Ignoring the lessons of history means we are often doomed to repeat them.
After what he witnessed 20 years ago, the ACT's Chief Fire Officer Matt Mavity is determined that won't happen.
He was a "freshly minted" senior fire officer when the mid-afternoon sky over Canberra turned as black as midnight in a maelstrom of wind-fed embers, flame, smoke and ash.
Now, as head of the ACT's urban fire-fighting capability, that dark day remains etched in his memory.
So many mistakes were made, and so much expensive equipment failed just when it was needed most.
Hoses ready, preparing to defend the Curtin Emergency Services Centre, Matt Mavity was astonished as soot-laden birds dropped from the sky onto the tin roof at his feet, seared and exhausted from attempting to escape the superheated mass of swirling smoke and heat feeding on itself and soaring high into the atmosphere.
"It was totally surreal, you try to describe the enormity of it and you just can't," he said.
"In all the years I've been fighting fires, that day was like no other. I'll never forget it."
Build up to disaster
Saturday, January 18, 2003 began much like any other in the bush capital with residents out mowing lawns, and taking their kids off to sport. Smoke from far-off fires had been drifting in and across the city for weeks.
During much of early January, fires had burned sporadically out near Bendora, in the ACT's water catchment, as well as Mt Gingera, on the NSW-ACT western border, and nearby Stockyard Spur. The wind patterns had posed little threat to the ACT and there had been only desultory efforts to contain it.
There's a conflicting logic in fighting small bushfires in remote areas. On one hand, the best time to attack them is at night, yet sending crews into steep, difficult country presents significantly higher risks of slips, falls and injuries.
Swathes of the bush to the west of the ACT were considered at the time to be of extreme bushfire risk after repeated long, dry summers. Fuel loads in the forests had been left to build up. Parts of the Namadgi and Brindabella were regarded as being in a volatile state. Soils were parched and dry.
Long before the National Arboretum, the hillsides to the west of Canberra were thick with commercial pine plantations, giving way to open woodlands and grasslands out near the Uriarra settlement, and national parks beyond.
On January 13 and 14, the winds were from the east and south-east, and light in strength. And on the Friday morning of January 17, such was the confidence that nothing could go wrong that a rural fire crew, under instructions from the Emergency Services Bureau, drove up Mt Franklin Rd to Piccadilly Circus and started backburning. It seems such folly now.
"Dry" thunderstorms had swept across the region in the weeks leading up to January 18, creating lightning strikes at remote, high bush locations.
One such site was McIntyre's Hut, in the hills just over the Goodadigbee River from where farmer Wayne West had his 400 hectare farm Lazy Acres. Mr West found a smouldering dead tree, hit by lightning, and called the NSW Rural Fire Service repeatedly, asking them to send a crew out to put it out. His requests were ignored.
A frenzy of activity
When the Mt Gingera and Stockyard Spur fires joined up, veteran rural fire captain, Steve "Sarge" Angus, whose 600 hectare farm is nestled in the Naas Valley in sight of Mt Tennant, began making phone calls asking for fire breaks to be cut. No bulldozer was available.
On the afternoon of January 17, other small fires then began "wakening up" in other locations like Mt Morgan, to the south, and Mt Cromwell further west. The forecast was for extreme fire weather.
Having a Saturday morning off at his home in Queanbeyan, acting City Station Sergeant Jeff Knight was looking at the advancing black smoke plumes and had an uneasy feeling in his gut.
"It was blue sky one side of Canberra and black as hell the other; I tried ringing comms [the police communications centre] but the phone rang out, which was really unusual," he said.
He drove in and found a frenzy of police station activity, with "blokes grabbing gear, radios, getting kitted up, jumping into [police] cars".
"Things were going bad really fast," he said. "I started ringing to get as many people as I could to come in, then jumped on a police bike and headed out to Weston."
By this time, the Rural Fire Service - largely volunteers with the role of defending the outlying areas - was completely overwhelmed, with the tinder-dry forests to the west and south-west an inferno. Many crews took emergency measures just to stay alive.
Fire jumped the Murrumbidgee at Uriarra and marched into the Cotter, travelling kilometres in minutes. Pierce's Creek Forestry settlement was gone. Fireballs began bouncing across the high bush canopy and into the pine forests, where trees exploded with the ferocity of it. Attempts at fire containment lines were useless. Tharwa was evacuated at 2pm.
A state of emergency was declared at 2.45pm.
A monster feeding on itself
When a phenomenon known as a pyro cumulonimbus is created, wildfire rolls and feeds on itself, lifting and throwing embers kilometres ahead of the firefront.
That firestorm rolled up the western side of Mt Stromlo and spilled over it, incinerating the mountain-top observatory, marching into the pine forests, over Eucumbene Drive and down into the suburbs of Duffy, Holder and Rivett. A terrifying fire tornado was whipped up in Weston Creek. Most residents grabbed what they could and fled.
"The speed of it was phenomenal," Knight recalled. "By mid-afternoon, the entire west of Canberra was as black as midnight, smoke was thick, embers were flying around; the sit-reps from [police] comms couldn't keep up.
"Fire was leaping from one house to the next. I'd look over my shoulder and then another house would go up in less than a minute."
Between door knocking homes and trying to shepherd people off the street to safety, he remembers watching from his police bike as a huge Eriksson Air Crane dumped 2500 litres of water on a burning two-storey house in Stirling.
"The air crane thumped all this water down on it; there was this massive roar and cloud of steam and as the helicopter flew off, the house went up again," he said.
The firestorm lasted less than 10 hours but the human grief, injury and devastation it caused was phenomenal.
Four people died and 435 were injured. Dogs and cats burnt to death in the RSCPA kennels.
In all, 414 residential homes burned and a further 161 damaged. Outside the urban envelope, 89 rural residences were destroyed and 14 more fire affected. In total the fire burned 160,000 hectares of the ACT, and the same in NSW.
