The southern highlands hamlet was savaged by a blaze that one resident said was ‘a thinking fire, like it was alive’

'This is how I die': the day the bushfires came to Balmoral

'This is how I die': the day the bushfires came to Balmoral

As the flames approached Justin and Helena’s Balmoral home from two directions on Saturday afternoon, they still held out some hope of saving it.

“I thought a 50-50 chance,” Justin tells Guardian Australia. “First it was [coming] from the south and I thought, ‘We expected this, we can handle it.’ Then it started coming in from the east and it was, ‘OK, now it’s harder but still maybe.’”

Play Video 1:19 'We had no chance': family returns to Balmoral home destroyed by three fires fronts – video

But as the couple and their 16-year-old son, Gabriel, battled to protect their home it seemed determined to outsmart them.

“It was a thinking fire,” Helena said. “Like it was alive.”

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As flames dozens of metres high bore down on them they ran desperately through thick, choking smoke to put out the spot fires that kept breaking out around them. Then, suddenly, the fire was behind them too, blowing in from a third direction, and they were overwhelmed.

“I looked around and suddenly there it was behind us, like it had caught us in a pincer movement,” he says. “I probably knew then it was too much.”

“The heat, I can’t describe it. It would have burned your beard off.”

He ran to the laundry to climb on to the roof, in one last desperate attempt to fight it off, but as he opened the door what Helena called “a ball of fire” burst through. It was in the house then, and the three of them ran for it together.

As they made their escape, the windows they’d had checked by two fire captains before the blaze came through were smashing around them. “It was ‘whoosh, whoosh, whoosh’ – glass breaking behind us,” Helena says.

A few kilometres down the road, 67-year-old Steve Harrison was having his own harrowing brush with the brutal fire that tore through this part of New South Wales at the weekend.

Harrison, a professional potter, had prepared his home the best he could, wrapping his windows in aluminium foil – “like a giant garlic bread” – and installing sprinklers on the walls and roof. As the flames approached, he did one last check around his property and jumped into the car to leave.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Justin and Gabriel watch the fire approaching on Friday. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

“But the garden was already on fire, the driveway was on fire, the road was on fire, I thought, ‘I’m not getting out of here,’” he said.

Instead he ran to a “coffin-sized” shelter he’d fashioned out of fireproof ceramic fibres the day before, and scuttled inside. Huddled inside his makeshift kiln he watched as his pottery shed – the third he’s had destroyed by fire since moving here – burned around him. He dared not look at his house until the fire had passed. When he did, he was shocked to see it still standing.

“It was eerie. The light was this metallic, luminous glow. Burning leaves were falling around me. The smoke was so thick I could hardly breathe. I just watched it as it came over me. I was shit scared. I thought, ‘This is how I die.’”

And so this is Balmoral now. This tiny, usually picturesque village with a population of about 400 in the southern highlands just south of Sydney, where 18 homes were destroyed on Saturday, is now another pitstop in the travelling bushfire emergency that has claimed nine lives and more than 900 buildings since November.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The makeshift shelter where Steve Harrison took refuge from the flames. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

They had known it was coming, of course. Conditions in the lead-up to Saturday were forecast to be catastrophic, and they were. Most of the residents of this tiny village, built in 1867, left on Thursday, heeding the warnings.

Then on Friday the village Rural Fire Service brigade captain, Brendon O’Connor, held a community meeting at which, he told Guardian Australia, he was “very honest about what I thought was going to happen”.

Another resident, Simon Marlow, was one of the people at that meeting. “He basically told us to make sure we’d prepared our will if we were going to stay,” he says. “I had bought a water pump and planned to stay but, when I saw it coming, honestly, it was terrifying, I got out of there.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Marlow on his scorched property. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

O’Connor’s brutal honesty may have saved lives. As temperatures climbed above 40C on Saturday, he described the same scenario to the Guardian that Helena and Justin had seen. Fire fronts came from the west, the east and the south, sending flames dozens of metres above the treetops.

“Everything that was already burning was burning even more, everywhere you looked was burning,” O’Connor said. “It’s a miracle. The firefighters that were here, they were … ” O’Connor stops and takes a deep breath, apologising.

“Not only were they fighting for their own lives, they were fighting for this community.”

Play Video 1:08 Path of destruction left at ‘ground zero village’ of Balmoral amid fire crisis – video

At one point, he says, they ran out of water.

“We’re on tank water here,” he says. “We were desperately trying to get more water into us, desperately calling for more to come in. A member from another brigade spoke to his boss about getting another truck into us really quick.

“That company saved a lot of homes.”

For Helena and Justin, there was no such luck. They are not angry but they do feel the Rural Fire Service volunteers here were stretched too thin, asked to cover too much territory.

The home they built together overlooking picturesque bushland 20 years ago – a home that survived fires in 2001 and 2013 – is rubble now. As they spoke to Guardian Australia on Monday, Gabriel found an intact mug among the ruins of their home and handed it to his mother. A jar of pork crackling sat unharmed. That was about it.

They remain in remarkably good cheer, though. “What else can you do?” Helena asks. They will “absolutely” rebuild here, Helena tells the Guardian.

“Gabriel says he wants a massive games room,” she says, laughing.