When there is an emergency call-out in the middle of the night, the head of one local rescue team doesn’t have to worry about waking her deputy – he’s right beside her.
Leanne Klammer is the Kinglake State Emergency Service controller, her deputy controller and partner is Andrew Derwent, and three of her unit members are her children.
Daughter Louise, now 20, joined as a junior and is now a team leader, son Alex, 18, is an operational member and Klammer’s youngest Nicholas, couldn’t wait to turn 16 to become a junior member. Her eldest, Martin, now 25, was a junior member but school demands at the time meant he had to give it up.
If the couple get an emergency call, they have eight minutes to hit the road; including four minutes to acknowledge the call and another four minutes to organise a crew.
Often Klammer is still wearing pyjamas under her orange SES overalls, but they have a near perfect score meeting the time for call-outs.
The emergencies are diverse. It’s not just pulling tarpaulins over storm damaged houses and sand-bagging in flash floods, helping in industrial accidents and searching the bush for missing people.
The SES crews often cut open smashed vehicles to rescue the living and recover the dead.
Derwent says ‘‘you try not to remember the nasty ones. We all have a slightly different way of dealing with it’’.
But Klammer recalls a quadruple fatality where two small children lost their lives in a two-car collision on the Melba Highway near Dixons Creek in 2011.
‘‘It is sadder when innocent people lose their lives and their families are left behind.’’
On Black Saturday, many of the Kinglake SES members were fund-raising ‘‘off the mountain’’ in Whittlesea. Their pagers started going off in response to road crashes as people fled Kinglake on the Whittlesea-Yea Road, and the volunteers talked their way around roadblocks and drove back up the mountain.
What should have taken 15 minutes took an hour as the fire came in waves blocking their path. They found bodies in the burnt out vehicles which were the emergency call-outs.
More heart-wrenching was when Klammer’s personal mobile started ringing.
‘‘There were mums begging us. They kept pleading, ‘forget me, just save my children’.’’
‘‘There was nothing we could do.’’ In the aftermath Klammer and her family stayed in Kinglake, at one stage living for 15 months in a caravan: two adults and three children. ‘‘It is our community; we chose to stay,’’ she says.
Klammer, who has been a SES volunteer since 1994, says the Kinglake unit is stronger since the fires, despite half of the then 18 members moving away because they had lost property.
It now has 28 members, including three juniors who Klammer says are the future.
In their down time, Klammer, 46, drives a courtesy bus for an RSL club, and Derwent, 55, is a small businessman and Murrindindi Shire councillor.
Derwent loves helping people, but it’s his sense of duty that keeps him coming back: ‘‘somebody’s got to do it’’. ■
