates of hell have opened. But what does it look like to the professionals?
There is at least one experienced, qualified, professional fire manager who’s positioned himself directly in the path of the inferno: Acting Ranger in Charge of the Kinglake National Park, Tony Fitzgerald. And even for him, a man who’s been working with fire for more than twenty years, it’s a frightful experience, one that comes close to claiming his own life.
Around 5.30 pm he’s standing on Mount Sugarloaf with one of his team, Aaron Redmond, staring out over the hills and valleys below. Wondering how long they have left. Aaron is nineteen; he’s only recently joined the DSE, but has been a member of the CFA since he was twelve. He knows fire. The two men have gone up there to get an idea of what it is doing, are horrified at the situation unfolding before their eyes.
They are looking directly down upon the destruction of Strathewen. They see the inferno rolling over the town, the spot fires and fingers of flame heading in their direction. They hear the local CFA captain, Dave McGahy, as he sends his crews into action.
‘Godspeed to you all.’
‘Godspeed? Not the sort of language I’ve ever heard on the radio,’ Fitzgerald comments later. ‘It sounded like something you’d say to someone when you feared you were never going to see them again.’
‘Doomsday language,’ adds Aaron.
Appropriately so, as it turns out: of the 120 houses in Strathewen, only sixteen will survive. One of the twenty-seven victims in the town is a member of McGahy’s crew.
There are experienced emergency services personnel in Kinglake West who cannot speak highly enough of the DSE’s work on Black Saturday. Fitzgerald was the first to warn them of what he feared was coming, and he and his crew risked their lives to defend their section of the community. Frank Allan from Kinglake West CFA rang the Kangaroo Ground Incident Control Centre around 2 pm to get more information on the plume of smoke he was watching from the driveway of his brigade, and was stunned that nobody there seemed to be aware of it. He assumes they were so busy looking at screens they hadn’t even stepped outside to look at the sky.
Tony Fitzgerald wasn’t relying upon computers or other equipment but on his own awareness—a knowledge of the way fire works, of the topography, the fuel loads, even his reading of the winds to predict the timing of the change.
It was an awareness based on more than twenty years of making fire his business. He understands fire at a theoretical level, with a degree in ecology, majoring in botany and geography from Melbourne University. But more importantly, he’s been working at the coal—or fire—face since 1983. He was recruited to Kinglake primarily to work as a fire manager, and in the fifteen years he’s been there has managed controlled burns on thousands of hectares, as well as holding command roles in some of Victoria’s biggest bushfires.
It isn’t until Fitzgerald comes into the Kinglake West station and tells them that according to his gut instinct the fire is going to hit them in about two hours—which it does—that the CFA has the first inkling of what they are in for. They make good use of the warning,
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