How Ash Wednesday changed our lives
IT is 30 years since 28 people died in the Ash Wednesday bushfires, the worst in South Australia's history. Are we any safer. Penelope Debelle reports.
IT is 30 years since 28 people died in the Ash Wednesday bushfires, the worst in South Australia's history. Are we any safer. Penelope Debelle reports.
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It was a Red Alert day at the end of a hot, dry spell that had scorched the ground tinder dry. Temperatures hit 43 C and the squally north-easterly winds were gusting at 75 km and hour. At her home in Mylor, artist Barbra Leslie knew a bushfire was coming.
"It's in the air. The birds tell you, you can smell the dryness before the fire even starts," she says. "All it takes is a bit of broken glass. The littlest thing can start one."
Gallery - Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983
She knew from the first Ash Wednesday three years earlier that when a fire is bearing down on you, reason flies out the window. In 1980, with the fire just over the horizon, she packed in panic a box of odd socks and some bills.
For her youngest son she retrieved school shorts that he never wore and for her older son - a bird-lover with a collection of ornithological books - she took a book of games. Her then husband grabbed his old work clothes. A friend nearby was unpacking King George Whiting from her freezer when the police ordered her to leave
"All your commonsense goes," says Leslie.
"It is so traumatic and astonishing you cannot actually believe it is happening with the noise of the wind and the trees bending over and ash everywhere."
It is 30 years since Ash Wednesday 11, the devastating holocaust that roared through the state on February 16,1983. In the space of a few hours, 28 people died, 14 in the Hills and another 14 in the south-east. Three CFS volunteers were among the dead. More than 300 homes were lost along with a hotel, a service station and 13 historic buildings.
Flags flew at half mast as the state mourned the incineration of people and property. It shook South Australia to the core and changed forever the way fires are funded and fought.
"The Ash Wednesday fires have been the driving force for improving fire fighting for two decades at least and they to some degree still drive things in the CFS," says CFS deputy chief officer Andrew Lawson.
Leslie survived both fires and is still there, on the same loved block in Mylor down a dirt track near Silver Lake Road. Back then, she was new to the Hills. She left the suburbs after falling in love with the light and the trees and the feeling of space.
"I came up here and I've been here ever since and I ain't leaving, I'm never leaving," says Leslie, now 73.
On the first Ash Wednesday in 1980 - both fires inexplicably fell on Ash Wednesday on the Christian calendar - Leslie came home at lunchtime from teaching art at Mt Barker. She looked at the dishes and decided not to wash them.
"I thought, 'if a fire comes through, what have I done the dishes for? And if a fire doesn't come through I'll be very, very happy to do the dishes later on."
She took shelter at a friend's house not far away. A couple of hours later, after the fire had gone through, she and her husband returned. Their 100 year old stone cottage was still there, untouched. The fire had stopped at the back fence. A fire truck was there and the CFS fire fighters were having a coffee. Yes, you can come back, they told them, there's nothing here to burn.
Leslie went to check on her son's birds. He was a bird-keeper at the Adelaide Zoo and in a large aviary were injured and exotic birds he was caring for in the Hills cooler temperatures. She lifted up an old grandma galah in a cage and began shifting her from one side of the shed to the other to shelter her from the radiant heat.
Suddenly the firemen yelled "Run!" and fled for their lives. A nine-metre fireball rolled down the valley, hit the shed, blew it up and consumed the house. In a matter of minutes just stone walls were left standing. It was more like an explosion than a bushfire.
Leslie didn't see the house burn because if she had looked back she might not have made it out. Over the next three years her marriage collapsed. She was a single mother and a full-time artist with two children and a home that was uninsured. She was paying the mortgage on something that no longer existed.
"It was the one year I didn't have insurance," she says. "We'd lost money through a bad deal, my husband's business was falling apart, he wasn't working and then came the fire."
Friends and strangers gave her things, the Salvation Army was a lifeline and she had to train herself to accept charity.
"You feel bad, you only take the minimum," she says. "They said, 'you've got to change your sheets, take a change of sheets' but I couldn't. It's hard. It taught me that to receive is a gift for other people. I never realised that before. I learnt how to accept stuff. It was a good lesson because I was a pretty independent girl up until then."
The first Ash Wednesday turned out to be the wake up call. Three years later parts of South Australia and Victoria were consumed by the worst fires, at that time, in Australia's history.
Again, Leslie knew it was coming. The was plenty of ground fuel and the winds were strong and northerly. She was by then living in a transportable home converted from the old lunch room from a cheese factory at Nairne. She bought it for $3,500 and moved it onto their block. It was dirty and rough but her boys jumped up and down on the floor and said 'this is solid, we can live in this Mum'.
This time, she decided to drive out as the fire approached. There are five roads out of Mylor and by then, every one of them was alight. The air was filled with smoke and the roads were unrecognisable and difficult to navigate. With her son in the car, she drove down Leslie Creek Road, reasoning that the fire had already come from there.
"I decided to drive through it rather than run away from it," she says. "The fire was crossing the road as we went through. It was only a matter of 10 or 15 seconds but when I think back now, what a dreadful risk to take. But you don't think."
This time, she was lucky. The fire burnt all around but the CFS fire fighters - all of whom knew her and what she'd been through - sprayed her house as the fire went through.
The fire was a watershed and in the aftermath the CFS slowly moved into the modern age. But the director Lloyd Johns, who had begun the process of modernisation, was sacked. Johns was a blunt man who in the early 1980s was so horrified at how ill-equipped the CFS was he publicly called them a 'Dad's Army'.
"I said 'we're like a veritable Dad's army; we've got no equipment, no training and we're expected to put our lives on the line. I believed in my heart of hearts the service had been taken for granted," he says.
Russell Grear, a CFS volunteer then and now, says that in 1983 - after being in the service for more than two decades - he had undergone no formal training. Fire fighting trucks were run down and second hand. If you wanted to build a fire truck, you built one and as long as it was white, had a tank of water, a pump and hose reels, it qualified. None of the equipment was standardised and even the provision of overalls and helmets was haphazard. A truck might have six pairs of overalls and three helmets and the first three to arrive got them while the rest just went without.
In addition, chains of command were unclear and communication in a pre-digital age was poor.
"I remember a fire at the back of Belair National Park before 1983," Grear says. "We were struggling to hold the fire and suddenly a number of units turned up, one from Carey Gully, one from Stirling and one from somewhere else. I said to the guys, 'how did you get here?' and they said 'oh, we saw the smoke and decided to come'. That's what happened."
On Ash Wednesday, eight fires ripped through the state. The Adelaide Hills fire started at Mt Osmond and roared up the freeway. Vehicles, bumper to bumper, picked their way through the smoke while the fire sped up to Crafers, on the way destroying the Eagle-on-the-Hill Hotel and the BP station opposite.
With no aerial support, the effectiveness of the CFS was limited.
"The fire front that went through Cleland and wiped out Greenhill, we had no ability to stop that side of the fire at all," Grear says. "They were just trying to save life and property. We had no resources to do any more."
The front had been heading towards Stirling and only a change of wind direction mid-afternoon saved the town from destruction. The eastern side of the fire became the new front, pushing over to Greenhill and Cleland where people were caught unawares and lives were lost.
"It went through Mt Lofty as well," says Grear. "All those lovely old houses - St Michael's house (the Anglican monastery), Mt Lofty House - wiped out."
Communications were so bad that at one point CFS headquarters were receiving situation reports from fire fighters in the south-east via a radio ham in Roma, Queensland, who picked up the messages and used a landline to ring them in.
The deaths of 28 people were the trigger for a great deal of soul searching. Until then, CFS funding was unreliable and haphazard. Lines of funding were not clear or well understood and individual brigades were funded partly by local councils, chook raffles and the state government.
In 1980, when Johns came in, the total CFS budget was $750,000.
"There was a piecemeal approach to equipment - some was very old, they were different standards, some were diesel, some were petrol, some had protective features, others didn't," says Andrew Lawson.
It is said anecdotally that half the CFS trucks did not make it to the fires on Ash Wednesday; they broke down or overheated on the way.
"I'm not sure that number is accurate but I can believe a high number of our trucks would have had significant problems," says Lawson. "Many were old and petrol driven and they certainly contributed to the safety concerns of our fighters."
By 1983, the CFS budget reached $3 million and two years later it was $5 million. In 1986 the CFS budget was $10 million with another $10 million borrowed for new equipment.
Lloyd Johns managed to hang on until 1985 but in 1984 the CFS Board was sacked, leaving him isolated and centre stage.
"I honestly thought after Ash Wednesday that I'd get some of the stuff I'd been asking for," he says. "Yet in 1985 I still hadn't had a significant budget increase. Don't forget, I was a fairly blunt bastard."
His sacking in 1985 signalled the end of his fire fighting career and even today the memory hurts.
"My career had gone, 25 years," he says.
"I'd been fighting for better conditions and equipment since day one. I had no personal or vested interest in this. Regardless of whether you liked me or hated me, I changed the service."
Slowly, with the help of the Emergency Services Levy, equipment has been upgraded, systems standardised, communications dramatically improved and aerial support introduced.
"Now, if you need it, you get it," says Lawson. "It didn't happen immediately after Ash Wednesday, but Ash Wednesday was one of those watershed moments where we lost people, we lost members of the community and fire-fighters. It shook the people of South Australia."
So how prepared are we? In January, 2005, a bushfire started in Wangary, near Port Lincoln. Nine people died and 115 were injured. In Victoria on Black Saturday, 2009, 173 people died and more than 2000 homes were lost. There are no guarantees.
"If winds are 40 kilometres or more, then fires really become uncontrollable," says Grear who has fought thousands of fires in his lifetime. "You can probably save some houses and some property but trying to actually stop the fire front is very difficult if it's over 40 kph, even with aerial bombing."
The introduction of water bombing has been a huge advance, as have improvements in mapping. Stationed around the state are fixed wing aircraft that can be in the air 90 seconds after an emergency call out. In addition there are three rotary wing helicopters including the Erickson Skycrane which are slower but more precise at targeting fires on the ground. They also refill on the job by sucking up water from a swimming pool or dam through a snorkel.
Lawson warns against believing that because we have aerial backup, there will be no more major fires.
"Aircraft alone don't put out bushfires and I don't want people to think they're the silver bullet answer," he says.
As warning systems have been streamlined, people have become better informed. On Ash Wednesday, the only warning residents had was to look for flames and smoke. Today, three-staged emergency alerts are issued in a variety of ways including SMS,, social media, radio, television and media outlets.
They help but they stop fires.
"What hasn't changed is the power of a bushfire," says Lawson who lives in the heart of the bushfire zone in Littlehampton. "All these things are significant improvements but people shouldn't be lulled into a sense of security that because we've got better trucks and better training systems, we're going to be able to put every fire out."
At Mylor, Barbra Leslie gets edgy when the temperature is up and the winds are high. She comforts herself with the thought this only happens four or five days every summer. After the first bushfire, she processed the trauma by painting bushfire pictures including images of dead possums, a horse on fire and burning birds. It helped her family cope, and the paintings sold surprisingly well.
Losing the birds was the worst. Returning in 1980 to find their charred corpses was deeply painful for the family. The birds had been free to fly away but the aviary was their safe place so that was where they sought shelter. She hasn't kept birds since. Outside her window a succession of cockatoos, rosellas and lorikeets clamber over a bird feeder on a branch. They take what they want then fly away.
She knows that in another fire she would fall apart again so on the couch she keeps an emergency bag packed with sensible items like photo albums, jewellery from her third husband Ron, medications, face masks, a fire blanket, a walking stick, a torch, jeans and a cotton shirt. Next to it a bucket with a towel ready to fill in case they need it to protect their heads.
"I don't dwell on the fires, it's only when we get a bad day and it's very windy and I like to be a bit organised," she says.
Over the years her little transportable has been added to and expanded by friends and neighbours and she calls it 'the house that loved built'. It was hard at first using other people's cutlery and wearing other people's clothes but in some ways the family had never been happier.
"It was just bizarre but it was wonderful as well," she says. "It taught my boys about materialism. I've never been much of a materialist anyway - being an artist you think differently - and we just made the most of it and got on with life."
Losing the 200 trees she had planted was harder than losing her belongings and in some ways she it still getting over it.
"The ground here was so destroyed that 30 years later even the weeds won't grow," she says. "They reckon it was burnt down to (25 centimetres). I've got native trees that are so small because there's no goodness in the soil. We've got things growing now but it's taken a lot of hard work."