Emergency crews fear deaths in future disasters if lessons are not learned from the 9 June storm in the Dandenong Ranges. Photograph: James Ross/AAP
Victorian emergency services commanders say “it was an absolute miracle” no one died in the Dandenong Ranges storm earlier this month, when some residents were barricaded in their streets with no capacity to call triple zero for days. But experts warn if governments and the community don’t learn from these system failures, future disasters on the mountain – particularly bushfires – could have mass fatalities.
On the night of 9 June, as the storm raged outside, Sassafras residents Zeffi and her mother spent hours huddled together on the couch.
“We couldn’t even hear each other, the sound … it was like a million bombs going off nonstop,” Zeffi, who only wanted to use her first name, said.
Their house was not damaged, but when they ventured outside the next morning Zeffi realised the nightmare wasn’t over.
“The debris was metres high and twisted in with all the power cables,” she said.
Four large, densely bushy trees were blocking her dead-end street, Driffield Crescent. With power and mobile phone towers down, there was no way to contact triple zero, or the rest of the outside world.
“For days we didn’t know what was happening outside our street,” she said.
“We were walking around like zombies, we are all still very traumatised.”
Zeffi’s neighbour Paul said he wasn’t even able to tell his family he was safe.
“The phone service would flick on for like 30 seconds. My wife would get 30 messages of people going ‘you guys OK?’, but you can’t write back because it just doesn’t send,” Paul, who only wanted to use his first name, said.
Residents said they didn’t know if the State Emergency Service (SES) or Country Fire Authority (CFA) were aware they were trapped, and they suspected there would be hundreds of trees to clear before rescue teams could reach them.
“If someone was seriously injured, well I hate to think,” Zeffi said.
“There wasn’t even anywhere a helicopter could have landed.”
With multiple blockades down the street, it took residents with chainsaws three to four days to clear a path wide enough for cars to reach the main road.
“The first I saw of the SES was on Tuesday [15 June],” Paul said. “They came and did a welfare check.
“[Six days] is a long time if you’re injured or no one’s checked on you.”
The Victoria SES said the severe weather was “unprecedented” and there had been more than 9,500 calls for help.
Paul is angry at the Victorian government for not getting Australian Defence Forces (ADF) help earlier. The acting premier, James Merlino, took seven days to make his first request – for five ADF planners. The government said this was because an initial impact assessment was required before more troops could eventually be called in.
“They could have made that call that it was an emergency [that] morning,” Paul said.
“It should not have taken a week to assess, it’s outrageous. Someone could have been trapped under a tree in their house and how would anyone know?”
Although Sassafras, Olinda and other communities in the ranges are often thought of as towns, they are considered suburbs in metropolitan Melbourne, less than 50kms from the CBD.
Captains from the CFA and unit commanders from the SES both confirmed to Guardian Australia there were many streets like Driffield Crescent in the hills, where residents had no way to call for help and were trapped, without anyone knowing.
This included an 85-year-old woman who was taken to hospital with dehydration after being found by her neighbour six days after the storm, according to Nine news.
“I definitely think there needs to be something put in place to make sure all residents are contacted because they can’t ring out,” Phil Skiller, the captain of the Olinda CFA, said.
The Victorian government did not respond directly to Guardian Australia’s questions about whether there was a coordinated plan to conduct welfare checks on homes in the area in the days after the storm, but a spokeswoman said a combination of emergency services and community groups had doorknocked hundreds of homes.
“During times when it was unsafe to conduct doorknocking, due to severe winds and the risk of falling trees, welfare checks have been conducted by phone,” a government spokesperson said.
The SES Emerald controller, Ben Owen, said the lack of phone reception made storm rescues extremely difficult.
“God knows how many people needed triple zero and couldn’t [get through],” he said.
Even so, he said his unit received a year’s worth of calls in two days.
“It’s an absolute miracle that a first responder wasn’t killed on the hill that night. There’s no other way to explain it.”
Skiller put the lack of fatalities in the storms down to “God and luck”.
“I was shit scared. I was sure we were going to lose crews … I’ve been to Black Saturday, I’ve been to Ash Wednesday. I’ve been doing this 40 years, and this was the scariest thing I’ve ever come across,” he said.
“You would hear the cracking and just hope it wasn’t coming down on you.”
University of Melbourne bushfire expert Kevin Tolhurst said similar mobile and internet outages could significantly increase the risk to lives in the event of a forest fire.
“Getting accurate information is critical to making good decisions,” he said.
Tolhurst said the government needed to use these storms as a wake-up call to the vulnerable position these Melbourne suburbs are in.
“What has happened with the storms this time round could easily happen in a bushfire … because of the severity of the wind conditions associated with a fire,” he said.
“You only need one major tree across a road that would dramatically limit the ability for people to get out of the area.”
The hills are a maze on thin winding roads with only a handful of exit points. In local bushfire advice, the CFA warns it could take five hours for everyone to evacuate by car on short notice.
“In terms of the number of people who could be caught on the road … that would be quite catastrophic,” Tolhurst said.
“It would be quite conceivable to have tens of deaths and hundreds of houses lost in somewhere like the Dandenongs.”
Owen said a bushfire in similar conditions to those the SES faced during the storm would be “devastating”.
“I don’t even want to try and imagine … you couldn’t even drive 50 metres without coming across something on the road.”
Mobile reception in the area cut out four hours after the power, which is the average common backup battery capacity in mobile phone towers.
Upgrading battery life was one of the key recommendations from the 2020 bushfire royal commission. While the federal government has upgraded “blackspot areas” and pledged $13.2m in grants for service providers to install 12-hour batteries in other towers, applications for these grants only opened on 17 June, and details of which towers will receive upgrades have not been released.
While Optus and other mobile providers have independently upgraded towers and equipped some with additional generators, ultimately the system relies on power from the main grid.
Ausnet, a power provider in the Dandenongs, confirmed there was “basically no network left” after the storms, with fallen trees destroying the above-ground wiring system.
Placing powerlines underground in non-urban areas of Victoria was a key recommendation of the Black Saturday royal commission, but the state government found this could cost $40bn. It eventually opted for targeted areas to have powerlines placed underground, and the installation of insulated power lines in some regions, such as the densely-forested Dandenongs.
The Victorian government did not respond to questions asking if the placing of all power lines underground was being considered in the area.
Given the cold climate rainforest in the hills, Tolhurst said extremely hot and dry conditions would be required for the area to burn, similar to those on Black Saturday. But if a bushfire were to start, the terrain could make it extremely ferocious and hard to contain.
“These extreme weather events are happening more and more … it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when,” he said.
“It wouldn’t make sense to just ignore what’s happened [in the storms]. Often politicians just want to get on with life and move on, but moving on is not necessarily moving forward,” he said.
“It needs to be a learning opportunity, not just an experience.”
