Bushfires: Howling wind ‘sounded like a machine gun’

As fire tore through Balmoral village, volunteer Russell Scholes was ­defending his neighbour’s property from towering flames.

RFS Volunteer Russell Scholes at his property in Balmoral. Picture: Jane Dempster.

As the second fire in three days tore through the small village of Balmoral, southwest of Sydney, on Saturday, NSW Rural Fire Service volunteer Russell Scholes was ­defending his neighbour’s property from towering flames.

Focused on his task and surrounded by the sound of crashing timber amid the sweltering heat, he was oblivious to the fact his own home, just 20m away, was ablaze.

“It was not until we got that fire under control that one of my ­buddies came and told me, ‘Sorry mate’. I knew exactly what he meant,” Mr Scholes told The Australian on Sunday as he stepped over the remains of his home — now reduced to sheets of twisted metal and plastic warped by the ­intense heat. “The smoke was just that thick, we just couldn’t see.”

The swimming pool, where Mr Scholes’s now-adult children had forged many happy memories playing in its water, was now a toxic green colour. Its melted edges curled upwards like a snarl.

The tight-knit community of about 400 people was already reeling on Saturday, having been overrun by flames on Thursday, when the Green Wattle Creek firestorm returned to its door.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters on Sunday that residents had been given the “devastating” news that there was not much left of the town.

So ferocious was the attack that two of Mr Scholes’s NSWRFS unit who had helped save the neighbouring property had smoke-­induced asthma attacks; another was taken to the Campbelltown hospital for heat exhaustion. ­Another neighbour, Craig Hurley, told The Australian it had been eerily quiet around lunchtime on Saturday when suddenly “all hell broke loose”.

“The flames on that house were four to five storeys high,” he said, pointing to Mr Scholes’s former home.

“The wind was howling — it sounded like a machine gun.”

Mr Hurley, who has lived at his home for 25 years, escaped relatively unscathed but said the ­wind and the flames were like nothing he had seen before. “It would howl this way for about an hour and then would just come flying this way from the northwest,” he said.

“We were going flat out for over three hours and just getting smashed from all corners.

“We couldn’t get out once it hit. There was no escape. It took maybe two minutes for us to be completely surrounded.”

By Sunday morning, emer­g­ency crews were lining the eerily quiet main street to begin clearing away the burnt-out telegraph poles and tangled mess of wires and replace them with a more fire-resistant material — concrete.

“It’s like a bomb has hit it, it’s all flattened,” Mr Scholes said of the town where smoke was still unfurling from blackened tree stumps. “It basically totalled anything and everything.

“We had been preparing for two to three weeks but nothing could have helped us. The conditions were ripe for the perfect storm and it didn’t just come once, it came five times.”

There’s also a sense that while the Green Wattle Creek fire is out of sight, it’s certainly not out of mind.

“It’s still there,” Mr Scholes said pointing beyond the shell of his home. “We’ll all be on tenterhooks until we get rain. We’ve run out of water. When you see the sky cranes driving across the sky, they’re dropping black because they’re now just pulling up mud from the dams.”

Another Balmoral resident, Justin, stayed to defend his house with his wife and son but the flames overwhelmed them and their house was destroyed.

“We got smacked pretty hard, in all directions,” he said. “We got hit from the east and the west at the same time. That is what made the property indefensible … We had no chance against that.”