18 January 2003 firestorm - Mount Stromlo stories Rachel Moody RSAA PhD student at Mount Stromlo Observatory

That Saturday Lachlan and I went up to Stromlo just to do some work for a few hours. We knew about the bushfires but it never entered our minds that Stromlo, much less Canberra, was in any immediate danger. We left the mountain at 3pm still blissfully unaware that there was any impending doom.

 

Less than 2 hours later the sky had gone dark and the sun was blood red. We were glued to the radio and TV listening to the reports about which suburbs were under threat. Our housemate, Amanda, came in totally panicking because her mother was at home alone at their house in Chapman. Luckily for them everything was fine and while people in their street lost their homes, Amanda and her family were ok.

 

By 7pm that night, I was verging on panic myself. We had turned the TV off and were listening solely to the radio. Power kept flickering and by this time our suburb, Wanniassa, was on alert status. Lachlan went up on the roof to hose it down while I filled the bathtub with water and set up buckets at the pool. We also spoke to our neighbours and everybody checked that everybody else was ok. There were lots of people just standing on their balcony or the street and looking out. From our house we could see two nearby hills of reserve parkland burning unchecked.

 

Ash rained down several times and the air was filled with smoke but everything was strangely very quiet. The stillness was only broken by the emergency signal from the radio. Every time the emergency signal was made, I ran to the radio but it was the same message each time – a list of the suburbs under threat.

 

Soon though, the fires we could see had burned out and, as there seemed nothing else we could do we, went to bed but I don't think there were many who got sleep that night.

 

The next morning we started ringing around. We were very worried at first when we couldn't get through to friends and family but soon all were accounted for. Lots of people who had heard about the fire rang us too – my godfather whom I hadn't seen in almost 10 years rang to check that we were ok.

 

Lachlan and I saw that many of our friends were tired and hungry and very very weary so we invited everyone we could get hold of over to our house, just to eat, watch TV and use the phone. Lots of students came, including a couple of guys who were visiting Stromlo just to use the 74". We all swapped stories and I was shocked to hear that the mountain had been cleared less than an hour after Lachlan and I left it. We offered our house for people to stay overnight but most preferred to go back to their own homes.

 

That day was very long and we had no idea of the state of the Observatory. We taped all of the news bulletins that we could see and the one that shocked us the most was footage from a helicopter that had flown over the site. It was only then that it occurred to me to worry about the 50" and what had become of it – the pictures weren't clear but there was little hope that it could have survived.

 

The next few days were a blur of meetings on campus and phone calls to friends. It didn't really sink in how much devastation had occurred until I saw the Observatory and the 50" for myself. I think that the image of the melted computers and shattered telescope of the 50" will stay with me forever.

 

Almost at that moment I was introduced to the Prime Minister – there was no time for me to prepare so what I said to him was exactly what I was thinking and feeling at the time, about how unique the telescope and the site was and how much we needed to preserve and improve them.

 

Those are my memories of the Stromlo bushfire.