This one is by one of the firefighters, who found themselves simply unable to do a thing for the doomed town of Marysville:
We knew this was something serious, something far beyond what we had ever seen before. The conditions were absolutely extreme. The winds were hurricane strength.A nightmarish situation.
We proceeded into Marysville. This was a little tourist town of 1500 people surrounded by mountain ash forest, tree ferns and waterfalls. It was a town built around that environment. It had a commercial centre, guesthouses, all the trappings of tourism
We got to Marysville and day turned to night. There were burning embers and pieces of bark landing and starting numerous spot fires. Our intentions were to put out the spot fires, find houses and save them. That's what we are trained for: to save life and property. ...
it became clear very quickly that the scope of the fire was beyond what we were capable of. The apparent conditions were so extreme that everything was impossible. No form of active fire fighting was possible.
Our training told us that we had a resonsibility to save our own crew and it was obvious that was what we needed to do.
We made our way back to the anchor point at the oval. It was a typical country oval - a patch of clear ground. We had to sit it out. There was 30 minutes of intense stuff and we sat there for four or five hours as the town burned around us. There were houses burning everywhere we looked.
It was very confusing. A lot of residents were attempting to leave. It was pandemonium. People were pleading with us to help them free friends and family who were trapped in their houses.
1 comment:
I was there in September - a pleasant enough little town that services mainly nature tourists (there's a waterfall just out of town) and skiers in the winter. It's extraordinary how a how town can vanish like that, (and it seems improbable - there must have been a few brick buildings?)
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