‘They thought they were going to die’: Wooroloo resident recalls horror night losing family home to bushfire

The night of the Wooroloo blaze is one the Hay family will never forget. Fourteen months on, they are living in a converted horse stable while they build a house to replace the home they lost in the devastating bushfire. Recalling the heartbreaking Sunday last year, truck driver Rupert Hay said the family — who watched fire balls shoot from the trees as the blaze raced up the hill towards their home — had “good days and bad days”. Staying to defend, they had their fire plan in action with all of their hoses and pumps running and their neighbours had come to help. On top of a hill, they had a good vantage point to see where it was coming from. But things took a turn very quickly. “The fire just sat in the valley, I suppose 10-15 minutes just sitting there doing not really a lot,” Mr Hay said. “And then all of a sudden the wind just changed and everything changed and it climbed up the hill.” Their neighbours drove back to defend their own home, while Mrs Hay and their son hopped in the pool and Mr Hay bunkered in the carport, where he could see them, while watching for any embers on the roof of the house. “We felt the first heat wave . . . then I could start to hear the noise that a fire makes,” Mr Hay said. “The tree fire came first, just motoring through the top of the trees. Trees exploding everywhere. Fire balls flying. “Then you had the secondary fire, which was doing more damage because that had the intensity of the heat . . . it was so big it was creating its own wind.” As huge flames “roared” over the top of them, they feared for their lives. “They honestly thought they were going to die,” Mr Hay said. “They didn’t know but my wife had sat the phone on the edge of the pool, and it was actually recording. It’s recorded the fire the whole time they’re in the pool, so you can actually see what it was like to be under the fire.” They survived, but suffered burns to the head, face and arms. Mr Hay said, unfortunately, they also faced criticism for jumping in the pool. The ordeal is still too raw for Mrs Hay to talk about. Thinking the worst had passed, the family got to work moving everything smouldering from around the house, thankful it was still standing. “Nothing was burning, it was just smouldering,” Mr Hay said. “It was very weird, there were no actual flames. “My wife had even rang her daughter to say, ‘We’re OK’.” About 10 minutes later, everything changed. Mr Hay said their Solarhart hot water system began smoking, the plastic ends of it melting and embers getting into the insulation. All of a sudden, the house they had called home for 24 years, where they raised their children, nieces and nephews and foster children, burst into flames. Before the firefighters could get there, the roof collapsed in and Mr Hay said “there was nothing we could do”. “Because the pipes are all insulated to take the hot water into the house it just went straight into the roof cavity,” he said. Inside, were treasured photographs which Mrs Hay had just started digitising, more than two decades of memories, and just about everything they owned, bar passports, paperwork and hard drives. Their animals — including a donkey, three dogs and two cats — survived, but their pet macaws did not. Mr Hay said there was “not one thing” salvageable, with an engineer insurance assessor estimating by the twists in the steel and colour of the cement in the double-brick-and-tin house that it burnt at 1100C-1200C. “A lot of the walls of the house you could actually push down by hand,” he said. “There was nothing left — no jewellery, no plates, everything was just shattered.” Despite knowing his home had been destroyed, Mr Hay spent the night with a group of neighbours on quad bikes saving neighbours’ homes from the blaze, one of which they stayed with for two weeks after. In August, the wreckage of their home was removed to make way for a new home, which Mr Hay is hoping will be completed by Christmas. While it would never be the same, he said it would be a fresh start and the most important thing was that they were all OK. “It’s sad that it’s all gone,” he said. “But at the end of the day, safety and people’s lives is number one.”