Death, questions in wake of floods

Ayaz Younus’s dashcam may unlock the mystery of how the young Pakistani engineer came to be trapped underwater in his car in a flooded creek.

Ayaz Younus: a good driver who ‘wouldn’t take risks’.

Before Ayaz Younus set off for work on Wednesday morning he grabbed the dashcam his flatmate had borrowed — a camera that may unlock the mystery of how the young Pakistani engineer came to be trapped underwater in his car in a flooded creek in northwest Sydney.

Police already know some of the story: the 25-year-old had ­dialled triple-0 and was on the phone to emergency services for more than 40 minutes in the sinking car, pleading for help, before they lost contact.

A search-and-rescue helicopter had been dispatched but could find no sign of Younus or the hired Toyota Camry. It would be more than six hours before police divers found the car, in 6m of water, but by then it was too late. Younus was dead.

But if police are puzzled about how Younus came to be trapped, his friends are confounded. Younus was a good driver, they say, who would never have risked driving into floodwater.

That morning he was up early for what should have been a 50-minute drive from his home in Whalan to his new job driving trucks at Boral Concrete in ­Glenorie. His first shift was due to start at 7am.

The rain had finally stopped and he was in a good mood.

At 5.30am he was outside the house he shared with his best friend, Imran Ahmad, chatting about his family back in Karachi.

Younus was about to start his first shift at a new job.

“He was always talking about his family, they were everything to him,” says Ahmad.

Younus left his parents, two elder brothers and sister, a year and half ago to study in Australia and quickly found friends in Sydney’s expat Pakistani community.

“From the day that I met him, the first day that he came to Australia, he had a smile on his face and that’s how I remember him, with a smile on his face,” one friend said.

He’d worked as a pizza delivery driver for Dominos to pay for his studies, but now had his truck driver’s licence and was excited about the new job at Boral, Ahmad said. “He was training to be a software engineer, but his real passion was driving: cars, trucks, anything.”

And, on this day, cement mixers. He’d just finished training at the company and was eager to start for real.

All he needed to do was pick up the dashcam and charging cable he’d lent Ahmad and load it into the gleaming new Toyota Camry he’d rented.

Into the water

Younus left home before 6am. Half an hour later he was on the Cattai Ridge Road, heading ­towards the now heavily swollen Cattai Creek. It was still dark.

Pakistani man, Ayaz Younus.

The speed limit is 80km/h. The road was supposed to be closed but the flood gates that might have blocked passage to the creek were already underwater. The road bends just before the creek, where a sign warns: Road subject to flooding: Indicators show depth. The indicator on the narrow bridge goes up to 2m. It was completely underwater that morning. Younus was not familiar with the area. It is possible he did not see the water before he entered it.

But if he tried to drive through the obstacle, as police suspect, his car would have started to float down the fast-flowing creek before he knew what was happening. The car’s electrical system would have seized up almost instantly, stopping the windows from opening. If he was able to open the doors, something stopped him.

The cries for help

He dialled triple-0 at 6.25am.

In the dark and confusion, it’s unlikely he knew where he was. The car had likely already been swept off the road towards where it would later be found, 30m further down the creek.

At 7.04am phone connection went dead. A police crew that arrived at the scene shortly after could find no trace of the car.

His conversation with the radio dispatcher has not been released and police have declined to speculate on what happened until a full investigation has occurred.

Floodwater submerges the road at Cattai Ridge Road, near Hidden Valley Lane, in Glenorie, Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

One thing seems clear: Younus did not give up easily.

“You can only just imagine somebody fighting for their life to get out of the car — that’s what the inside damage of the car looked like,” Detective Inspector Chris Laird said.

But Younus’s friends have questions.

First, why couldn’t he have opened the car door sooner, and tried to swim away?

The creek was in a full flood, but Younus was an excellent swimmer. His father is a trained naval diver, now retired from the Pakistan Navy, and Younus learnt to swim at an early age.

‘Not a risk-taker’

His friends are certain he wouldn’t have tried to drive through floodwaters.

“I don’t think so because I know him, he’s a very sensible driver, he wouldn’t have gone into the water intentionally,” says Imran Ahmad.

Another friend, Waqas Ahmed, says: “He wasn’t the type of guy who takes risks for no reason, so being dark that early in the morning and the water being around the bend, you know, maybe he just didn’t see it.

“And his work just being around the corner from there, where he was trying to get to, the excitement of the first-day job. I don’t know, there’s so many things that we can’t just assume.”

The second question — more troubling to his friends: why wasn’t more effort made to find him?

The Facebook page of the Pakistan Association of Australia has been inundated with demands for the Pakistan government to push for an inquiry into why it took so long to send a helicopter into the area, given the more than 40 minutes Younus was on the phone with emergency services. “We live in a supposedly first-world country and a man was in a distress call for 44 minutes and no one could reach him? Doesn’t make sense at all,” one message read.

“Where were the helicopters and emergency services?” another asked.

That is also a question that will be investigated by the coroner.

NSW Deputy Commissioner Gary Worboy said the response times of emergency services would be investigated at an inquest into the death.

“The people at triple-0 would have dispatched the most appropriate resources, the closest resources would have gone to that location,” he said.

Mr Worboy said he believed the road was closed at the time but the visibility of signs and gates would also be investigated.

“My understanding was that there were barriers there, some of them were underwater, some were out of the water.”

The hardest call

On Wednesday it fell to Imran Ahmad to call his friend’s parents in Karachi to deliver the terrible news.

“That was really hard,” Ahmad says through tears. “They were devastated. They were in pain, ­because he is the youngest son, the youngest child in the family.”

The family’s grief was compounded by the realisation they would not be able to get to Australia to hold a funeral. They have requested his body be returned to Pakistan for burial. His friends plan to honour Younus by going ahead with the community mission he’d organised: to help those who’d suffered in the floods clean up after the ­devastation.