Canberra commemorates bushfires and the mark they left
Ten years since the Canberra bushfires killed four people and destroyed 500 homes, the ACT has reflected on the damage, the rebuilding, and the indelible mark left on residents.
Transcript
TRACY BOWDEN, PRESENTER: As fire crews battle blazes throughout the country, it has been a day of reflection in the ACT. Today marks 10 years since the Canberra bushfires that killed four people and destroyed 500 homes.
Craig Allen works for the ACT edition of 7.30 and also reads the news there. At the time, the fire came to his garden fence, but fortunately his house was spared.
Recently Craig Allen went for a drive around his neighbourhood, a drive that brought back many indelible memories.
CRAIG ALLEN: We're turning into Holder now. Just along here on Dixon Drive today there's only a few cars coming along but on the afternoon of 18th January 2003 there was an amazing convoy of vehicles escaping the suburb. The sky had turned pitch black even though it was only three o'clock in the afternoon. Behind them, you could see the first fires catching alight in the pine trees.
The people leaving this suburb were fleeing for their lives. They hadn't been told to do so, but by that stage of the afternoon it was pretty clear something was going pretty badly wrong in their suburb and they wanted to get out.
We're turning into Duffy now. This is Warragamba Avenue. Back in 2003 this was one of the worst-affected streets. Again there were pine plantations to one side of the road and houses to the other. By the time those pine forests caught alight there was no hope for the homes on other side of the street.
Today it's a mix of old, 40-year-old homes and brand new homes that have been rebuilt. And the new homes stick out. They don't look anything like their neighbours. The irony is that the fires brought such a renewal in this suburb, in the suburbs of Weston Creek, that property values skyrocketed the day after the fires. All of a sudden you had all these blocks of land available for sale. Some of the residents up here couldn't stand to rebuild, it was just too painful. They sold up and got out.
We're on the corner of Warragamba Avenue and Eucumbene Drive and this is exactly where the fires hit first.
(Archival footage from 2003)
FIRE FIGHTING OFFICIAL: This is going to get bloody hot. You want to get out of here.
CRAIG ALLEN: Remarkable, remarkable scenes on that night of the fires coming through the pine forests. It's emotional even to think about it now. Pine forests right up to the road and a fire truck positioned on the corner of the road there. Trying, trying to stop what was unstoppable.
They just had no chance.
We're coming down Renmark Street now and this cuts down from Eucumbene Drive and this was an escape route for a lot of people, including the fire trucks that were caught up in the firestorm on that afternoon.
The police had set up a roadblock here to try and control the traffic.
(Archival footage from 2003)
POLICE OFFICER: Turn around and go back. Head toward the Weston police office...
CRAIG ALLEN: It was just chaos. There were fires burning in the fences over here. Just across the way here, the petrol station was on fire. You can imagine the terror of the people around here to see a petrol station burning. Was it going to blow up? No one knew but they knew they needed to get out of there pretty quick smart.
It's one thing that the pictures don't adequately portray and that's the smell that was left here for months. It's not a nice bushfire smell. It's not a nice barbecue smell. It was a smell of dead things, of things breaking down, of toxic burnt rubbish. It wasn't a very fun place to live for quite a few months.
What were once beautiful shady suburbs lost a lot of their character and it's only been in the last few years that it's started to get that sense of a shady tree-lined suburb again. For many years it was a pretty bleak place to live, no better than a new suburban estate. It had really lost a lot of the character that attracted us here in the first place.
And this, to my knowledge, is the last home to be rebuilt in Duffy. It's taken them nearly 10 years but they're finally getting there.
It's funny, you don't really think about the fires too much day to day. It's been years since all the rubble's been cleared and the houses have been rebuilt. But special anniversaries like this one this year are bringing a lot of emotions back up to the surface and people are thinking about it and they're talking about it again for the first time in a lot of years.
There's a lot of people in these suburbs who are going to feel it pretty tough on the 18th of January 2013.
TRACY BOWDEN: Lots of memories there. Craig Allen reporting.
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