How two firefighting crews cheated death to save 30 lives
It was one of the battles that defined the horror NSW bushfire season – the desperate bid by two isolated and exhausted firefighter crews to save the tiny Southern Highlands town of Balmoral – and its 30 residents. WATCH THE VIDEO
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Alex Milgate tore off his blackened firefighting suit, threw it on the ground and burst into tears. The veteran firefighter had almost died. Twice.
“I’ve never been so scared before,” Milgate told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I was shitting bricks, to be honest.”
Milgate sat sobbing, choking on smoke and contemplating his unlikely survival in a stifling tin shed, surrounded by dozens of townsfolk sheltering in fear.
But none of them knew this was just the beginning. Outside, two wings of the rampaging Black Wattle Creek bushfire were converging on the Southern Highlands town.
The battle for Balmoral was about to begin.
The Sunday Telegraph can finally reveal the untold story of how a handful of firefighters saved a community from death with hoses scavenged from a crushed truck and a dwindling water supply.
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The rearguard action was a daring feat of unity and camaraderie between members of independent firefighting agencies, who had never met before that day.
On the morning of Saturday December 28, six volunteer firefighters from Warringah Pittwater Headquarters Rural Fire Brigade on Sydney’s Northern Beaches joined a four-truck strike team convened in readiness for the predicted catastrophic conditions.
The crew, whose day jobs included a sparky, truckie and financier, were sent to defend homes in Hill Top between Picton and Bowral southwest of Sydney, where they faced a fire the likes of which they had never encountered before.
“I’ve never, ever, ever seen fire act like that, ever,” RFS volunteer of 15 years Nick Morrison, 35, said.
“It just took anything in its path. It had no mercy.”
While beating back flames licking a Hill Top home, flames crowning in gum trees behind the RFS crew billowed out towards them and burning leaves rained down.
The firefighters spun around to douse their fire truck with water, which turned to steam on impact.
“The truck was our only way out of there, so we wanted to make sure it didn’t catch on fire,” volunteer firefighter Lachlan Boyle, 24, said.
Wind gusts ballooned the flames to within arm’s reach of firefighters, who at times were forced to turn their faces away from the heat and aim their hoses indiscriminately at the flames.
Fearing for their lives, crew leader Milgate sounded the emergency evacuation alarm, which was the crew’s signal to drop their hoses and clamber into the scorching truck for shelter.
The men recalled the superheated air before they climbed aboard and how it felt “too hot to breathe”.
Volunteer firefighter James Daly, 42, battled through the radiant heat to the back of the fire truck to switch off the valves, so if the hoses melted the water in the tanker would not drain out freely.
“I turned the valves off and I started to roll the hoses up, then I just thought: ‘F … this’, I just had to leave the hoses, it was too hot,” he said.
Once inside the truck, a “halo” sprinkler system mounted to the truck’s roof and wheel wells was switched on, to stop the truck igniting.
An attempt to drive away from the flames was quickly abandoned when it became obvious the smoke was too thick to drive through. The crew had no choice but to sit and wait for the fire to subside.
When there was a lull, the crew clambered out of their truck and picked up where they left off.
Plastic wheelie bins and whole rain tanks melted from the intense heat but they were able to save the house, so the RFS Warringah HQ1 crew decided it was safe to drive 10 minutes north to Balmoral and fill up their truck with water.
After three hours fighting fires with their “heads on a swivel”, the men were weary but sustained by a sense of accomplishment, pride and relief that they had survived.
Careful examination of dashcam footage proved there was no way they could have foreseen the enormous gum tree branch that fell and smashed onto their truck.
The freak accident was eerily close to a disaster on the same Green Wattle Creek fireground two days earlier, where a tree crushed and flipped a fire truck, killing Horsley Park firefighters Geoff Keaton, 32, and Andrew O’Dwyer, 36.
“That was quite possibly the scariest moment of my life,” crew leader Milgate said.
“Rambo could have been in the truck and he would have been just as scared as we were.
“The guys from Horsley Park had been hit by the tree a few days before and I just had that running through my mind, thinking: ‘Oh my God, I’m alive’.
“We were stuck in the middle of this burnt-out area where trees were falling everywhere and we just wanted to get out of there.”
They donned their helmets, slumped in their seats and kept driving the badly damaged truck on heat-warped wheels, but their nerves were jangled and they were about to be confronted by chaos and confusion in Balmoral.
By that stage, about 5.20pm, Balmoral brigade captain Brendan O’Connor had already sounded an air raid siren, imploring all remaining residents to seek shelter in the tin shed that constitutes the local fire station.
The local brigade was out on their feet after they had pushed themselves past breaking point defending homes all day, only returning to the fire station to collapse from heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation.
“When we first got there, there were a lot of people pointing at fires and trying to get us to run around in circles,” HQ1 volunteer firefighter Lachlan Boyle said.
“When I opened the door of the truck, a person was screaming at us to come and help but we had to ignore them all because we needed a rest and Fire and Rescue were there.”
Fire and Rescue NSW City of Sydney ‘C Platoon’ Rescue Pump 1, led by professional firefighter Jason Strong, had also been in Hill Top that morning but arrived in Balmoral hours earlier in response to an urgent “red message”, when homes first caught alight.
The professional crew had been handicapped when the Balmoral water hydrant ran dry, forcing them to make 25-minute round trips to Buxton to fill their relatively small tank throughout the three hours they spent defending homes from flames.
A bulk water tank was dispatched to Balmoral on the back of a B-double truck shortly before 5pm but a request for reinforcements had to be denied because a southerly wind whipped up flames that cut the town off.
Three Fire and Rescue NSW trucks from Engadine, Rhodes and Pyrmont, as well as three more RFS trucks from Davidson, Coal And Candle and Ingleside, were little more than a kilometre away but they simply could not break through the wall of flames and survive.
Forty minutes later, the sky turned orange, embers showered down and thick smoke choked the village. The firefighters had no idea 50m-high flames turbocharged by 100km/h winds were barrelling “like a freight train” towards the village.
Around that time, volunteer firefighter Alex Milgate walked out of the fire shed to dry his eyes and realised how dangerous the situation was.
“As soon as I walked outside and noticed how thick the smoke was and I could feel the embers, I just snapped out of it and told my crew: ‘We can’t just stand here and do nothing’.”
The RFS Warringah HQ1 squeezed back into their sweaty suits, ransacked their wrecked truck for spare oxygen cylinders, hoses and first aid kits and offered their services to Fire and Rescue NSW.
Two firefighting teams became one and stood shoulder-to-shoulder as a last line of defence.
The Balmoral crew, despite being out on their feet, wanted to help but lacked the breathing apparatus — and specialist training to use it. Without it they would have been more of a hindrance than a help and instead looked after the terrified townsfolk.
The sound of four helicopters, including a Skycrane and two Black Hawks, was the starter gun on the battle for Balmoral.
Without their pinpoint waterbombing, the fireys would have been forced to risk loading as many people as possible into trucks and trying to dash for safety through flames.
“As soon as it went to crap, I knew we had just enough water to protect the station, which was our main priority, because there were people inside,” Strong said.
“Just before the fire front hit, both crews were together, and I said to them: ‘This is what we have trained for, we can cope with catastrophic conditions’.
“We pretty much said: ‘Let the houses burn’, we have to protect the (fire) station and the people in it, at least until back-up arrives.”
Inside the shed, residents fearing for their lives took some consolation that a sprinkler system was dousing the embers raining down on the roof but they didn’t know that when the power failed, so did the sprinklers.
In the heat of the battle, firefighters had to turn their backs on the flames to train their hoses on the shed.
A two-storey home fully engulfed in flames didn’t pose a concern to the immediate safety of the townspeople — until Strong realised that if the fire spread to the house next door their only source of water, the bulk tank, could be destroyed by radiant heat.
He directed two of his charges to leave the line and tackle the house fire head on.
At one point during their 20-minute stand, when spotfires were springing up all around the fire shed, a resident reported someone trapped in a home on fire further down the road.
Strong made the gut-wrenching decision he could not spare any firefighters to investigate whether the rumours were true.
“I sound like an a**ehole, but I thought: ‘F …, we have 30 people here whose lives depend on us, we can’t move’,” Strong said.
“If it all went to shit, I would be going to the Coroner’s Court to explain why 30 people and two crews died.”
HQ1 crew leader Alex Milgate radioed an urgent message to the other RFS crews, waiting on the other side of the flames, who were able to send a crew to the house, where they kicked the door down and freed a man.
Back at the shed, the two crews fought like a machine for 25 minutes, attacking a seemingly endless stream of spot fires and embers, knowing that if just one caught hold and took off, lives could be lost.
Finally the main fire front passed and the cavalry could charge in, when the six other trucks were able to punch through the remaining flames to lend a hand.
With eight crews ringing the shed, finally the residents were safe.
Soon, police arrived from Buxton to escort the shell-shocked residents out of the town and to safety.
Twenty of the town’s 120 homes burned down but no one died.
Two months and countless counselling sessions later, Strong still wells up as he reflects at the way the two firefighting crews fought together.
“It makes me proud that at the critical moment when I instructed my crew and the (Warringah Pittwater) crew to don their breathing apparatus and step up to protect the lives in the fire station, that there was no hesitation,” Mr Strong said.
“It shows crews from two different fire services can work together in extreme circumstances.”
Firefighters from both crews have had time off work and countless counselling sessions.
The Sunday Telegraph reporter Jack Morphet and photographer Sam Ruttyn were in Balmoral when the fire hit and will be forever grateful for the heroism the firefighters displayed.