Pat Dollard | Young Americans

84 Dead, 700 Homes Destroyed in Australia’s Worst Fire Disaster

HEALESVILLE, Australia — Towering flames razed entire towns in southeastern Australia and burned fleeing residents in their cars as the death toll rose to 84 on Sunday, making it the country’s deadliest fire disaster.

At least 700 homes were destroyed in Saturday’s inferno when searing temperatures and wind blasts produced a firestorm that swept across a swath of the country’s Victoria state, where all the deaths occurred.

“Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters as he toured the fire zone on Sunday. “It’s an appalling tragedy for the nation.”

Thousands of exhausted volunteer firefighters were still battling about 30 uncontrolled fires Sunday night in Victoria, officials said, though conditions had eased considerably. It would be days before they were brought under control, even if temperatures stayed down, they said.

Government officials said the army would be deployed to help out, and Rudd announced immediate emergency aid of $7 million.

The tragedy echoed across Australia. Leaders in other states — most of which have been struck by their own fire disasters in the past — pledged to send money and volunteer firefighters. Funds for public donations opened Sunday quickly started swelling.

Witnesses described seeing trees exploding and skies raining ash on Saturday as temperatures of up 117 F combined with blasting winds to create furnace-like conditions.

The scene was utter devastation Sunday in at least two regions — the town of Marysville and several hamlets in the Kinglake district, both about 50 miles north of the state capital Melbourne.

In Kinglake, just five houses out of about 40 remained standing, an Associated Press news crew who overflew the region observed. Street after street was lined by smoldering wrecks of homes; roofs collapsed inward, iron roof sheets twisted from the heat. The burned-out hulks of cars dotted roads. Here and there, fire crews filled their trucks from ponds and sprayed down spot fires. There were no other signs of life.

Even from the air, the landscape was blackened as far as the eye could see. Entire forests were reduced to leafless, charred trunks, farmland to ashes. The Victoria Country Fire Service said some 850 square miles were burned out.

“This is our house here — totally gone,” Wayne Bannister told Sky News, standing with his wife Anita amid a tangle of blackened timber and bricks in Kinglake.

Another man, who was not named, described to Sky battling the flames with a garden hose until he heard first his car gas tank, then a house propane tank, explode. He and his wife fled through a window.

“It rained fire,” he said. “We hid in our olive grove for an hour and watched our house burn.”

Witnesses said about 90 percent of the buildings in Marysville, a town of about 800 people located 20 miles west of Kinglake, had been ruined. Police said two people died there.

“Marysville is no more,” Senior Constable Brian Cross told the AP as he manned a checkpoint in nearby Healesville on a road leading into the town.

The official toll climbed higher during the day, reaching 84 at 20 locations by Sunday night, according to a police statement. It was expected to keep rising.

Australia’s previous worst fires were in 1983, when blazes killed 75 people and razed more than 3,000 homes in Victoria and South Australia state. Seventy-one died and 650 buildings were destroyed in 1939.

Police said charred bodies had been found in cars in at least two places — suggesting people were engulfed in flames as they tried to flee.

At least 80 people were hospitalized with burns. Dr. John Coleridge of Alfred Hospital, one of the largest in the fire zone, said injuries ranged from scorches on the feet of people who fled across burning ground to life-threatening burns. At least three would probably die, he said.

Victoria police Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe said police suspected some of the fires were set deliberately.

Temperatures in the area dropped to about 77 F on Sunday, but along with cooler conditions came wind changes that officials said could push fires in unpredictable directions.

Dozens of fires were also burning in New South Wales state, where temperatures remained high for the third consecutive day. Properties were not under immediate threat.

Wildfires are common during the Australian summer. Government research shows about half of the roughly 60,000 fires each year are deliberately lit or suspicious. Lightning and people using machinery near dry brush are other causes.

The Australian:

Victoria’s bushfire hell and fury: horrors revealed

by George Megalogenis and Julie-Anne Davies

THE Black Saturday firestorm that swept across Victoria on its hottest day on record is feared to have claimed more than 100 lives, making it the nation’s worst bushfire disaster.

And the crisis was far from over last night, with the Country Fire Authority advising that 12 major fires were still burning.

The official death toll was last night climbing almost hourly as more bodies were recovered from homes and cars in 22 devastated towns to the west, north and east of Melbourne.

Victoria Police had confirmed 96 people dead, including four children in one house, by 8pm yesterday while the CFA said more than 100 people were still unaccounted for. Up to 700 homes and 340,000ha of land were destroyed. More than 3730 people had registered with the Red Cross as having left their properties and the total homeless figure is expected to be much higher.

Among those confirmed dead was Brian Naylor, one of the state’s most recognised faces as a long-time newsreader for the Nine Network, and a resident of one of the worst-affected areas in Kinglake. Mr Naylor’s wife, Moiree, also perished.

State government officials were worried the final number of people killed could double to about 130 by the time the search of all properties was completed.

“Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria in the last 24 hours and many good people now lie dead, many others lie injured,” Kevin Rudd said yesterday as he pledged both financial aid and the support of the Australian Defence Force for the recovery effort.

Despite repeated warnings in the lead-up to Saturday’s heatwave, the state was overwhelmed by a series of fires, some of them believed to be deliberately lit, that stretched from the South Australian to the NSW borders, up the centre of Victoria, and down toward the coast in Gippsland.

“The firefighters were hit early and hit hard and the fires were impossible to control,” Victorian Premier John Brumby said last night. “It was worse than Ash Wednesday and Black Friday.”

In a cruel twist of nature, while Melburnians greeted a cool change late on Saturday afternoon after the mercury had hit a record high of 46.4C - the highest for any Australian capital city - the shifting winds turned a fire one hour to the city’s northeast in the Kinglake area into a raging inferno.

Of the 700 or so properties destroyed so far throughout the state, 550 were from this pocket of the picturesque Yarra Valley.

Across the Great Dividing Range, the postcard-perfect township of Marysville was flattened to a ghastly mess of rubble and soot, with only one or two buildings left standing. So far two people have been confirmed dead, including 73-year-old Marie Walsh, but townsfolk fear there are up to 11 bodies lying in those ruins, or in the surrounding ashes. Some of those are feared to be children.

“I asked one friend about her dad and she just looked blankly at me and said, ‘He’s gone’,” said Stephen Collins, manager of Marysville’s Kooringa resort. “I believe 11 friends have perished.”

When snow comes to Victoria’s high country, Marysville is a charming coffee stop on the road to the ski slopes. When the wind and heat came on Saturday, bringing with it fire of devastating intensity, Marysville was razed.

On the suburban outskirts of Bendigo, the home town of Mr Brumby, a cigarette butt flicked from a passing car is believed to have started a fire that claimed at least two lives.

The nation went to bed on Saturday night with the news that 14 were already dead and with police saying the final number could be in the 40s.

By 5pm yesterday, the count had been put at 50, which surpassed the 47 Victorian lives lost in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires. The Ash Wednesday fires had claimed a further 29 people in South Australia, for a total of 76 dead. That unwanted record was matched at 8.10pm yesterday when police confirmed 76 dead and at 9.30pm the toll was raised to 84. Although it is too early for explanations or recriminations, CFA officials said many of the victims lost their lives because they fled too late.

“If we want a key message out of this - and I’m not second-guessing the cause because we’re not far advanced - it is about keeping off the road,” CFA deputy chief officer Steve Warrington said. “It about not being anywhere near a road during a fire event, and that probably refers to late-minute evacuations, do not do it.”

But for every horror story of people who failed to outrun the flames, there are heroic escapes. Gary Hughes, a senior writer for The Australian’s Melbourne bureau, writes today of his family’s brush with death. They lost their home at St Andrews, in the Kinglake area. But they count themselves lucky as 12 of their neighbours are already confirmed dead. St Andrews had the largest individual death toll as of 8pm last night, followed by 12 in Kinglake and a further 10 in Kinglake West.

As survivors and firefighters emerged from the Kinglake area, they would hear the earlier bodycounts, shake their head and say: “No, it’s many more than that.”

Throughout the area’s blackened rolling hills and gullies there were dreadful accounts of death.

People perished in their homes and on the roads as they fled. One woman, a firefighter, died at St Andrews when she returned to her home to save her animals.

A man from Mount Beauty was found on the outskirts of St Andrews separated from his motorbike. Firefighters believe he was running for his life.

Firefighters described chaotic scenes of cars that had crashed into trees or into one another and that were yesterday black and smouldering, some of them with their doors flung open.

Police believe that six people died in a pile-up of cars on the outskirts of Kinglake.

Reaction to the unfolding drama was swift, and moving. Authorities received offers of help from firefighters in NSW, Canberra, South Australia and Tasmania.

The Prime Minister spoke to Mr Brumby in the early hours of Sunday and offered the services of the Australian Defence Force.

The offer was accepted. The federal Government will match dollar-for-dollar what the state raises for a community relief fund.

Mr Rudd visited a CFA command centre in Kangaroo Ground, south of the Kinglake area, and joined Mr Brumby and Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon for one of many sombre press conferences held through the day.

Mr Rudd said this was an appalling tragedy for the state, and for the nation.

“To echo what the Premier said before, our first response as human beings is one of just the deepest empathy for people whose lives have now been devastated,” Mr Rudd said.

“This loss of life, the numbers of injured and horrific injuries, our thoughts and our prayers go out to each and everyone of them as they now try and deal with this tragedy and recover from the damage which has occurred.

“Also as human beings we salute the extraordinary courage of all the emergency services workers. And, the Premier and I’ve heard just some small stories of this today, there’ll be others larger told later on.”