18 January 2003 firestorm - Mount Stromlo stories

Ken Freeman

I'd been to Stromlo on the previous night (Friday Jan 17), around 11pm, to see how the fire was doing. At the Yale telescope, the Red Belly Black café were having a black tie party for the beautiful people of Canberra, in aid of the bushfire fighters I believe. The fire was still a long way off, far on the other side of the Murrumbidgee.

Next morning I came to the Observatory for a few quiet hours in the office – Brad Gibson and I had been working quite intensively in the previous week, preparing the input catalogue for the first observations for the RAVE project with the UK Schmidt and there was a lot of tidying up to do.

Around 1100 Graham Blackman came into the office to say that the Observatory was closed, so I went out to have a look. Next to the Admin building, a couple of fitters were just finishing installing a large portable generator for fire-fighting, in case the power went out. I asked them how they were going, and they were definitely going – they didn't want to hang around one second longer than needed. Then I went down to the 74” to have a look at the valley – at this stage the fire was still nowhere near the river.

From here on I'm not too sure about the times. I went out occasionally to see what was happening, and then started getting emails from my son in Campbell, saying that things were looking bad over on our side of town (the Stromlo phones were out of action). I went down to the 74” for another look: it was very windy. Vince O'Connor was there, plus one police officer and a few bushfire people from CSIRO making measurements of something. I was surprised that there were no fire-fighters on Stromlo, not realising that a decision had already been made not to try to save the mountain. On the way to the 74”, I passed Kim and Isabel and a few others, carrying armfuls of beer from the Red Belly Black – the Red Belly Black had closed for the day, and they were planning an afternoon of fire-watching. By this time the fire was near the river but still on the other side. The police officer told us it was time to go, so I headed back to the Duffield building, collected my laptop and a few things I really did not want to lose, cleared the papers from the desk near the window just in case, and then went downstairs to check if anyone was left in the building.

I found Mark Whittle and his student (visitors) and Isabel, who was looking after them, told them it was time to go (which they already knew), and headed down the hill. At this stage, there was no fire on Stromlo. Isabel and the others left a few minutes after I did and by then they could already see the fire behind them. Once the fire crossed the river, it burned up the hill very quickly. Mark told me later that when they reached the bottom of the hill he remembered Oliver, who was asleep in the bachelors' quarters, and called the emergency services to tell them. He thought that someone from Emergency Services had then rescued Oliver, but I don't believe that did happen.

Usually, when it is so windy, pine trees are uprooted and fall on the road. We were very lucky that this did not happen on January 18, as I think we could easily have been trapped on the road when we were trying to get off the mountain.

When I got home, I started preparing the house. My son had come over, and we filled the gutters, moved some inflammable stuff away from the house and laid out the hoses. Agris and Lesley Kalnajs turned up: they had gone first to the Bessells who were away. Agris was half into a pair of overalls when the fire hit. The front and back yards caught fire right away and we started putting out spot fires. Then the water supply quit, so we were stuffed. I'd put two of the cars down on the road, just in case we needed to move quickly. That time had come, and we headed down to the road – the Toyota was surrounded by burning material so we took the other car and my son's car and left. About 10 minutes later, after the fire front had been through, we went back – the Toyota had survived and it started, so we moved it out. A number of fires were burning in the yard, including our old van, but there was still no water and there was not much we could do. So we left.