18 January 2003 firestorm - Mount Stromlo stories Andrew Thompson Friend of the Bacon’s – interview, 12 February 2003

Bart Meehan – As I explained to you what I am going to do is just record your experiences on 18 January up at Mt Stromlo. So can we just start by getting a little bit of background about who you are and what you do and why you ended up at Mt Stromlo on 18^th January?

Andrew Thompson – Well I've actually been in the security industry for about 15 years – probably 15 years too long but, what I used to do in Melbourne and what I do sometimes here for the same company, is service automatic teller machines, but that's just been something to pay my way. I'm passionately into mediaeval re-enactment and that's essentially, how I first met Mark. I've known Mark since he was 16 or 17 and I met him in Melbourne through a mutual friend, who I'd met while I was doing mediaeval fighting, and I'd met his current wife independently again through the same organization. So when Suzanna moved up here (Mt Stromlo) and had her contract working on the 50" telescope I was constantly popping up and visiting. So I've known them for a quite a considerable period of time and that was my connection. I'd been up there quite a considerable number of times and sort of pottered around and helped during the wee small hours that sort of thing. Especially on those nights when you know the cloud cover was over and there was nothing much to do. So I've, I mean we've been good friends for a considerable period of time.

B – So your good friend Mark called you when …

A – We'd both been in the gymnasium in the morning. That's what (apparently) firemen do when they're not busy or they're not sort of cleaning their equipment… they work out to stay fit… and we'd been to the gym in the morning and he gave me a call and said would I mind popping up and giving him a hand to put out some spot fires because the main front was spotting up to 12 kilometres in front. And I thought, well that's fair enough so I rushed home and got changed and headed up towards the mountain only to encounter two police checkpoints that weren't prepared to let me through until I explained that the reason I was actually in my boots and my overalls and you know I had all my equipment to go was that this friend of mine up on the mountain was expecting me to be there to give him support to help with his spot fires. So, reluctantly, they let me past with the proviso that once I was up on the mountain they wouldn't be coming back for me until the fire had gone through and did I understand that, and the answer was "yes" and so I turned up on the mountain and the wind was picking up and there was a lot of smoke about but there was no great firewall at this stage and Mark had explained to me what he would like to do as we had just discussed it. You see Mark had been a volunteer fire-fighter with the Rivers Brigade previously. In fact the Rivers Brigade used to actually be situated on the mountain itself. It used to have a shed probably only about 30 metres from their garage and that shed was now filled with furniture – which survived the fire incidentally. And, so he'd already had experience with fighting smaller bushfires and he's a very capable man. Suzanna and Mark are both very capable people, so I had a lot confidence in him anyway. So he basically explained to me what he thought would occur and …

B – Well we'll just talk about that in a moment, but can I just clarify the chronology. What time would this have been? When did you actually arrive on the mountain?

A – Time wise now… he's called me at about I think half past 12. I was actually visiting friends so I had to go home. I would have been on the mountain by about twenty to 2 and that was when I was being prevented from going up on the mountain. So I would have been at the top by about five to two.

B – So they had police roadblocks where? On Cotter Road?

A – They had two on Cotter Road, one at the Uriarra Road intersection, and one at the Eucumbene intersection and I was actually coming from the Defence Academy end… and so I came up to the Uriarra Road crossing and they passed me down the line to the Eucumbene crossing and suggested that they should make a decision on whether I should go through. So they waved me through with the proviso that I would understand what the situation would be.

B – So about twenty to 2 you go up on the mountain?

A – Well it was about twenty to 2 when I spoke to the police… by the time I got up the mountain because, obviously I wasn't travelling too quickly, about ten to two, five to two by the time I'd finished talking to the police.

B – Going up the mountain did you see many people coming off the mountain?

A – No it was surprising. I think I did pass one vehicle when I was heading up the mountain at the time. I think the impression after, in hindsight of course, was that the warning came extremely late in terms of evacuation and, I mean realistically, that occurred everywhere but what happened was that I arrived about five to two. Mark explained to me what he thought we should be doing and that entailed getting up on the roof and clearing out all the guttering. He'd obviously done it previously but there was still a lot of debris up there. So we cleared that, stuffed the downpipes, had a sprinkler system up there so we were wetting down the roof and filling up the guttering which protected the eaves because, as it proved to be the case, that was the most vulnerable point when a fire goes past because the front tends to congregate there – hits the wall and goes up or gets underneath the guttering then hits the leaves and leaves burn underneath the eaves and up they go. Now we would have been up on the roof for about 20, 25 minutes I would say.

B – So round about 20 past 2 …

A – Well no, by the time I got up there, by the time we got up on the roof …well say it was about half past 2 or thereabouts I would say when we were quite well into securing the roof we'd almost finished it was quite slick and wet up there.

B – That was presumably because Mark had been wetting down the roof is that right?

A – That is correct, yes. Now… we'd already discussed issues in terms of if we stayed what would occur and he had told me that he'd had a discussion with Graeme and Graeme had told him that they'd made efforts to ensure that there'd be water on the mountain because they'd put in an additional generator to run the pumphouse and what-have-you so we were anticipating having water. Mark had already filled up one galvanised bin… rubbish bin… and two of the sort of larger industrial sized paint tins so we had a supply of water there and the usual plastic bucket and a couple of shovels and he had explained to me what would occur if we decided to stay. So by this stage we'd prepared the roof as best we could, it might have been, say half past two or thereabouts. It got a bit grey about this stage. (I didn't have timepiece on me) So a lot more smoke and we could see orange flames starting to appear on the ridge coming up …

B –… so the western ridge?

A – Well actually no, it wasn't… the flame we saw was actually more towards the north-west but the prevailing wind was from the west. This confused the police somewhat when they turned up to evacuate us because Mark at this stage was off the roof and he went and talked to the police when they turned up in their sedan and one of them got out to explained to him that it was time to evacuate. By this stage I could see other vehicles coming from the administration area and starting to run down the road towards the gate.

B – So just to clarify when you actually arrived at say roughly five to two on the site there was still a number of people on the site sort of in the admin area and around the other residences?

A – Oh absolutely, absolutely. I hadn't actually been up that way to see, but certainly from the number of vehicles that came down it was apparent there were quite a number of personnel on the site.

B – Did you see anybody in the residences?

A – No there was no-one else left. I saw another one of the vehicles leave… I'm not sure who it was at that stage. I hadn't actually met any of the other residents and we, well because we were on the roof at that stage, we'd seen one or two cars leave but when Mark had gone to talk to the policemen by this stage… the word had gotten through they'd obviously gone to the admin area first and advised everybody to evacuate. They started from the furthest end and worked their way back and I could see cars starting to stream down… some of them quite quickly. I mean they were obviously agitated, quite keen to evacuate and I was still on the roof which was quite slick and difficult to manoeuvre on by this stage, and Mark came to me and explained that the policeman had been a little bit confused when he'd asked him where was the fire coming from and then pointed towards the wall of orange flame – the quite considerable wall of orange flame – and Mark thought it was quite odd because the prevailing winds seemed to indicated it would be coming from a slightly different angle. Then the policemen jumped in his car and they disappeared.

B – Now at this point Mark had been advised by the police to evacuate. Mark told me when I interviewed him that at that point, he'd said to the police that he was intending to stay and that he had made all these precautions.

A – Well that's correct. When he came back to me while I was still on the roof and we had a quick discussion and he asked me again was I intending to stay. He didn't say… he didn't ask me to stay, he asked if I was intending to stay. Once I'd ascertained that he was going to stay there was no way in the world I was going to leave him alone because that would have been far too dangerous. In fact that's why I was glad when we heard later, even though Mark had been told by Graeme that he would stay, we were happier in the end that he'd gone because he was on his own and it would have been a lot more dangerous to be in the environment on your own without a backup. Now Mark and I, once we'd determined that we were safe and I could manage to work my way off the very slick and wet roof – by this stage all the downpipes were filled and everything was on – I got down off the roof and, by that stage, it was probably pushing the point where we would have actually considered evacuating anyway because the flames were obviously moving along at such a speed and because there is only one road off the mountain and it's a switchback. The time for a decision about leaving had just about gone anyway. It would have been… it was actually safer to stay at that stage. But we knew… I mean… between us we had… well I had two sets of overalls on, volunteer overalls on… and we had the hard hats and the goggles and we had actually we were using nappies soaked in water… you know the old cloth ones… which he assured me were the clean ones.

B – (laughs)

A – So we were quite prepared and we had …

B – So you were using the nappies sort of like …

A – Over our faces to prevent smoke inhalation and also to cool down the air we were breathing. You can actually reduce the temperature of the air when you're outside.

B – So this is what time roughly?

A – Ooh, its difficult to say I mean everything… I mean you sort of… you lose so much perspective because there was a bit more excitement happening… a bit more adrenalin and what have you… perhaps 2.40, 2.45… it's a bit hard to say.

B – So, as far as you knew, at that time you and Mark were the only ones left?

A – Well we thought at that time we thought that Graeme was still there because he had suggested he was going to stay… so we had anticipated that there'd be another person on the mountain and because Graeme had advised him that there was an additional generator so they were expecting a continual water supply. We thought we would be fairly well off because we had a plan, we knew what to expect, we knew roughly the direction of the wind, we thought we'd be shielded somewhat by the garage and by the slope. The house, House 8, the grass is slightly higher because of the slope and it offered a little bit of additional protection and because Mark had already received training, he understood what was the text book scenario, that is in that sort of situation you wait inside the house which has been secured as best you can, you have all the protection that you can wear, you pull down all the roller shades and the curtains and close them up because the glass tends to heat up and crack and then blow in or out depending on the pressure variation. So he basically gave me a quick text book scenario in approximately five to ten minutes. So I had a clear understanding from someone that I had confidence in his abilities, so I felt that it was good. My main concern was that if the house actually did set on fire and it did come inside the house very rapidly, how long would we have to survive in the house before we'd be safe to step out because I hadn't experienced anything like that before.

B – Did you ask Mark that?

A – Oh yes, yes… and we discussed how we would move because of the prevailing wind and where it was likely to ignite first how we would actually retreat steadily back through the house and which rooms would be safer. Like the bathroom area is quite solid and it's tiled so it's cooler, it's a lot more secure it's near to a doorway there so we knew we had a chance to evacuate if need be and that would give us enough time to allow the front to pass through. So I mean I had, intellectually, I absorbed all this and understood what was likely to occur. Then reality …

B –… before we start talking about that can I just, and I appreciate your sense of time is somewhat distorted in these circumstances but let's say around 2.30 police come, you can see the flames north-westerly direction …

A – Which actually tallies when you think about it. When I was looking at it in hindsight again… if you could see the way that it came up the slope and hit all of the major buildings first but at the time visually it was definitely the flames… the predominant flame… was in the north-west, the winds coming from the west.

B – Now just in terms of the sense of the conditions, you mentioned when you first arrived, there was quite heavy smoke and the smoke increased, the heat increased, was there a lot of embers?

A – Funny how you just you gloss over these things because they just happen as a matter of course, but yes, there was. It became progressively darker and the firewall got progressively taller as it got closer. It was surprising how much… the perceived height I mean I don't know what the relative height was but it certainly seemed quite tall… certainly 40 metres high maybe at that stage. That's the impression you get through looking through the smoke and you have a reference point… the gum trees and some of the pines that are around that to give you a vague reference of height. I've heard different varying height approximations of what the height was… but that's the impression I was given. It was like a wall… like an orange wall hidden behind the smoke coming progressively in our direction and it was getting progressively hotter and the wind was starting to increase quite dramatically. As the front got closer the wind was very intense… it was very intense… I hadn't expected it to be that bad because, I guess, because most of the experience I'd seen of bushfires were quite small by comparison. Now we were – by this stage – we were in the house. We still had the sprinkler going on the roof. I put on the extra pair of overalls, had a hard hat on, had the goggles on and we were anticipating… well, we were anticipating the fire front being there within minutes literally, because it seemed to be getting faster and the wind speed was picking up very dramatically at this stage. Then we lost power because we had the lights on because it was getting darker. We lost power. Then when we checked the water we lost the water pressure… all the water pressure had gone and as you would have realised of course we later discovered that was because the… … switches on the power house… the pumphouse… had tripped. So that was a bit disconcerting. There I was thinking that we'd have a ready water supply and I hadn't anticipated not having as much water. Now at this stage, even though I was certainly getting very nervous, I still had you know… the great plan of mine as it were, where I understood what my function would be. I'd be assisting Mark. He was the experienced person and I knew roughly how long we'd have in the house even if it did burn and how long we'd have, roughly speaking, at what stage we would be allowed to step outside as the fire front got through all these little things. And then we just waited for it to arrive because there was nothing else to do. As Mark pointed out he wished he did remember to get his camera then because he had nothing else to do but wait but that was one of those things.

B – Yeah, that's fine, so basically you're sitting there waiting… you'd seen the wall of fire through the smoke… you're sitting there… no water pressure, no electricity and you're simply waiting for it to pass over. Whereabouts in the house again were you?

A – Well. We were sitting, well standing I should say… in the kitchen and the kitchen is basically on the west of the house and, through the window we could see the approaching flame – dust, smoke and flame. And then the noise started. Whereas before you could hear… I mean you could hear the helicopters going around… there was a lot of helicopters around the mountain mostly from what we could see through the gaps it seemed to be one of the Air Force helicopters doing spotting for the fire brigade and we could hear others. There was obviously a lot of activity going on but we couldn't see a great deal… but the noise just picked up… we lost… we couldn't hear anything once the flames actually started to arrive because …

B – When you say the noise of the fire …

A – It was quite surprising I mean you hear all this anecdotal evidence about you know these tales about what to expect and you just imagine that they're all blown out of proportion because of the circumstances and because it's such a very exciting, I suppose exhilarating, experience. A very frightening one as well, but it was tremendous… the noise… it was quite… I don't think you've ever heard inside a furnace before… I have once before… and a hot mill inside a steel works and the flame, the noise of the flame is just… so intense it's exactly like that. I had not anticipated it at all and to the point where you couldn't hear anything else. You just hear this… this funnelling of flame coming towards you and, at about say between say five and ten metres in front of the actual flames themselves, anything that was combustible would suddenly erupt because you have… the actual radiant heat was so great that flames didn't have to come in contact with it because it was already that hot as it approached. This is probably the point I should imagine where I turned to Mark as we were looking out the window and… … I said to him "Is this the appropriate time to tell you just how frightened I am"?

B – (laughs)

A – At which point he, you know, his responsibility was to be the cool, calm, collected one – that was his task. I was just there to be told what to do and he just stopped and you know… he paused and looked around for a moment and then there was rather, ah, and in this drawl he just said "yeees" and that was it. That was our sole conversation before the flames arrived. And then the carport which faces…  it was on the west side of the garage which was shielding part of the house, that took the brunt of the flame. All the bushes in the garden that we could see through the other kitchen window, the southern window of the kitchen, everything just went up. All the bushes, everything just went up in flame. Fortunately there was a large grass area so it didn't immediately hit the house and then the garage went up and then Suzies's car went up so we saw… you know we saw progressively more and more flame and this is where time just seemed to be… … whether it was extended or truncated I couldn't say but I lost all perception of time for a good… for a five or ten minute period. So much happened in that timeframe than I couldn't tell you exactly what… how much time had elapsed because so much had been happening; the garage on fire, where there was a differential pressure the mortar on the brickwork on the wall facing us basically gave way and the wall …

B –… the brick of the garage …

A – Of the garage and the garage fell out towards us and down the slope and a few of the bricks and timbers and everything else hit the western wall of the house and Mark, being the stalwart that he is, popped outside the door and had a look to make sure that the house wasn't on fire at this stage and this is when… this is at the time when the fire front had gone past. Now it could have been two minutes it could have been five it was difficult to tell at that stage… but… it was sufficiently obvious that it was safe enough to step outside although it was incredibly hot and he determined that the house had not ignited. The eaves were still intact at that stage on that side of the house. He came back in and then we waited for a moment to see what else would occur. You know… when one of the windows in the study on the northern side of the house popped – IT'S a little extension to the house – because all the windows had started to crack with the heat and it blew in and because the wind was blowing in that direction it was blowing the roller shutters in and of course we started… we progressed to that point, put out any of the embers that were banging into the house and that's when we had to start doing our tour. We'd each go around the house, check to see which windows had blown in and try to secure as best we could, put out any embers and then we constantly went around inside the house checking to make sure that nothing on the inside was igniting. That meant that we were relatively safe and then, at a point where Mark felt it was ready, he went outside and I followed him at that point and we went around the house to see what was in flame and what was not.

B – What was the first impression as you went outside the house and looked around the house?

A – Well… this was it… now this is one of the fortunate things of having someone who'd been through it and has been trained. Mark knew what to look for first. I looked. I stepped outside and everything was in flame so I looked at everything because you're naturally drawn to it. It's a fascinating circumstance to be in. I wouldn't recommend it, but it is a fascinating experience when you see all the bushes on fire and you determine that it's not immediately threatening you and you walk around the house and look for things that are. Now… he'd already progressed half-way around the house because he'd gone from the southern side of the house around the eastern side and back around towards… basically he was circling and coming back towards the kitchen and he'd already ascertained, while I was walking behind him looking at all the other things that were alight, that the eaves… the actual roof was on fire at two points and that was at the north-eastern corner of the house. The roof was on fire and the north-eastern point of the study because it… the study juts out from the house. So both of them, the north-east corner and the projecting eaves, were on fire and I didn't actually talk to him about whether that's common because of the direction of the fire but we had buckets, I had a bucket and bins full of water. Oh we also had one water-based fire extinguisher that came with the house and some of the older residences had those fire extinguishers, I should have pointed that out earlier. We decided that… well we had ladder with which we could reach the roof, already positioned so I went and filled up a bucket and came back… I threw the water from the bucket up onto the eave and with surprisingly good accuracy… I was rather surprised by that and then he clambered up on the roof because it was safe because the external flames on the roof had been extinguished and then he… through the gap that we left… because it'd already burnt a hole in the corner he used the water-based extinguisher and squirted around it and then we felt that it was probably safe enough… lifted up the metal sheeting and then I would pass up another bucket and we'd drench that because the whole idea was that he could still lose the house later if it was still burning inside. And then we did the same thing with… that was the study… and we did the same thing with the north-eastern corner of the house itself – the main part of the building. I threw a bucket of water up to extinguish the external flames then he went up with the ladder and used the fire extinguisher, the water base fire extinguisher again, to extinguish the internal flames. Then he'd lift up some tiles and we used a bucket again. So we gradually got it drenched… anything that looked like it was on the house. Then it was a question of… because this was happening at quite a pace as you can imagine but you can't rush… it's one of the things I… you discover very quickly… it's incredibly warm you feel… it's odd… it's almost like a nurturing cocoon of warmth in your overalls because you feel protected. I had three layers on. I had two pairs of overalls on. I felt quite cocooned in my own body heat and it was really warm… it was like an incredibly hot summer day and yet, on the odd occasion, when the wind would actually blow up underneath the you know… the guard of my helmet… and I'd really appreciate just how hot it was outside you'd get that contrast. But of course there's smoke everywhere and it's really hot, you can't rush because if you rush you take in too much hot air and smoke and you can't rush because it's so hot and so draining. So in a sense it was actually… it was a relief because I just took a nice steady pace and so it meant that you could stop, stand back for a moment, look at what had to be done and do it because you couldn't afford to rush. So it was actually… it actually helped me get experience as a fire fighter to actually accomplish my tasks. Before we started my perception was a little bit different to Mark's. Mark had actually had the training, he knew what to look for and so could delegate a task to me because, even though I could see what was on fire I needed him to prioritise things for me. So while he was giving me tasks to do so he knew that he could leave me there to do them because, at this stage, I hadn't run away and panicked so he felt he could probably trust me at this stage. He could then focus his attention on other things and he'd noticed that the porch… the front entry of building 18 which directly across the road was on fire and once we'd secured the eaves and determined what else needed to be extinguished around the house, he went over there. Found another water based fire extinguisher again attached to the house in the porch he put out well it was actually a dog or a dog blanket, I think out of hessian or something… either it had ignited from some of the embers and then… I think the window frame on the bedroom on the… to the right hand side of the doorway as you face the building, it had burnt through the frame. It burnt through part of the floor but he extinguished that just with a water based fire extinguisher and he did a very quick tour of the house, determined that nothing else had actually ignited and that the building was secure. Then he came back and then we progressed to go around the building and just progressively extinguish what we could – with the limited water supply we had, with bucket and with shovels to scrape fire away – to progressively secure the perimeter of the house. I'm just probably… I mean there's a lot of detail I could give but I'll try to edit to keep it as simple as possible.

B – That's fine.

A – We decided that it was safe enough to leave the house. Now there's something else I've forgotten at this stage… now I know that it's important and I know what it is but it was one of those incidences that… Oh he'll slap me when… I've got to tell you about Ollie …

B – I was about to get to Ollie. Mark, when we spoke, said that Ollie appeared out of the smoke and that he saw you waving to Mark… trying to get his attention and it was then that he saw Ollie, so you might describe what happened …

A – Well actually because… I actually… I was explaining the fire fighting and I'd missed the chronology of that. Ollie appeared a little bit before we finished securing the perimeter of Mark's house. The eaves had been extinguished so a certain amount of time had elapsed. At least ten minutes had elapsed after the fire front had gone through and there was still a tremendous amount of smoke there was smoke everywhere… everything was burning there was… you couldn't really see a great deal around at all. In fact it was basically twilight and I had stopped… it was obviously one of the occasions where I felt that I could stop for a moment and look up because the eaves were secure I didn't feel that the building was immediately threatened because we were doing… you know, we constantly were doing a patrol of the house. And then we were standing at the northern side of the building near the study which we'd already extinguished and out of the flames, well out of the smoke I should say, again from the north west – which I later discovered was probably the Bachelors Quarters – this figure came walking out with a doona over his head. Came walking towards us… he was looking quite bemused I think by the whole experience and was waving to us and talking. I could see the mouth going but I couldn't hear anything and even in a circumstance like that where so much is happening that is not a daily… an every day occurrence… because it looked so out of place I stopped for a moment and was a bit lost… I sort of… you know… tilted my head to one side and slowly rolled my arm backwards and forwards waving to him in a somewhat astonished fashion wondering what on earth he was doing. I thought perhaps he'd come from admin… perhaps other people had stayed… and I just gestured for him to come over at which point I think Mark had discovered that I'd seen Ollie… he realised he was there… waved him in and we took him inside the house. And that's when he explained to us that he'd been in the Bachelors Quarters. He had been observing the night before and he was in his normal sleeping pattern and he'd been missed by the evacuation as a consequence and… he had noticed… he woke up and noticed the room was very bright. He thought perhaps it was sunset, you know. The sun was shining through the window and that perhaps it was time to get up. And so he got up, expecting it to be time to go back to work, and looked out and there were flames everywhere and then he also discovered flames coming through the vent… the upper vent in his wall… in his accommodation and then he realised he was in some trouble and, of course, from the story he explained while he was sitting in the kitchen in Mark's house… he explained to us how he'd been given a pamphlet from a fellow observer when he'd first got here, apparently from South Australia… about how to behave in a bushfire. He had read it and been somewhat disparaging of it thinking that it was crazy… why would you want stay at a house when there's flames all around it… then he proceeded to do exactly what the pamphlet told him to do… stay in the house… made sure he covered himself… stay low… you know douse a cloth in water so that it cools breathing air and what have you. He'd actually… he followed exactly the same procedures as we had in fact, except that he wasn't intending to fight the fire he was trying to save himself. And then when he felt it was… that he'd waited long enough and the flames had passed him… it was getting quite warm in there… he opened up his door to see what would occur… you know to see what it was like outside… and of course all the onrushing air because of the pressure variation and the temperature variation… the whole place went up in flame and he stepped out into the playground and realised that he was actually alive after all… that he wasn't going to die. And… then he just decided that he would like to sleep… he felt if he could just sleep for a little while because someone had… you know the fire had come along, disturbed his sleep patterns, how dare it… but he …I think Mark was just a little bit, he wasn't irritated per se but it didn't fit in his game plan. He had an extra person that he had to take responsibility for. Didn't know him, didn't know what he was capable of doing, didn't know how much shock he was in. So we asked him just to basically do the internal patrol of the house because we were going outside and basically we put out the eaves… we went inside and caught our breath… went out… did a patrol… started to put out more things… went inside caught our breath… because there was smoke everywhere and it was really hot and you needed to take it very carefully because you couldn't afford to breath too much of the air because, I mean, smoke inhalation is the last thing you want because it's debilitating and you're no use to anybody when you can't actually perform your task. I have to point out that my learning curve for fighting fires in that situation was incredible… very steep learning curve I have to tell you.

B – Well you've got Ollie now in Mark's house… he's been designated to do some internal patrols and he probably wants to go to sleep?

A – That's right, yes… we couldn't offer him much… not even suggest that he sit down and read a book because it was so… we had no power. It was so dark you couldn't see… you know you couldn't really see anywhere to read anything, so basically he just had to sit there, he had some water, just stay calm. We explained what we were going to do and because he understood that we had to go out because we had a task to perform but because we understood what we going to do, I think he felt quite comfortable with that. I think he felt that, while he was in the house, he would be secure because we had effectively… well, we felt secured the premises and… we went out again and did a few more patrols and then we felt it was safe then to venture further afield. The only person that we knew for certain was… that we expected to be on the mountain was Graeme and so we decided to walk down towards Graeme's home, which is two towards the south, it's the house going back towards the gate and it was on fire by this stage. The – I think it might be his lounge room on the northern side of his house – flames had gotten into the wooden frame of the window and they'd progressively made their way inside the house… we could see it. Now, we had no water pressure at his house either. We'd already checked. Mark already checked the hydrant and established that there was no water pressure there either and, unfortunately, it was also in the eaves again on the eastern side of the house right up at the peak of the roof, and we had no way of reaching it. Even with our ladder we wouldn't have been able to reach it. We had no way of projecting fluid into that roof – we had no pressurised water supply because we'd used the fire extinguishers on building 8 and building 18 across the road – and that was the most frustrating thing… seeing the frustration on Mark's face because he… I mean he understood what was required but he didn't have the facilities with which to take steps and it was really …

B –… there was no extinguisher at Graeme's house?

A – No, no we couldn't find one and we didn't think it was safe to go inside the house. We didn't find Graeme. There was a burnt out vehicle there, I was a little bit concerned, but there was no sign of Graeme at this stage. We went back and had a look around …

B – So what was your perception at that point, did you think that Graeme had left or you weren't sure whether he might have been caught in the house?

A – Well we had a look around through the windows as best we could and we couldn't see anybody. We tried calling out but we couldn't hear anybody. Of course anybody could have been overcome with smoke by this stage. Mark had explained to me earlier in the piece that the training that he had received, as a volunteer bushfire fighter as opposed to the suburban fire fighters, is to deal with bushfires. They're not specifically trained to deal with house fires. In fact they're not given the equipment for it except I think for one of the bushfire brigades… I think one of them has additional training. And they're not encouraged actually to protect houses and… I basically… … I deferred to Mark in these circumstances and I guess we both just decided that it was not safe for us to really go any further. I'm sure if we had found anyone at that stage I don't think we would have been in time. Certainly from the time that elapsed, we wouldn't have been in time. But it was also frustrating that we couldn't save the building. But of course we had looked through the windows, we tried to ascertain everything that was there… we had a look around the building and it didn't look as though there was any human presence… like it didn't look like there'd been any activity as such. There were certain signs you could see that we had been around Mark's house, house 8, because of the… you know… the activity we had performed once the front had passed… we didn't see any of that so it did appear that …

B –… it had been evacuated …

A – Graeme had made the right decision, being on his own, and had left when the police had left. Now we went back to the house, we had a look around, we had a little bit of water left in the tins but had no way of actually saving the roof and when we went back and had a look again anyway it had really caught alight. There was nothing we could do. It was beyond saving with our limited resources.

B – You say you're working a little further afield… … there are a number of properties that had already caught fire including Graeme's and the Bachelors Quarters.

A – The Bachelors Quarters were on fire. Working away from the west towards the east back towards the main road, all of the buildings that we could see to the west were in flame… on fire… maybe building 16 or 17… one of them had completely lost its gas main and the gas was jetting directly out of the main and the flame was above the house. And even though it was burning cleanly we certainly didn't want to go anywhere near it. Power lines were down on the road because some of the poles had already burned and collapsed, some of the lines had just fallen anyway from the heat and we could see that building 18… well building 18 was still intact. Mark had already put out the fire on the porch and otherwise it had remained intact. Actually, surprisingly, if it hadn't been for the dog bed on the concrete porch, if that had not been there, we surmised that it would have survived anyway. Now house 19 heading back east towards the main road… that was in flame and it was gone. But house 20, Agris' house was still intact. It had some char marks on the external paintwork again up in the eaves in the corners exactly the same as house 8, Mark's house, and yet it didn't go up in flame at all. When we later looked at some of the trees at the back of Mark's house, which had been to the east down the slope back towards the main road, you could see a burn pattern where half of the tree had been shielded by the house. It was in the shadow from the house and the leaves on part of the tree were fully intact in almost a straight line. On the other side of the house the trees were completely gone, they'd been burnt away because the heat was so intense and it had gone through so quickly it had just burned them and gone and there's sort of like this image of portions of the trees and the shrubs. It was quite surprising.

B – So at what point did you actually move up to the main operational site, to the old admin area?

A – Oh that was much later in the day. Much later in the day. Because we had Ollie in the house too, we had to keep on going back and making sure that he was secure and we were still continuing to watch the house. The trouble is that… I mean we got up into the roof cavity and checked… couldn't see any smoke… it looked fairly intact. We did, you know, all the basic checks because, after spending that time there and being that frightened and that exhilarated at being… you know, having a purpose and being able to achieve what we did we didn't want to lose anything so we were very diligent in that respect. But of course the water was still off but… we had a certain amount of drinking water – that was all – and so we had a problem. We had to recycle. So we would drink and drink and drink because you had to constantly put fluid in your system because it was so warm. As soon as you went inside you had water first and then you caught your breath you did a quick tour of the house made sure everything was intact because we had a few little hand torches had a look around and… and then because it was by this stage we felt it was a little bit safer outside, the wind had diminished somewhat but there was still everything… I mean all the bushes and what have you around the area were in flames. The wind had diminished so the threat to the house was less. We would go outside and we would be bursting to go to the toilet so we'd utilise that by basically urinating on anything we'd find that was in flame close to the house because it was what we had.

B – That's very practical recycling.

A – In fact there was a point where Ollie came up to me when we'd come inside and said you know asked me if it was alright if he went outside to urinate and I looked at him and he… I looked at him rather oddly and thought "what an odd request". He said "I'm not asking your permission" I think he just wanted to know that it was safe to do so and he went as well. So I mean that was a form of recycling if you like. Utilising what we had. There were… one of the impressions I had about things that… the way things could have happened differently. When I'd look at the shed… because we moved further afield the shed to the west of the house about 20 or 30 metres from the garage where the old fire unit used to be for the volunteer fire brigade with all the wooden furniture in it… the pine tree behind that, directly behind that, was on fire and so was one of the electricity poles and… we couldn't put out the electricity pole but we did extinguish the fire within the crook of a few of the branches of the old pine and we extinguished that. And that whole building was intact at that time. All the furniture was intact in that building. Now that's where the old unit, the fire unit would have been. If a lot a people had… like when we actually got away from the mountain, a lot people have been criticising the fire brigade and you know why did they do this, why did they do that, why were there no fire units up on the mountain… and we kept explaining to them that if the fire units had been out in the open up there on the mountain they would have been lost and it would have been a foolish thing to have them there at all. When I look back in hindsight and I think about it… if one of those units had been protected… had a place to be protected, in this case, the old shed where it used to be housed, and if it'd come out of that shed after the front had gone past just as we had out of the house then it could have been used to great effect. We would have had a portable pressurised water source that we could have used to save some of the buildings. Would we have been able to save Graeme's house? I don't know about house 19 because in the whole timeframe I can't recall when it went up in flames. Some of the houses towards the west… there was… we were in a solid brick house I have to point that out to you, I didn't say that in the description… I felt quite safe we had a ceramic tiled roof, we had a solid brick building and we were shielded partially by a solid brick garage. Even though we lost the garage and it just burnt to the ground it did shield the house. For that I was terribly thankful. A lot of the buildings, the older wooden buildings, went up almost immediately as far as we could tell, because when we looked outside we could see the flames through the window even before the flame hit the house we were in.

B – Going back to your earlier comment – things were igniting before the flames actually hit them.

A – I was very thankful that I was not in that house… I was totally thankful that we were in a solid brick building and… I was surprised at just how well the plan – it was Mark's training which had set the plan that had been made by others that had passed on the training from past experience – that it worked so well. It worked incredibly well, as he said it was a text book scenario… stay in the house… you're protected in the house… have all the correct equipment and you wait until the fire front went through and then you extinguish whatever you can with whatever you have, and it worked – it was incredibly effective. We were visited by many of the different fire brigades very late on the Saturday afternoon heading towards late afternoon and late evening. We had the RAAF fire fighting unit… two units actually turned up at about 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning and we walked up to talk to them as they were heading towards the admin area and they were doing what is called a blackout, where they go around and extinguish areas that are still smouldering and, effectively, everywhere was smouldering. It was quite eerie. It was dark and yet you could see so well because everywhere you looked there were these evenly spaced fires especially in the pine plantation. Because it is a pine plantation it looked like campfires spread everywhere. It looked like a huge army had just basically bivouacked there and they'd set up their fires for the night. So we were surrounded. The RAAF basically came up, had a look around; it was probably good experience for them because I don't know that they get a lot of experience at extinguishing fires. And they came up and they tried to extinguish as much as they could in the workshop and in the administration area and that was when Mark discovered that there was fire underneath the Woolley and the Duffield building. There was some water damage… there'd been a lot of water going through and there was water lower down but in a lot of the chip bark.

B – So when you say there was water damage to Duffield/Woolley building, obviously water; what, from the external sprinklers?

A – We weren't sure. We couldn't actually ascertain at the time where the water was coming from because it didn't look like the internal sprinkler system because the place looked dry, but there was water draining down underneath the building and you could see it had collected… actually washed a lot of dirt into the guttering and had progressed down the slope and you could hear it trickling away somewhere… we weren't quite sure where it was coming from and yet the buildings themselves were dry and the chip bark underneath the building. They had the plants near all the plastic tubing for the drainage and ventilation or whatever it was for the building, were all threatened by the fire so Mark wandered off because he'd already located this… he left me there and he went wandering off to ask for the fire units to come and extinguish it.

B – This is a small fire under the Duffield building …

A – Yes because it was one of the few buildings that was still intact and we wanted it to stay that way… so I stayed there and I was basically scooping up all of this moist mud and, basically lobbing it into the flames at the point where it was closest to all of the pipe work of the building and working my way back until the unit arrived. But it was a quite unusual circumstance to be wandering around and having a look at all the damage.

B – Yeah just on that, this is probably the first time that you'd been up to the old admin area since the fire?

A – Yes, yes it was.

B – So you got up there and just tell me a little about what you saw when you actually got up there.

A – Right. Now this would have been late afternoon certainly sometime after five, and we secured enough of the area and we felt that we could wander further afield and we wandered around and basically went probably directly north. Basically straight up the rise heading towards the administration area and everything was black because all the grass had gone, the trees were gone, the bachelors quarters as we went past was burning and roof was gone. You could tell immediately if flames had affected a house, because it had no roof. The first, the obvious sign was the rooves had fallen in on virtually every building, and that was the case when we got to the administration area, because the walls were still intact but the roof was gone and the doorways had gone and the windows had blown in and it became more… and it was a common occurrence, we were seeing more and more of this. Although the Duffield and the Woolley building were attacked, apart from a little bit of scorching on one side of the Duffield building it looked remarkably intact. Then when we got past the administration building and headed towards the telescopes. That's when you could see the full extent of the damage because domes were missing. We weren't expecting domes to be gone. For a huge aluminium dome to just disappear… just shards of it where the heat had been so hot and the pressure had been so great that it had basically collapsed and torn and bits were lying on the ground. That was the great surprise, and the workshop; it was such a sad sight to see all of that wonderful equipment, all the computer controlled lathes and everything else in the workshops, simply gutted. That was just… it was very disappointing… and we went around the back of the building too, because at this stage we were having basically a scavenger hunt… we were looking for anything… any other resources we could use in case the wind changed direction and so any fire extinguisher that was still intact that hadn't been charred beyond recognition, because a lot of the plastic hoses had perished. We just obtained what we could just on the off chance they might be required again. We'd gone around the back of the workshop building and had a look and we'd noticed that there was a truck and a trailer parked at the exit to the workshop. I think everything goes in one end and comes out the other.

B – The loading dock.

A – The loading dock… and the tyres on the trailer and the truck had disappeared. The tractor, which was parked in front of the trailer, was completely intact… not touched at all… not even a singe, but when we around the back of the workshop building the sprinkler system had collapsed. It had fallen away from that wall. There were two large pipes so there was one really large pipe, maybe between 8 and 10 cm in diameter, for quite large volume flow of water for the sprinkler system. There was a smaller diameter pipe, maybe 2 or 3cm diameter, again for the sprinkler system, that had fallen away from the wall. In fact it was attached still at both ends of the building but it had collapsed from the middle and when we looked at the points where it had been bolted to the wall it looked like it'd just pulled away from the brickwork and as we could see black smoke coming from the eaves… it looked like it came from the inside of the building and worked its way out. It certainly gave us the impression… I mean, not that we are experienced in assessing that sort of damage, but it certainly gave the impression that, with the heat and possibly with the large volume of water going through – well certainly the larger pipe – that, as each sprinkler had opened up, it gave the impression that perhaps water hammer combined with the heat had basically just hammered it off the wall… water-hammered off the wall and fallen away. How much protection it would offer I'm not sure, because the sprinklers on the outside it was hard to tell whether it was designed to prevent against flames heading towards the building or not. Obviously there was no way we could have a look inside the building, it was too unsafe. I mean, not from flame, from falling masonry and what have you. Also from any chemicals that were burning at this stage, plastics, that sort of thing, all the synthetic material… anything synthetic was gone. A lot of the man-made substances remained remarkably well intact, remarkably intact, anything synthetic had vanished.

B – What about the Exploratory? Which interestingly survived in very good order.

A – It was surprisingly so. They lost one cool room at the back of the kitchen and the door actually separating the cool room from the kitchen was completely charred. It was beautiful… shiny almost… it was like ebony… it was exquisite patterning where it had slowly contracted as it had burned. But it had actually prevented the flames from getting in the kitchen and so they lost the cooler and lot of their supplies but, in other respects, it was very well intact. We could see through the windows of the doorway, one of the doorways. You could see ash and debris on the carpeting but, in other respects, it looked perfectly intact. Because it projects out from the slope and having a look at the way everything had burned as it came up the slope, it seemed apparent that, apart from the fact that there was less to burn underneath the building, as the wind had pushed up the slope the fire had actually been forced around the side of the building and, because there was less actually on the top of the mountain as opposed to that portion that extended out – it only caught the very edges of the building and only the cooler had ignited and it was otherwise intact. It survived. Some flames had got up though the downpipes. Whatever had been caught in there, old leaves and everything else, had ignited. You could see charred remains at the bottom and some flame damage to the top but it hadn't actually damaged the roofing at all and yet the 74", which was just a stone's throw away, was completely gone. And there were little holes you could see, holes had appeared in the steel dome, although the dome was still standing, and it looked like it was because the annex to the building, the annex to the dome where a lot of the heavy equipment seemed to go in to the building, it looked like it had been caught by the flames as it came up the slope and it had worked its way around the Exploratory and it caught on the annex. That's the impression we got. You could see where it looked like it may have started. I'm sure all the experts would be able to tell that for certain, but that was the impression we got. And then it worked its way inside the building and then burnt from the inside out.

B – Were the buildings still burning or had the fire mostly dissipated?

A – All the buildings were burning to some degree. There was smoke going everywhere so you didn't actually stay for too long. Trying to recall who we saw at that stage, because we saw various people at different times …

B – The volunteer fire brigade?

A – Well actually I was thinking about other people that had previously resided on the mountain and some of the staff. The chronology of those encounters have blurred somewhat since that occasion but, certainly we saw the fire brigade on the Saturday – they turned up to have a look. We didn't get much support really in terms of blacking out except for the RAAF.

B – Which was around about 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning?

A – 1 o'clock in the morning, that's right, yes. But some people did come up to investigate to see what was still intact whether anyone was there, that sort of thing.

B – That was the next day?

A – No that was late Saturday afternoon.

B – Saturday afternoon… so that was fire brigade, emergency services?

A – It was the fire brigade. Now we didn't actually get to talk at that stage. They went up the main road and went up to the admin and then went back down the mountain again… we didn't actually get to find out… it's supposition on our part I suppose, but that appeared to be what they were doing. On the Sunday… that's when all the people started appearing. The people – some of the ANU staff and security wanted to do an inventory of what was still intact, what was not, and what could be saved. There was a lot people coming up there wanting to clear out computer equipment and what have you… students and staff desperate to find out if their backups had been saved because, even though they had backups, they were in their residences. So they were affected just as readily as in the main buildings. It became quite …

B –… quite busy?

A – Quite busy, it did yes, as you can attest yourself, having been there.

B – Andrew, how long did you stay on the mountain after that? Because you were there on the Monday when I arrived …

A – I was there about 4 days …

B – 4 days?

A – Yes, I just rang up work and said that I was busy. I think it was one of those… it was interesting see the psychological effect that it had on certain individuals. Some people were a lot more distressed by the circumstance than others. I hadn't known how I would react. Having had a task and knowing exactly what to do and being able to perform that task. I actually had a concrete objective and had actually achieved that by first of all saving house 8 then of course house 18 was saved as well and then anything else of course… I mean finding Ollie… we didn't save him per se but we found him and gave him somewhere to sleep.

A – Just a few items that I should point out because, especially in media and of course even speculation amongst students and staff about precautions that had been taken about the fires in the first place. But of course no one had ever anticipated the severity of the event and that was the first thing that most people, even the media, admitted – that it was a one-off occurrence, once in a hundred years – but a lot of people were still very sceptical or certainly questioning about what steps had been taken in terms of fire prevention, that sort of thing, to save the facilities and we had received a visit from quite a few of the different inspectors. We'd encountered an ACT fire inspector who was taking photographs and measurements and what have you I think on the Monday. On the Sunday we'd also received a visit from what looked like the New South Wales fire inspector and he had asked Mark, in particular, because Mark had already had experience about what had occurred and because he apparently had been made aware that we stayed on the mountain, had asked Mark for his opinion and he'd explained it was a textbook situation. Here we'd stayed in the house, been protected, had the right equipment, stepped out and then basically mopped up, and he was happy with that. But he'd also asked about the facilities that were meant to be in place because there'd been fires the previous year. The University had already taken steps to install new facilities in order to prevent… to save or protect the entire infrastructure on the mountain and a lot of it was actually in place as we walked around… because we walked around the mountain quite a considerable amount over those 3 or 4 days. You could see that the pipes had already been concreted in. They were all ready to go and apparently it had been designed to come in on line a bit earlier but the pumps hadn't arrived. So it's not as if the University had not taken steps to actually secure their facilities. It was just one of those unfortunate circumstances where it wasn't in, in time. So in that respect I think the University at least could not be considered to be negligent in their duties… it was just a question of the timeframe.

B – Yes we'd put a temporary pump up there the Friday, a diesel pump we'd hired.

A – Yes – near the administration building …

B – Yes, but quite quickly services ceased and the intensity of the fire could not have been anticipated. Just in terms of the systems that you did see working, you said you didn't notice whether or not the Duffield and Woolley building sprinkler systems had engaged.

A – We couldn't tell for certain whether they had or not. Certainly the internal system hadn't operated so there was no water damage as far as we could tell looking through the windows. The external sprinkler system, we couldn't tell because we couldn't actually ascertain where the water was actually draining from… because it was all draining on the ground… it was actually running down the slope. There was nothing actually projecting out from the building but I mean there could have been a residue that was left in the pipes. But someone had remarked later, I think at the meeting on the Monday with the Vice Chancellor, somebody remarked that there was water damage, slight water damage to one of the buildings because of the way the water had drained through the slope. But in that respect most of the buildings had ignited because they received the full force of the fire and once something within the building had ignited it continued to burn.

B – It's interesting. When I spoke with Mark he said that looking out from his house as the fire front hit, he couldn't actually see the end of it. It was literally occupying his entire vision. Was that the impression you had?

A – Oh yes, very much so, yes. It was basically… I mean it… people were describing some of the situations where they'd been fighting fires down in the suburban areas and foolish people you know, running out in their shorts and their thongs, and with buckets from the pool, that sort of thing, but they remained intact… and describing how they had been standing there as the front had come through. Like I couldn't envisage that until I'd actually worked out what they were talking about and a lot of it was grass fires and embers being blown over, whereas if they'd been standing where we were, outside where we were as the wall came through, they would have been incinerated because it literally did encompass your entire view. But because, when you're a bit nervous your vision tends to tunnel just a little as well, I was focussing on the garage and the flames coming around the garage and hitting the shrubbery. But it was literally a wall… it looked like a wall as it approached… it was quite intense, quite intense.

B – Just as an aside, and on a personal issue, Mark said to me that you had a BMW that you'd driven up there and it melted on one side?

A – Ah yes, oh yes… my car… well, I mean it was insured and I did actually own another vehicle but it was actually parked in. If I had stopped to organise for someone to move their vehicle and I'd swapped vehicles over and taken the old one up to the mountain I wouldn't have arrived in time. The police would not have let me through. So in that circumstance I was much happier that I was there and that circumstance evolved because I needed to be there to be Mark's support. If he'd been on his own and I hadn't made it I would have felt dreadful, absolutely dreadful. Now I had parked on what I thought was relatively open ground, and I had parked it so that it actually would have been shielded by Mark's van, he has a four wheel drive van, and it did actually shield my car. When the flames came through it melted the rear indicators on his van but left the right hand side of my car relatively unscathed apart from falling branches, pine cones and what have you… and there was another car's length gap before the carport where his wife Suzie's car was parked in the carport. Unfortunately the radiant heat when her car burnt to the ground melted everything on the left hand side of my car. So it was looking very sad. But, I mean it's with insurance assessors and they assure me that they'll decide fairly soon whether it can be repaired or written off and then I'll get a decision… so I mean there's no rush and realistically, I felt good because again we had achieved what we'd set out to do. We'd saved their house, Mark had saved the house across the road, we were quite happy: we were alive, we weren't even singed. I mean the worst thing that happened was when we were sitting inside in the dark on the Saturday night… I was there on my own… Mark had gone down to visit his wife and their new baby and I was sitting in the dark doing my little patrol inside the house and outside the house. It was quite – again it was this concept of being surrounded by a large army because of all these little campfires of burning pine trees. And my worst injury of the whole event was I was starving and couldn't see what I was eating so I grabbed some corn chips and drove a corn in the top of my mouth while I was eating and that was the sole injury I sustained for the whole event. And that is very embarrassing I can tell you.

B – Well, again Andrew thank you very much for your time today and sorry to ….

A – I… two things I have to say. One – Mark and Suzie love the house, they love being there, but in terms of a symbol because a lot of people up the mountain they hadn't been there, they felt disempowered, emasculated. They weren't able to do anything when the fire hit and they saw the devastation, they saw the personal loss and the loss to the University itself and they were so distraught. They just felt that they couldn't… they weren't able to do anything and it really did affect them rather badly, some individuals more than others. Some were really distressed. And having the physical presence on the mountain, of being able to stay there even when we still didn't have power, we still didn't have water, to be able to physically stay there and have a physical presence on the mountain that people could see that there was still work going on there, that there were still people on the mountain ready to go as of course the Vice Chancellor said… the message is rebuild, rebuild, rebuild. It actually helped sustain us as we spend our time on the mountain clearing up, because it seemed to be more and more of a tangible link for people that they could hold on to. That yes – there were people still living there, yes – it would continue. I was surprised at the effect that had. But I also have to congratulate all the staff – whether it was the academic staff or ANU Security – they were wonderful. The academic staff were up there and the administration staff were up there, they were all up and they were basically trying to establish services as quickly as they humanly could. And that was tremendous because you could just see so many motivated people that genuinely had an enthusiasm to get the facilities back on line and that was… again that was really wonderful to see. ANU Security – they were fantastic… I mean some of them looked a bit lost because… especially on the first day or two, because they'd never had to deal with that type of security work before. I've worked in the industry quite a long time so I've seen it… and they were a little bit lost, they weren't quite sure what to do; but they were very approachable, and very reasonable and as they became more experienced and as some of the more experienced staff came in, they were tremendous. That sort thing again impresses you a great deal and of course, because the administration got all of the other service people in, emergency services were there, ACTEW were there, the electricity people were there… I mean… wonderful, wonderful… to see that whole thing in operation it was a pleasure to see.

B – One of the most reassuring things for us was that, at least as far as services were concerned, we had them back on line Monday a week ago so they could have been back on the mountain on the 3rd of February. Look thank you very much for your time and thanks for all your efforts on the mountain and also not the least of which was the Duffield/Woolley building… that would have been a real problem for us had that gone up. That's what gave us the opportunity to get them back.

A – Thank you – I really appreciate it. It certainly helps to actually be able to come back for the last time and actually just to be able to recount it.

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