February 9, 2009

Victoria has witnessed Australia's greatest natural disaster. Worse than Black Friday. Worse than Ash Wednesday. Only in wartime has the toll of dead and wounded Australians been greater.
That is the grim reckoning of a catastrophe that already exceeds all previous Australian natural disasters - and which threatens to grow worse still.
The towns of Kinglake and Marysville have been wiped out as if they had been bombed, and around Victoria more people have died than in any previous natural catastrophe - one so lethal that authorities are treating it like a terrorist attack.
The first of several interstate victim identification teams arrived yesterday to assist Victoria police and coronial staff under a terrorist contingency plan framed in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001.
More than 70 people died in the Black Friday fires of 1939 - and 75 on Ash Wednesday in 1983, 47 of them Victorians.
But as the official death list topped 84 last night, senior police sources told The Age newspaper they feared that the final figure might be double that.
There are so many bodies scattered in fire zones around the state that it could take police days to find and retrieve them all.
Bodies in burnt-out cars will have to be removed first so that roads can be opened to the public before gutted buildings can be combed for remains of the missing.
Victoria's morgue was full last night - with hospitals and universities being asked to store bodies until formal identifications could be made. Some of the injured people in hospital were not expected to survive.
The once-pretty alpine town of Marysville was reduced to a tangled mess of smoking rubble and twisted iron.
Most residents were evacuated to nearby Alexandra - itself under threat from fire last night. But some of those who left too late or stayed to fight the fire lost their lives.
The fire that began at the old Murrindindi sawmill near Yea earlier on Saturday raced across the Black Spur and razed the hamlet of Narbethong and then Marysville, house by house, street by street.
After one terrible hour, Marysville was no more. Few buildings escaped. Every public building - including the police station, post office, telephone exchange - and the much-loved guesthouses and a hotel, had been destroyed.
Worse was the fact that some of the gutted cars and buildings had human remains in them. Names were not available last night but the few locals who stayed and survived talked numbly yesterday of one firefighter's family being killed, of a pensioner dying at home and of cars being found with human remains in them.
They hoped the toll was as few as five, but it could be much higher, they said.
Third-generation local Leigh Jowett saved the old house he had grown up in, then helped his neighbours save theirs.
'There might only be 15 or 20 houses left in Marysville,' Mr Jowett said.
'There's only three left in Falls Rd and the whole main street is gone apart from one motel.'
He mechanically listed the burnt-out buildings: the Marylands and the Cumberland guesthouses, post office, police station, kindergarten, general store, timeshare apartments, caravan park and the Marysville Hotel.
Former Marysville resident Graham Haycraft was distressed to hear his old family home had been destroyed but counts himself lucky to have moved out.
'Marysville missed out in 1939 and on Ash Wednesday but not this time,' he said last night. 'My heart goes out to people who are part of my life.' He expects to return for funerals.
There were similar scenes and similar stories at Kinglake, at Churchill in West Gippsland and at Bendigo.
Stories of offhand heroism emerged yesterday.
Reluctant teenage hero Rhys Sund declined to be photographed after driving a tiny tractor and trailer across country behind the fire front at Chums Creek, near Healesville, to save his sister Rhiannon and a group of frightened women and children from an isolated farmhouse.
'I'm so proud of the young bloke,' Rhys' father Mark Sund said yesterday. 'He cut down the fences in his way and went in.
'There were about 10 kids in the house, gathered there from other houses on the property. I was stuck about 20 kilometres away and couldn't get there.
'I was in contact with Rhiannon by phone and told her what to do with wet blankets and so on but the last time I rang her, she had despair in her voice.
'I rang Rhys, who was fighting the fire at another house, and said she needed help.
'So he hooked up a little tractor to a trailer tanker and went through the back paddocks.
'Rhys hasn't been to bed yet. He's been fighting the fire all night. He is a legend.'
Desperate battle: Bushfire rages out of control from the Bunyip State Park toward the townships of Labortouche and Tonimbuk.