Port Hills fires, one year on: 'You'd think they would try to help us out'

Saturday, 10 February 2018

The first thing you notice about the Grace family property is the garden. It is almost pristine. The flowers are in bloom, the lawn is low and weeds are scarce.

The second thing you notice, which comes to overshadow the first thing, is the gaping concrete pad where the house used to be until it burned down a year ago.

On Monday, February 13, 2017, a small fire broke out in long grass beside Early Valley Rd, on the southern outskirts of Christchurch, about four kilometres from the Grace home on Worsleys Rd.

Both locations are tucked into the north side of the Port Hills, which separate the city from Banks Peninsula and on this day were tinder dry from a long, hot summer.

**READ MORE:

* Firestorm: The Port Hills fires

* Port Hills fires: Lessons for the entire country

* Port Hills fire: How it moved

* Canterbury's Port Hills fires likely deliberately lit**

Over the next week the fire, and another that began on nearby Marleys Hill, would quickly spread, merge into one and destroy another 10 houses and 2000 hectares of bush and farmland with a ferocity that one firefighter would later characterise as the 'face of evil'.

One year on, you have to survey the Grace property closely for signs of what claimed the family home. Some trees on the eastern perimeter are a little scorched. Two artificial lights that used to flank the front entrance stand exposed, their bulb casings melted and drooping. Treetops stemming from down the valley, at the bottom of the property, are just visible, dead and decaying.

'That's what everyone says when they come up here. The trees and gardens are fine, it's the house itself,' Kieran Grace says.

'Pretty much the whole property was fine except the house.'

The house burned on Wednesday, February 15. About two hours before it went up in flames, a police officer knocked on the Graces' door and told them they had 10 minutes to get out. Kieran Grace had come home from work about half an hour earlier.

'We got some clothes and a few things on a trailer.

'Considering what we had here. Dad died five years ago. All the stuff that he'd left me was here and all of his dad's stuff too. I didn't really care about the house, it was what was inside here.

'If they'd said, 'The fire's looking pretty bad' … we would have had this place empty in a day. Not 10 minutes to get out.'

The house that Grace lived in with his mother is gone, along with most of the infrastructure that contained the sheep they used to run on the property. Much of that was uninsurable.

'It's pretty tough,' Grace says. 'We're looking at rebuilding but it's going to be nearly half the size of what we used to have, just purely because of the cost to put in all the services, irrigation, buildings for the stock and the farm and kilometres of fencing and trees.

'Through no fault of our own we're completely out of pocket. We used to have three storeys, 450 square [metres]. We've just got a quote for a 200sq m place and that's pretty much all we can do.'

Grace is angry. Angry at having to settle when rebuilding the family home, angry at losing most of what he owned, angry most of all that he had to battle to find out what happened.

'There's just been a real lack of information flow towards us. We were the ones that lost so much. You'd think they would try to help us out the most but there's been a real lack of support, I guess.'

A 'LOST OPPORTUNITY'

The 'they' Grace refers to is an elusive group. Among the revelations after the Port Hills blaze was the byzantine system by which fires in rural areas in New Zealand were fought.

The country used to have 38 rural fire districts, where any blaze was fought by rural firefighters under the authority of the local council, unless it was on state land, which came under the Department of Conservation's (DoC) remit.

The New Zealand Fire Service was responsible for urban areas but, as the primary emergency responder, was typically the first to respond to rural fires when someone called 111. Once rural firefighters arrived, it would hand over command.

This structure changed last year when Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) was formed. The new organisation is an amalgamation of the New Zealand Fire Service, the National Rural Fire Authority and the 38 rural fire districts. It commands the response to all fires, urban and rural.

FENZ didn't exist last February, which is a shame, because the Port Hills fire traversed Christchurch city, Selwyn district and DoC land and presented an opportunity to run a unified command, like the new management model would provide.

It wasn't to be. It was a close run thing, but the first fire, on Early Valley Rd, was in Selwyn's patch.

'Not [owning] that fire, because it wasn't our fire, it was Selwyn's fire, that was frustrating for us,' former New Zealand Fire Service, and now FENZ, Christchurch metro area commander Dave Stackhouse says. 

'It was always going to be that way because that's the way we've operated. But this fire was on our doorstep, which made it very visual to the public of Christchurch and that's why it was different.'

The jurisdictional call meant the Selwyn District Council was in charge, and would run the incident management team (IMT). A unified command would have brought other authorities into the fold on an equal footing.

'I could have been strategically working with their incident command team to implement and use the resources both of urban and rural together,' Stackhouse says.

'I think we would have made better decisions around the deployment of rural resources, which have got more pumping capability. We understand structure fire more, that type of thing.'

That didn't happen. Baffling as it sounds, the New Zealand Fire Service was not part of the IMT.

'That's what the residents don't understand,' Stackhouse says. 'I tried to explain that but they just see us as one organisation. That's fine … we take responsibility for that. But at the time the structure that we had has been difficult for me and difficult for the New Zealand Fire Service to infiltrate into that.'

JOINT STRATEGY 'NEVER ACHIEVED'

'Infiltrate' and 'frustrating' aren't words you want to hear from a senior firefighter discussing the response to a major emergency.  An independent review of the firefighting response released in November commended firefighters' efforts but found myriad shortcomings on the management side. 

An action plan formed on the first night lacked detail and suffered from poor information from the ground and other intelligence, it said. Fire spread modelling was not used in a timely way and the IMT lacked resources in support positions.

The planning and IMT teams also lacked 'situational awareness'. The operations officer appointed for the duration of the fires stayed in one spot and did not relay the full picture to the IMT leaders.

Further confusion was caused by different terminology being used across the fire services and the wider emergency agencies. There was a lack of information given to the affected public.

'A holistic joint strategy was never truly achieved,' the report concluded.

For one example of how this detachment played out, consider the most devastating period of the fire, on the afternoon and evening of February 15. Before this, firefighters seemed to be getting on top of the blaze, but the wind changed to an easterly and the firefronts flared up with an intensity many of the firefighters had never seen. It was then that most of the houses were lost. The easterly change was forecast.

'We didn't get that intelligence,' Stackhouse says, 'and when we did and we started getting the 111s in on the radio, that's when we got down there as quick as we could.

'We saved as many [houses] as humanly possible. I was up on Worsley Spur when that fire came through. I put [firefighters] in harm's way, almost more than I would like to. I wouldn't get the fact that I'd lost a firefighter up there to save a house.'

Rural firefighter Richard McNamara, who led the aerial assault on the fire through its worst period, agrees.

'At that point the thing was uncontrollable,' he says. 'There's no point trying to tackle the main fire. You might as well spit at it.'

'Given the circumstances, [everything possible was done] … We all talk about the nine houses [lost that day], and yes, it is a tragedy, but there's not a lot of reference to the 90-odd that were saved by the actions of the firefighters and the work that they put in.'

Both men endorse the independent report on the fire and its findings. Stackhouse is at pains to point out many of the problems of a year ago are being phased out with the changeover to FENZ and recommendations in the report, including improved communications with local helicopter companies, adopting a proven Australian crisis management model used in bushfires and better public information processes, are being worked on. Technically, urban and rural fire are still separate entities but the transition will be complete by 2020.

'Eventually, in five years' time, a bit like the [Ministry of Transport]-police merger, you won't know the difference. They'll just be firefighters. And that's what the public of New Zealand want.

'There's opportunities lost there but that won't happen in the future … We are one, so there'll be no excuses.'

All of this is cold comfort to Kieran Grace and people like him. Stackhouse concedes as much.

'I understand their frustrations. I'm not entirely sure that it's justified in all cases. We tried our best to save their homes. There's a wee bit of personal responsibility but I'm not going to get into that too heavily because they won't like that.

'We are going to look at that in the future about how we can be better about providing that information to them.'

This is Grace's biggest gripe. The battle to find out what was going on during the fire and afterwards. Despite the reckoning following the release of the report, he remains unconvinced.

'We felt unbelievably guilty after the fires because [of the thought] we hadn't done something because we hadn't called earlier, got the water supply sorted or firebreaks or whatever. At least with that review coming out it showed us there were shortcomings in the response.

'Put it this way, if something similar happened again, I wouldn't be leaving here. If a cop turned up I'd tell them to bugger off. I'd stay here with everything.'

THE STAYERS

Eleven houses were lost in the Port Hills fires but countless more came under threat. On Early Valley Rd, the house below Dave Schiel's property was half burned and the one above was destroyed. Flames came within a couple of metres of his house, but it survived. 'Just sheer luck,' he says. The rest of his 22 hectares is a different story.

'The farm was completely burned. All our fence lines were gone. They weren't insured. We had to get rid of our stock in a fire sale because there was nowhere to contain them.

'We're probably out of pocket 100 grand or something like that.'

There is no obvious way to claw back that loss. After the delays of a wet winter, all the fencing, save for about 300 metres, is replaced, but cattle prices rose 'astronomically' last year, Schiel says, killing any chance to restock.

'It was impossible to buy any for an operation like ours and make any money. We needed to get it grazed so my neighbour came up and put some animals on it.

'It's set us back God knows how many years.'

Farming isn't even Schiel's main job. By day he is a marine scientist at the University of Canterbury with a small beef cattle interest and a healthy disrespect for authority on the side. He recalls emergency services 'all discussing the colour of their fluoro' during the fire response and dodging cordons to round up stray farm animals.

'Me and a mate spent a couple of times playing Smokey and the Bandit hiding out from cops while we got all the stock off the hill. There were hundreds of head of cattle and sheep and goats running around. We got water onto them and put electric fencing around.'

Now, $100,000 down and every spare minute swallowed by farm repairs, he is one of the lucky ones. He has little regard for the prescribed benefits of independent reports or emergency services reforms.

'All my neighbours are pretty incensed about it but I'm pretty relaxed because I don't expect anything.'

REGENERATION

At the top of Worsleys Rd, the bare, craggy hillside runs all the way to the top. This used to be the beginning of Worsleys Track, where you could walk, shrouded in native bush, right up to Summit Rd and take in a view that stretched to Lake Ellesmere.

Now it is bare, except for the lumpen covering of grass that hides the worst of the fire breaks and burnt tree stumps left behind. The charred, black stalks of some small forest blocks remain as well, but most of the burnt trees have been salvaged for logging and carted away by a steady stream of trucks.

'It was just a walking track,' Worsleys Rd resident Jo Kinley says. 'It's a bit like a highway now because of the road that was formed to take the trees out.'

Kinley's property, a mere 3000sq m amid the farmlets that surround it, was largely spared. Smoke damage was the biggest problem. She has watched the neighbourhood return to normal which, much like the earthquakes, is a 'new normal'.

'It's a funny thing. You just get used to how it looks now.

'From our place we look up the hill and it used to be all forest and you couldn't really see the [Christchurch Adventure] mountain bike park, couldn't see the lift and now we can see all of that.'

The scarred landscape isn't really anyone's biggest concern. Kinley recalls a statement that emerged somewhere in the public messaging to locals after the fires: 'We will walk alongside you in your journey.'

'I think if you pretty much asked anybody if anybody walked alongside them in their journey, they would say no.

'The council left skips up here for a long time which was great but no people to get into people's gardens and take out burnt trees. A lot of the things we got we got because people like myself or other people on the street asked.

'It was kind of like once we'd got home and people got back to reality that was pretty much it … There was more action when it came to replanting Marleys Hill with native trees.'

The replanting effort, led by the Christchurch City Council, has indeed forged ahead. Council park ranger Di Carter says 7200 plants have been planted across 1.5ha of Marleys Hill and Kennedys Bush reserves with the help of volunteers. About 3000 poroporo seedlings are also in the ground.

'The new plants are doing brilliantly and have come through the hot summer really well.

'We've had problems with thistle incursions and hares trying to eat the new plants in Kennedys Bush Reserve but 90 to 95 per cent of the plants have managed to survive.'

AFTERMATH

The report on the fire response concluded that both blazes were probably deliberately lit, though the causes were officially listed as 'undetermined'. Last month, FENZ closed its inquiry, citing lack of evidence. It will only reopen if new evidence emerges. A police investigation remains open.

The fire also lives on in the High Court, where an action by insurer IAG alleges blame against Christchurch Adventure Park owner Leisure Investments and city council-owned lines company Orion.

It claims the Early Valley Rd fire was started by an electrical fault and the Marleys Hill blaze was spread by the adventure park's chairlift cable, which was kept running to avoid heat damage.

Orion has lodged a statement of defence and the adventure park has said the failure of the haul rope would have been 'catastrophic, putting lives at risk'. A conference between the parties is scheduled for May 2.

On Worsleys Rd, life goes on. 'I think there is definitely a strength in community spirit up here,' Kinley says. 'There's never a positive out of an outcome like that but there's lessons to be learnt for everyone. The council have been very proactive in mowing the longer grass which they weren't doing before the fires.

'We talk a lot more up the road now. We're a great wee community. We've become much more cohesive.'

The Graces are still part of it. Kieran Grace is up the hill almost every day to tend the gardens, put out the rubbish and scare off thieves like the ones who tried to steal a car from their sheep shed and drive it out the bottom of the property (they got stuck in a fire break and gave up).

On December 25, the family had a Christmas breakfast on the concrete pad, using some lawn chairs that survived the flames.

'We'd done it every year for the last 20 years,' Grace says, 'This wasn't going to change anything.

'Nothing's changed. There's just no house here.'