INSIDE STUART’S RESCUE
Two decades after the disaster, three rescuers relive those dark days—and one jubilant moment
“I said, ‘Mate, I’ve heard something’ ”
—Stephen Hirst
Whenever former Sydney firefighter Stephen Hirst recalls 1997’s Thredbo disaster, one thing always springs to mind. “When he answered back,” he tells WHO of discovering the tragedy’s sole survivor, Stuart Diver, trapped beneath tonnes of rubble in the dim predawn of Aug. 2. “I said, ‘Can anyone hear me?’ And he came back with ‘Yes, I can hear you.’ It wasn’t a huge boom of voice. It was very quiet, but it was there.”
It was the sound of hope within an unprecedented horror. Twenty years ago on July 30, a landslide struck the NSW Snowy Mountains town just before midnight, killing 18 people, including Diver’s wife, Sally. Two buildings were reduced to rubble in the tragedy when Carinya Lodge was sheared from its foundations and slammed into Bimbadeen Ski Lodge below, where most of the victims were either asleep or preparing for bed. It remains the biggest disaster Hirst, now a NSW Fire and Rescue Zone Commander, has ever encountered. “The size of it was massive,” says the 51-year-old.
Here, Hirst, a father of two who lives on the NSW Mid-north Coast; Supt Warwick Kidd, 56, then the Rescue Operations Officer at Thredbo (now Manager of Counter-terrorism for Fire and Rescue NSW); and now-retired paramedic Paul Featherstone recall those dark days—and the elation that came with rescuing Australia’s most famous survivor. Supt Stephen Hirst It was one of my days off. I heard of the tragedy on the radio. I got a phone call from the rescue section saying, “We’re going to send you to Thredbo.” I left probably just after lunch and got down there when it was dark. Being the middle of winter it was short days. Supt Warwick Kidd I was home at night and my pager went off. They said, “Righto, we’re going to send teams down to Thredbo.” We had a private flight fly us down to Cooma and a police car gave us an escort to the site. Hirst I saw the landslide from Thredbo’s Alpine Way, looking down. It was massive. As a firefighter, we like making bad things right and we were all champing at the bit to get in. There were surveyors keeping watch on the site because it was constantly moving. We had those air horns that people use at the football, so three of those [ horn sounds] meant “evacuate and abandon your position.” Like pick-up sticks, when we were pulling on one bit of debris it would impact on something else because it was all intertwined. So there were occasions where the surveyors would see significant movement and they’d put the warning up and everyone walked off site until we got the go-ahead to get
back on there again. Warwick’s team did the bulk of heavy lifting. Kidd I had thermal imagery, so if we had someone who might have been covered in debris we could pick up a heat bloom from them. I also had a search camera that we could push down into the rubble and I had a seismic listening device, which would help us pick out thumps on concrete under the rubble. So we would call into the rubble and if a [trapped] person was able to thump the concrete we’d be able to pick that up. Hirst There was several times where people thought they heard something and people on the site stopped. But when they stopped they couldn’t hear anything. Kidd I worked just on 19 hours that first period. In that time we didn’t find anybody. We have what we call a 100-hour time frame. If we’re going to find someone alive, it’s usually within the first 100 hours. From the afternoon of July 31, the crew began discovering bodies. Hirst I’d never been exposed to that, to deceased persons on that scale. Myself and another gentleman, Geoff [Courtney], were harnessed, working on rope lines because of the sheer grade. We were on a concrete slab and because of the grade, you needed to be on rope lines. Then I said to Geoff, “Mate, I’ve heard something.” And he goes, “Oh, you’ve got rocks in your head.” I said, “No, something’s not right.’ And he goes, “Right, go with it mate, follow it.”
I still cannot recall for the life of me what it was that caught my ear. I don’t know if it was a tap, a voice or whatever. Geoff started yelling out for everyone to be quiet and then when it all shut down, I yelled into the concrete mass: “Rescue party working overhead, can anyone hear me?” And a voice came back, “Yes, I can hear you.” It lifted everyone. And then I went through the process of, “What’s your name?” ... “Stuart Diver.” When I asked him was anyone with him, he said his wife had passed away. I said to him, “Righto, mate, hang tight. We’re coming to get you.”
We couldn’t just pull him out, we had paramedics and doctors down there and they said, “There’s no way you can sit this person upright, you’ve got to slide him.” There were fears that if we sat him up and pulled him upright his body wouldn’t cope, due to the extreme cold he suffered. So we basically had to cut a hole so we could make room to slide him through the opening and then back up at the slightest angle we could. Kidd Our team started to tunnel down to Stuart at one stage and I was actually talking to him and he said, “Oh, I think I can see you but has someone got a torch?” And I handed Stuart down a torch and he shone it up and unfortunately my face was the first one that he saw. He still has that torch.
One of the biggest troubles I had was that my young kids were watching TV and could see me disappearing inside the hole that Stuart’s in, and the TV people are saying, “This is dangerous, this could collapse at any moment.” My wife ended up turning the TV off. Hirst It was hugely technical. They had to [cut] their way through the slabs and then at the bottom they had to make an area to push his head past the opening and then back up at as level an angle as possible. You do this slowly, slowly, to get him out, because you don’t want to lose him by being too enthusiastic.
I take my hat off to the crew who came on and did the hard eight hours and then we came back on for the final extraction. And the ambos who were there monitoring him, the police, the whole rescue team were amazing. The main person talking to Stuart was Paul Featherstone, the paramedic. Paul Featherstone There was a tube put in just above Stuart and it had a camera, a microphone, and he could also hear me speak on it as well, so I could actually see him through the TV screen under the rubble. I said we’d get him out and we were going to keep working until we got him out of here. At one stage I’d crawled down into the rubble and Warwick tapped me on the shoulder and pulled me out because the sirens had gone off, and I’d just gone into Stuart’s soul—he’d just opened up about what had happened. Kidd We spent the day digging him out and we knew towards the end we weren’t going to be there when he came out, and that was pretty tough because these guys wanted to be the ones that dug him out. But the best part is, the crew who found him were the ones that came back on shift. Our team saw him recovered down at where we were having our meals at night-time—on TV, like everybody else. Hirst I was in the hole when he came out. I thought he looked better than I did! When he came out he was obviously cold but he said, “What an ugly bunch of bastards.” Cheeky bugger. At the time it was so huge. It was a massive team effort. Featherstone As we got him out—he started going up the mountain [in his stretcher] like a cattle dog over sheep—there was an unbelievable roar and cheer when people finally realised that that was Stuart out. Kidd That lifted everybody up for a while. Then we started to find the remaining people that died and you’re at your wits’ end with your own emotions, because you don’t want to find any bodies but you know there are bodies there and they’ve got to be recovered. Hirst We were at the site for 10 days. Basically, the last body was recovered and the site got shut down as a search-and-rescue site. When I got home it was all pretty emotional. I had young kids at the time so that was really good seeing the kids.
I’ve formed great bonds with the guys that I worked with down there, that I still know well and see. Kidd One of the most important things I learnt from Thredbo is to look after the team. The real world for us is going home and dealing with the kids and paying the mortgage, and every now and then we’ve got to step into someone else’s nightmare. So being able to extract yourself from that—that’s the key to longevity as an emergency-services worker. Hirst I met Stuart at the [first] anniversary down there at Thredbo and [we] shook hands and had a cuddle. And I think he shouted me a Jägermeister. Yeah, nice guy. Featherstone Stuart and I are both close as, but we don’t see each other often. And we talk to each other maybe once or twice a year. But the phone will ring and if he asks for anything, it will be there. Kidd I’ve spoken to Stuart over the years. I will probably see him for the first time in 15 years when I go down to the event there. [ The Thredbo Chapel is hosting a Remembrance Service on July 30.] I’d just like to see Stuart and say hello, see how he’s travelling.
“He said, ‘What an ugly bunch of bastards’ ”
—Stephen Hirst