tragedy in yarra

[JMH]

Wow. I was just outside of Berry celebrating a mates 21st all weekend, so this is the first I've heard of it. Absolutely terrible. It was bloody hot, dry and windy where we were so I hope nothing happens there.

[Ken Gargett]

toll has hit 128. fires still raging in bendigo, beechworth and heathcote. roundstone seems only winery destroyed, but bigger problems than how the wine industry fared.

[Fuzz]

According to the CFA a rating of 100 is considered an uncontrollable fire, the fires on Saturday were rated as 400.

The Bendigo fire is reported as having been started by a discarded cigarette butt.

As for the firebugs who went back in after the firefighters left to relight the fires, the AG is considering murder charges against any who are caught. I say jail is getting off light. Leave them in the hands of the victims for some real justice.

[El Presidente]

In sections Saturday the worst of the fires moved at 100km (60 miles) an hour. There was no escape. Warnings went out to the rural communities but by the time they jumped in a car to evacuate visibitlity was near zero. Traffic accidents everwhere. The fire simply engulfed them.

Australia is a beautiful and cruel country. In our north, a land mass the size of Texas is flooded. Story today of a child walking through his back property was taken by a crocodile.

We have had better weeks.

[Colt45]

My best to all.

I've commented previously on my thoughts of humans as a species.......

[audio1der]

Sending our best wishes, thoughts and prayers from Canada to everyone down under.

Unbeleivable tragedy. I'm at a loss, but know the rest of the world is following the news, wondering what we can do to help.

[Bunker1028]

Terrible news to hear. Best thoughts for the lost souls and survivors.

Howard

[Lanthor]

Hate to see this happen to our friends Down Under. Let us know if a worthy relief organization is formed.

[JMH]

Here's a first hand account from a writer for the Australian. I can't imagine how fast the fires must have been moving. Quite a few people say they thought they were safe as the fires looked too far away to be of any danger, only to be surrounded by flames in a matter of minutes.

How we cheated flames of death

Gary Hughes | February 09, 2009

Article from: The Australian

THEY warn you it comes fast. But the word "fast" doesn't come anywhere near describing it.

It comes at you like a runaway train. One minute you are preparing. The next you are fighting for your home. Then you are fighting for your life.

But it is not minutes that come between. It's more like seconds. The firestorm moves faster than you can think, let alone react.

For 25 years, we had lived on our hilltop in St Andrews, in the hills northeast of Melbourne.

You prepare like they tell you every summer.

You clear. You slash. You prime your fire pump. For 25 years, fires were something that you watched in the distance.

Until Saturday.

We had been watching the massive plume of smoke from the fire near Kilmore all afternoon; secure in the knowledge it was too far away to pose a danger.

Then suddenly there is smoke and flames across the valley, about a kilometre to the northwest, being driven towards you by the wind. Not too bad, you think.

I rush around the side of the house to start the petrol-powered fire pump to begin spraying the house, just in case.

When I get there, I suddenly see flames rushing towards the house from the west. The tongues of flame are in our front paddock, racing up the hill towards us across grass stubble I thought safe because it had been slashed.

In the seconds it takes me to register the flames, they are into a small stand of trees 50m from the house. Heat and embers drive at me like an open blast furnace. I run to shelter inside, like they tell you, until the fire front passes.

Inside are my wife, a 13-year-old girl we care for, and a menagerie of animals "rescued" over the year by our veterinary-student daughter.

They call it "ember attack". Those words don't do it justice.

It is a fiery hailstorm from hell driving relentlessly at you. The wind and driving embers explore, like claws of a predator, every tiny gap in the house. Embers are blowing through the cracks around the closed doors and windows.

We frantically wipe at them with wet towels. We are fighting for all we own. We still have hope.

The house begins to fill with smoke. The smoke alarms start to scream. The smoke gets thicker.

I go outside to see if the fire front has passed. One of our two cars under a carport is burning. I rush inside to get keys for the second and reverse it out into an open area in front of the house to save it.

That simple act will save our lives. I rush back around the side of the house, where plastic plant pots are in flames. I turn on a garden hose. Nothing comes out.

I look back along its length and see where the flames have melted it. I try to pick up one of the carefully positioned plastic buckets of water I've left around the house. Its metal handle pulls away from the melted sides.

I rush back inside the house. The smoke is much thicker. I see flames behind the louvres of a door into a storage room, off the kitchen. I open the door and there is a fire burning fiercely.

I realise the house is gone. We are now fighting for our lives.

We retreat to the last room in the house, at the end of the building furthest from where the firestorm hit. We slam the door, shutting the room off from the rest of the house. The room is quickly filling with smoke. It's black, toxic smoke, different from the superheated smoke outside.

We start coughing and gasping for air. Life is rapidly beginning to narrow to a grim, but inevitable choice. Die from the toxic smoke inside. Die from the firestorm outside.

The room we are in has french doors opening on to the front veranda. Somewhere out of the chaos of thoughts surfaces recent media bushfire training I had done with the CFA. When there's nothing else, a car might save you.

I run the 30 or 40 steps to the car through the blast furnace. I wrench open the door to start the engine and turn on the airconditioning, as the CFA tells you, before going back for the others.

The key isn't in the ignition. Where in hell did I put it? I rush back to the house. By now the black, toxic smoke is so thick I can barely see the others. Everyone is coughing. Gasping. Choking. My wife is calling for one of our two small dogs, the gentle, loyal Gizmo, who has fled in terror.

I grope in my wife's handbag for her set of car keys. The smoke is so thick I can't see far enough to look into the bag. I find them by touch, thanks to a plastic spider key chain our daughter gave her as a joke. Our lives are saved by a plastic spider. I tell my wife time has run out. We have to get to the car. The choices have narrowed to just one option, just one slim chance to live.

Clutching the second of our two small dogs, we run to the car. I feel the radiant heat burning the back of my hand. The CFA training comes back again. Radiant heat kills.

The three of us are inside the car. I turn the key. It starts. We turn on the airconditioning and I reverse a little further away from the burning building. The flames are wrapped around the full fuel tank of the other car and I worry about it exploding.

We watch our home - our lives, everything we own - blazing fiercely just metres away. The heat builds. We try to drive down our driveway, but fallen branches block the way. I reverse back towards the house, but my wife warns me about sheets of red-hot roofing metal blowing towards us.

I drive back down, pushing the car through the branches. Further down the 400m drive, the flames have passed. But at the bottom, trees are burning.

We sit in the open, motor running and airconditioner turned on full. Behind us our home is aflame. We calmly watch from our hilltop, trapped in the sanctuary of our car, as first the house of one neighbour, then another, then another goes up in flames. One takes an agonisingly slow time to go, as the flames take a tenuous grip at one end and work their way slowly along the roof. Another at the bottom of our hill, more than a 100 years old and made of imported North American timber, explodes quickly in a plume of dark smoke.

All the while the car is being buffeted and battered by gale-force winds and bombarded by a hail of blackened material. It sounds like rocks hitting the car.

The house of our nearest neighbour, David, who owns a vineyard, has so far escaped. But a portable office attached to one wall is billowing smoke.

I leave the safety of the car and cross the fence. Where is the CFA, he frantically asks. With the CFA's help, perhaps he can save his house. What's their number, he asks me. I tell him we had already rung 000, before our own house burnt. Too many fires. Too few tankers. I leave him to his torment. I walk back towards our own house in a forlorn hope that by some miracle our missing dog may have survived in some unburned corner of the building.

Our home, everything we were, is a burning, twisted, blackened jumble. Our missing dog, Gizmo, Bobby our grumpy cockatoo, Zena the rescued galah that spoke Greek and imitated my whistle to call the dogs, our free-flying budgie nicknamed Lucky because he escaped a previous bushfire, are all gone. Killed in theinferno that almost claimed us as well.

I return to the car and spot the flashing lights of a CFA tanker through the blackened trees across the road. We drive down the freeway, I pull clear more fallen branches and we reach the main road. I walk across the road to the tanker and tell them if they are quick they might help David save his house. I still don't know if they did. We stop at a police checkpoint down the hill. They ask us where we've come from and what's happening up the road. I tell them there's no longer anything up the road.

We stop at the local CFA station in St Andrews. Two figures sit hunched in chairs, covered by wet towels for their serious burns. More neighbours. We hear that an old friend, two properties from us, is missing. A nurse wraps wet towels around superficial burns on my wife's leg and my hand.

We drive to my brother's house, which fate had spared, on the other side of St Andrews.

The thought occurs to me, where do you start when you've lost everything, even a way to identify yourself. Then I realise, of course, it doesn't matter. We escaped with our lives. Just. So many others didn't.

Gary Hughes is a senior writer for The Australian

[JMH]

And some photos

Click

[ARRV]

All just tragic. Saw on the news last night that a lot of people were killed in their cars - as they simply engulfed in flames. One survivor talked of driving along while his car was being set alight and having to pour cans of bourbon (cola and bourbon mix) onto fires actually inside the car. Just insane

[Ken Gargett]

i think we are now past 200 and who knows how many more will be found. mindnumbing.

i should point out that it is far from just a yarra disaster - it seemed that way when i first posted but it is spread right across victoria.

[bolivr]

They are expecting the toll to go over 300 in time. All fires are now being treated as crime scenes with a big forensic effort to work out how they started / who started them.

[Tone_NY]

My thoughts and prayers are with all those lost and their families.

[Vetteman]

Prayers sent for the victims of this disaster. Very tragic.

[toto]

Absolutely shocking! And the piece by Gary Hughes resonates with me. Prayers and thoughts.

[PDC1]

I lifted this post from a golf forum I used to mod' on.

It is a chilling first hand account of the Marysville devastation written by a golfing mate of mine who is a cop in Seymour. He was assigned the gruesome task of finding and marking the location of the deceased.

"In late August, last year, I took my family for a day trip to the snow at Lake Mountain. On the way, we stopped for lunch at the little town of Marysville.

As we drove into town, we passed the Marysville Golf Club which is amongst the prettiest courses I have played. My wife, Ann, had never visited Maysville before and was impressed with the beauty of the town.

Marysville is set into a gully between two large hills. It was surrounded by a forest of towering mountain ash trees, large tree ferns and other beautiful flora and fauna. The town itself had a nice mixture of old and new buildings and seemed to seamlessly merge with the surrounding bush land. Street plantings of none native deciduous trees melded nicely with the many existing native species.

Marysville was one of the prettiest towns in Victoria.

I returned to Marysville on Sunday as one of the first police members to enter the town since the fires.

I drove in along the same tree lined road from Buxton as I had five months earlier. But this time there was no greenery. The tall eucalypts were now completely blackened and many were still burning. Fallen trees and power lines lay across the road and the ground was devoid of all vegetation.

Along the eleven kilometre drive from Buxton to Marysville, were the scattered carcasses of both native and domestic animals which had been caught in the fire. More disturbing were the surviving cattle with their singed hides wondering on the roads in search of feed.

As I entered the outskirts of Marysville, I passed the golf course. I saw that many of the tall ash trees through which the fairways meandered had been burnt but was pleased to see that the much of the course had survived the fury of the fire. The watered fairways were like an oasis amongst the surrounding blackened ground.

I continued towards the township and was struck by the eerie silence. It was a surreal scene. Smoke had settled like fog between the tall blackened tree trunks of what was once thick forest. It resembled something out of a horror movie.

Nothing in twenty years of policing could have prepared me for what I was to find in the town. Comparisons to war zones and nuclear bomb sites are not over stated. The whole town had been razed to the ground.

Of the hundreds of buildings which once stood, only a few remained standing. In the centre of town, the bakery, where we had eaten lunch last year, still stood, as did a two storey motel a short distance up the road. As if by some sort of sick joke, these buildings seemed relatively unscathed while everything around them was absolutely leveled.

I attended at the CFA shed which was also undamaged. I later found out that many towns people had sheltered here while a fire tanker sprayed the outside of the shed with water. This undoubtedly saved the shed and the lives of those inside.

At the CFA shed, I met the only living resident of Marysville I was to encounter this day. Five months ago, the town was teeming with thousands of locals and visitors. This day, other than police, I was to see just the one.

I spoke to this bloke, a CFA volunteer, and he described to me the fury of the fire. He said that the first he saw of the fire was a distant glow from over a hill 12 kilometres away. Minutes later, the fire had passed them, leaving much of the town unscathed. But, then a second fire storm swept straight through the centre of town, demolishing everything in its path.

The fire was so large that it dwarfed the 30 metre tall mountain ashes which fuelled it and so fast that nobody in its path could hope to escape.

I then set about performing the tasks I was assigned. These included welfare checks of properties for persons feared to be caught in the fire as well as finding and marking the locations of deceased persons.

There were many truly awful scenes. There were bodies in cars, in the streets and in house yards. There will, no doubt, be many more located in the debris of houses once a more thorough search is conducted. I have never seen anything like this before and I hope I will never have to again.

I completed my duties late that night and headed back to Seymour.

I had to stop my car on the way out of town for a baby possum crossing the road. I watched as it wondered across the road and onto the charred earth on the other side where it prodded the ground with its nose in search for food. It will not find any and is certain to die. Like the people of Marysville, the possum had lost everything.

As I left Marysville, the smoke which choked the air caused my eyes to well with tears.

Also, I am in the fortunate, but uncomfortable, position of being paid for my time. Other agencies such as the CFA, SES, Red Cross, etc rely on volunteers. These people are spending long hours in terrible conditions and are not receiving one cent for their efforts.

As I said, I am not comfortable in benefiting financially from this tragedy. I will be paid for the 31 hours overtime I have worked in the last three days, but have committed to donate this money to the Red Cross Bushfire Fund. I encourage others to donate as well. These people have lost absolutely everything. I don't know how they will ever recover."

[First Lady]

The people who have been up there this past week are amazing people who are going to need our support in the months and years to come.

If anyone is interested in making a donation in helping to rebuild and get some normality to these peoples live you can donate to the Red Cross Victorian Bushfire appeal

Thank your friend for his story as it really brings home what a non reporter has seen and it just kills me

Lisa

[armedak]

I worked four seasons on a heli-tack fire supression crew to work my way through college. Until you have actually seen it you just don't realize how fast some of these fires can move under the right or maybe a better word is the wrong weather conditions. I experienced first hand several hairy situations where the wind and terrain conditions changed dramatically and we had to hunker down and pray the helicopters would be able to reach us in time to pull us out of the inferno. Hope the situation improves soon.