Pages from the diary of a relief worker from the Australian bushfires

Tuesday 10 February 2009

I spent last night at the Whittlesea Relief Centre - not so many evacuees stay overnight they seem to go back into the township with friends and relatives or stay in their cars. But the ones who are there have horrific stories. A grandmother from Darwin who is there because her daughter and three grandchildren died at Kinglake on the road trying to escape, people who have lost their home and are just waiting to hear what's happened to their loved ones.

There are many counsellors around even overnight. There are many people who drive into the centre with great urgency wanting to donate something, or just help out anyway tthey can. A bloke drove up fast at midnight and got out of his ute really aggro. He had an esky full of drinks"for the kids", bags of LCM bars and can openers. He was also pretty full and stank of alcohol. I thought he was going to biff me he was so aggro but later after we unloaded his truck he started crying - he had grown up in the area and had lost at least 15-16 people. He didn't want to see a counsellor he wanted to be part of the reconstruction and help build the roads. At Council we had been briefed earlier that day - none of the reconstruction will happen until all the forensics had happened. A job at 3am was to organise lunch packs for the 40 cops who were going in to do the victim identification at 7.30am. Later a water main burst at 4am outside the centre and then at 6am the media converged.

There are post-it notes everywhere ii the foyer - people looking for friends and family - the most disturbing was "mum and dad" looking for their 3 kids. The Red Cross were just amazing - they work right through the night registering people, consolidating their lists, to be data entered the following morning in Melbourne . They are just so well organised. We were the chaos they were the organised. The Salvos are there sorting through the rooms of donated clothes. The clothes at the Tennis pavillion across the road would fill a basket ball stadium (mixed sporting metaphors). I had been sorting clothes earlier that day at Council and I was impressed that most of it was good or new stuff and very little junk. The donated food can be a real hassle though. Anything cooked in a home kitchen has to go straight out the back to the skips to reduce the risk of a food poisoning outbreak.

Some of the volunteers get very precious about the food though. Through the early hours of the morning I was warning the kitchen volunteer that a tray of meat she had already reheated and re-served as food overnight was going to have to go as soon a the public health officer arrived in the morning. I had not been able to persuade her to get rid of it. She was wanting to keep it for dogs but had already re-served it to humans. When the health officer arrived at 6am I brought him in and he told them it would have to go outside. One Kitchen volunteer was furious at me and snarled abuse. When I got home this morning that was the main thing that has been playing on my mind and the only thing I that really upset me at the time. Listening to the news tonight, well there’s a whole lot more.

Thursday 12 February 2009

Last night I was the Centre Manager at the Whittlesea Relief Centre. My update two days go was about some of the heartbreak, this one is about some of the looneys. We only had 4 evacuees staying. I believe that all of them would have left today and gone back to Kinglake. The tales of survival are set against the backdrop of people’s normal lives. One of the people who were still there last night was an elderly woman who was still hoping that people she know would still turn up and register with the Red Cross that they are alive. By this stage we know that in Kinglake at least, if they haven’t registered they are dead. There are no miraculous tales of people being found alive in a dam 5 days later. I was told by others, not her, that she was concerned about going back because she would be living with her son and daughter-in-law. Another elderly woman the day before who had two daughters and families in Kinglake was seeing the Red Cross nurse who discovered she had a very full colostomy bag. One daughter and family were dead, the other daughter only found out about the colostomy bag at the Relief centre. It had been in place 2 years but she had kept it secret.

But back to last night – with only 4 evacuees the number of fire affected people who dropped in was probably zero. Probably – because a young guy - who turned up said he was burnt out in Flowerdale but we are not so sure. The police are registering fire evacuees with red hospital type wrist bans. The problem with his story is it kept changing throughout the night – his car was burnt out, his girlfriend had the car, he was sleeping in the car. Maybe a lot of what he was saying was true and perhaps somehow all the car stories were also actually true. But he turned up about three times throughout the night, and was accompanied by a fellow on one occasion who was known by Whittlesea residents present as having a criminal record “as long as your arm”. This person and another two who turned up separately, we suspect, were casing out the joint. There is heaps of equipment inside that has been donated or lent – plasma screens, play station games as well as all the usual communication equipment . The plant and equipment outside on a very large physical site is abundant – refrigerated trailers, generators, marquees etc.

We called the police early on but the police are completely stretched. Even though at Whittlesea Showgrounds about a kilometre away there are police, they are attached to the CFA and firefighting effort. And I think, quite rightly so, they cannot be diverted from that to deal with a few hoons at the Relief Centre because if another fire starts up they will need to go up with the CFA to do what they need to do there. So about 50 minutes later a police car did arrive but the poor fellow was the only one at Whittlesea and he did not have keys to the station to lock up. He had the previous shift guy waiting there until he returned. He was not even from the local area – so they are certainly stretched as well.

Anyway throughout the night we had 3 incursions from “yahoos”. They were no threat to us in the Relief centre in terms of people but I do believe they were checking out other things. So back to the young guy from Flowerdale. He said he was 26 and that in his younger days he had strayed but he had come good living in Flowerdale. He told us he had gone off the rails again since the fires and that makes sense. He told one of us he was pissed, he told me he was stoned, probably both true. He also told us 3 guys from Coburg had driven up and bashed him. Now this story is getting too long but he said he was bashed between 2 – 4 am after the first time he dropped in. Several people at the Centre said he was already bashed at 2 am before he even arrived. He also told us stuff about what the police were doing that did not make sense because we knew there was only one cop up there. Anyway I refused him refuge inside the centre as Centre Manager. I gave him two blankets and offered him shelter outside on one of the marquees but he wandered off. Later I thought I had made a good call after hearing what the young men from Whittlesea were telling me. Each time he came up the other one had split off and was scouting around the back outside. One of the Salvation Army chaplains and I walked around the perimeter however and couldn’t see anything. But the guy was tanked and if the story about the three guys from Coburg was true he was putting the whole Centre at risk. I did feel a bit bad however but I also thought he told he had been used to sleeping rough in the past and I know it was only 90 minutes till dawn – anyway they are the decisions you make. My ethics lecturer from last year would be interested.

So now returning to my diary of what happened two nights before this, the Red Cross have been amazing. These big institutions have trained people ready to roll in such a crisis and perform so well, so do the Salvos. I was talking To Major Graeme last night who was looking after the donations centre. The donations have now spilled out of all the indoor rooms, the gymnasium at Whittlesea Secondary College to marquees set up on the footy ground. And they have teams of volunteers who just sort, sort, sort. . I cheekily thought I would just refer to him as Major but I settled for Graeme. He was concerned also about the guys circling the perimeter outside.

Anyway.. two night ago one of the “Red Cross” counsellors I thought was impressive turned out to be an “imposter”. I though she was impressive because she had kicked a journalist out who was wearing a CFA coat. All journos have to wear a yellow fire protective coat that I was told are issued by the CFA with MEDIA on the back. This one had CFA on her back With the imposter, I challenged her about her coat. She said she was borrowing it for the night and would return it the next day., So on the previous shift I had kicked her out, She was wanting to sleep in the evacuees room because she said she had no where else to stay and her car was too cold. She always had her voice recorder in her pocket – we did not want her hassling evacuees. At the many union picket lines I have been on and several overnight for days, such as the 1998 MUA dispute, you have people there who just know everything that is going on. This is a lot larger and more disorganised because of the magnitude although I must say it improves every day. Anyway this woman who I thought was okay several other people from Council said she was a lunatic with some of the things she had done. When the Yarra Valley truck arrived the other night to fix the burst water main it fell into the water-logged road it was fixing up to its headlights. This “Red Cross” woman was running outside like a mad thing moving stuff out of the flooding water and had hooked up a fridge or generator to her car but drove it into a ditch. The Red Cross Melbourne Office had someone out on Wednesday who asked who was this person wearing their vest and the ruse was up.

The other thing that is happening is that counsellors from everywhere have descended on the place offering grief and trauma counselling and conducting it. DHS was registering them all today, with the view that some of the assistance could be more harm than good.

So to conclude what I thought would be a brief update: I’m okay for those who have asked, the family on the yellow post-it note are all dead, and I discovered one of the young men I relied on all last night for help especially with respect to knowledge about who the “yahoos” seeking trouble were, is actually the son of the “meat” lady. I found out she has been terribly distressed and telling me off about meat was probably a good outlet for her, me telling her off back, was probably a good outlet for me.

They rang me for another shift today. I have not returned the call. Tomorrow I might suggest we can bring in non-Council people. Council has provided an enormous number of staff. I am not sure how this is going to go in the long term, depending of course how long it goes on for.