Rescue from above

Some 200,000 Queenslanders in 22 towns and cities across the state became victims of the floods, a disaster described as of “biblical proportions” by state treasurer Andrew Fraser. But help was on the way.

The ADF’s aerial contribution extended across all three branches, with Army, Navy and RAAF aviation assets deployed across the state in the search and rescue, medevac and supply roles. Also prominent were Emergency Management Queensland (EMQ) and RACQ Careflight helicopters, as well as a raft of civil operators Initially, Rockhampton was the central focus of air support operations, as the city almost became an island on January 3 with the Fitzroy River peaking. Across Queensland an area the size of France and Germany combined was affected by flood waters, and Army Black Hawks and RAAF C-130 crews remained on hand to deliver supplies and provide medical evacuations if necessary.

As part of the ADF’s central Queensland contribution, the RAAF’s 37 Squadron had been active in the region since December 30, transporting ADF personnel, vital food supplies and providing medevac support to towns such as Emerald, Charleville, Mackay, Rockhampton and Gladstone.

C-130J captain Flight Lieutenant David Torrington was just one of many 37SQN members who participated in the flood relief efforts. The squadron had received notification on December 30 to deploy to Amberley from RAAF base Richmond the following day. Later arriving on January 6 to relieve a previous C-130 crew, FLTLT Torrington explained the task that lay in front of him and the squadron.

“Essentially our role was to be on standby and to move anything that required to be moved to airfields we could access. Our chain of command came direct from the Joint Task Force (JTF 637), so they came to us and said we need you to move this from here to here and that’s what we were essentially doing for the two weeks. ” 37SQN effectively served as a jack of all trades, conducting fast touch-and-go combat offloads, transporting nonperishable supplies, sandbags, and RAAF Air Mobile Load Teams to flood-affected areas including Charleville, Bundaberg and St George.

One of the first tasks assigned to 37SQN on December 31 was the delivery of a Queensland Fire and Rescue Service ‘flexible habitat’ evacuation centre, flown into Emerald from Amberley. FLTLT Torrington noted that the portable evacuation centre was also packed up and redeployedto Roma and St George as Emerald began its post-flood recovery on January 2. “What it allowed us to do, was to set up an evacuation centre wherever it needed to be set up. ” “One of the other big roles we had was actually setting up a FARP, which is a forward aerial refuelling point, because some of the regional centres didn’t actually have any avtur for the gas turbine engines of the helicopters, for example the Sea King and the Black Hawks . . . what we did the first time the guys went in, they took about four fuel bladders and pumps, so they could actually have fuel accessible to those helicopters, and then essentially the next few days we were just tasked to fly in fuel bladders full of fuel for those areas, so those helicopters could operate directly from those airfields, as opposed to having to fly back to say Oakey or Amberley which is an hour or two transit,” said FLTLT Torrington.

“A lot of the time, we were just on standby, just in case something had come up that they needed us for. As you could probably appreciate, a lot of the task was rotary wing focused. ” That “rotary wing focus” was spearheaded by Navy Mk 50A Sea Kings and Army S‑70A Black Hawks, led by Commander Paul Moggach and Lieutenant Colonel Tim Witenden respectively. Focused on any number of tasks, including supply drops, search and rescue and resident evacuations, the ADF helicopters had their work cut out for them.

As Commanding Officer of 817 Squadron, CMDR Moggach oversaw the detachment of two Sea Kings, aircrew and maintainers to Roma on January 5, before moving to Amberley to join the Rotary Wing Task Group (RWTG).

“In Roma itself, we were working the southwestern area of operations, which was mainly the Balonne River system, and our area of ops really stretched from Dalby and Oakey in the east all the way to the New South Wales border at the bottom end of the Balonne River system. ” With a refueling point established at St George, CMDR Moggach’s Sea King crews operated out of the town’s small airport, providing flood relief to the riverside towns of Surat and Dirranbandi as well.

“Our deployment up there was really in two distinct halves,” explained CMDR Moggach. “The first five days of our support work up there was, as I said, based out of Roma, and our work involved providing initial reconnaissance of the Balonne River system, looking at the areas along the main towns, ensuring that any major or medium lift requirements were identified in advance of the . . . main flood levels that came down the river. ” Close cooperation and communication with Balonne Shire Mayor Donna Stewart meant that if the Balonne River did rise above the March 2010 levels of 13. 4m, CMDR Moggach had Sea King helicopters ready to evacuate low lying townships in the area. Thankfully, helicopter evacuation was not needed when the Balonne River only rose to 13. 2m at St George with the flood levees holding.

With St George preparing to start clean up efforts by January 7, phase two of Sea King operations moved east after flash flooding tore through Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley on the evening of January 10.

“We received some urgent phone calls on that afternoon of the 10th January from the commander of the Joint Task Force [JTF 637], directing us to get to the Lockyer Valley, leaving Roma at first light on Tuesday the 11th. . . That started the second phase of our deployment in Queensland, which is really support to Emergency Management Queensland in the Lockyer Valley. ” January 11 would be a significant day for CMDR Moggach, as his Sea Kings rendezvoused with two Army Black Hawks bound for Amberley. “We joined up with two Black Hawks from the Army Aviation Training Centre, which were Black Hawks 220 and 201, and using a bit of their local knowledge, we descended down into the Lockyer Valley,” Cmdr Moggach said.

From there, it was into the maelstrom.

“Worst weather I’ve ever flown in, in 20 years by a mile,” Cmdr Moggach recalled of the day. “There was a huge band of thunderstorms right across our track when we were trying to get into Amberley and get down. . . At various stages in that initial morning on the 11th, the weather was so appalling that all the aircraft had to land at various places. My aircraft landed about 20 miles north of Gatton inside some local greyhound trainer’s training track, and waited out some horrendous thunderstorms in the area. We eventually got into Amberley, and all the aircraft, after about three hours, made it across to our first major area of operations. ” The first major mission in the Lockyer Valley for the two Sea Kings (Shark 21 and 22) and two Black Hawks (Black Hawk 201 and 220) was the large scale forced evacuation of Forest Hill, which saw approximately 400 residents moved to a sportsground at Gatton. An EMQ AW139 (Rescue 500) and one other civilian helicopter were also on hand to assist moving residents during the evacuation.

“That took a couple of hours of us moving these people out of Forest Hill across to Gatton, in some pretty bad conditions, with the rain and the rising water all around the town. ” Army and Navy helicopter operations also saw 160 people evacuated from Laidley and shifted a mile across a raging river inside an impressive 30 minutes.

Both CMDR Moggach and his opposite number, LTCOL Witenden, ensured smooth cooperation between the Army and Navy helicopter units when flash floodrelocationing reached a crisis point for southeast Queensland. CO of the Army Helicopter School at Oakey and an aircraft captain, LTCOL Witenden became commander of the entire Army Aviation detachment at RAAF Amberley during the flood relief effort. He remembers how important it was to have solid inter-service cooperation in such a natural disaster.

“Paul [Moggach] and I worked very closely with all these things that occurred, particularly in the week from about the 10th January onwards.

“Even though there are some differences [between Army and Navy operations], I think the similarities far outshone any differences that may have been there.

“The fact that it all came together, and I’d say it was a seamless transition, I think was quite phenomenal in itself, and we did not have any difficulty with how any individual or team worked as part of the overall Rotary Wing Task Group that was formed for this. Everyone just plugged and played like we did it on a regular basis. ” With nine Black Hawks, four Kiowas and a CH-47 Chinook deployed, all from various squadrons, Army Aviation’s contribution to the flood relief effort was extensive.

Search and rescue operations were conducted by Army crews during initial flood operations in southeast Queensland on January 11, before switching gradually to recovery and relief missions.

But Army assets were assigned to flood relief well before the Lockyer Valley was inundated.

“Two Black Hawks did an evacuation on the 30th of December from Condamine, so that’s the forced evacuation that took place there,” LTCOL Witenden related. “We evacuated 85 people from Condamine to Dalby. ” While LTCOL Witenden soon returned to Oakey after the evacuation of Condamine, three Black Hawks from Townsville’s 5th Aviation Regiment continued with flood relief operations in central Queensland.

On December 31, the Black Hawks had evacuated Emerald, while a RAAF C-130 flew 130 tonnes of nonperishable supplies from Amberley to Mackay, intended for Rockhampton before it was cut off completely by floodwaters on January 4.

“Nearly everyone I put on the aircraft was saying ‘I can’t find my mum, my daughter, my son’. We were certainly their first contact, the first people they had seen, so we became the rescuer, the counsellor, the re-assurer.”

As flash flooding ripped through Toowoomba and the Lockyer valley on January 11th, and with Brisbane next on the disaster list, LTCOL Witenden made the call to redeploy his aircraft contingent to Amberley, given its closer proximity to flood relief operations. This was despite some initial concerns that Amberley itself could be flooded.

“We were originally going to base ourselves out of Oakey, but given the devastation of the Lockyer Valley, it just made far better sense to be based out of Amberley, so we could access anything from Brisbane, all the way west, both up into Toowoomba, but also into the Western Downs area as well. ” “On the 11th of January, . . . the day after we had the flash flooding and everything through Toowoomba and the surrounding region, myself in Black Hawk 220 and another Black Hawk commanded by Captain Nate Coil, participated in search and rescue operations in the Lockyer Valley, and that’s when we were also joined by two of Paul’s aircraft later in that afternoon. So between the four of us, we evacuated places like Forest Hill, Laidley, and we also did 24 hoist rescues as well on that particular day. ” “Phenomenal” was how Witenden described the flood ravaged Lockyer Valley.

“It looked more like a tsunami had actually gone through the place, particularly areas like Grantham, where everything was absolutely flattened. When we were conducted some of our rescues, because of the flood waters themselves were moving at such a pace that anything from cars, water tanks, shipping containers, would actually be floating past whilst we were doing that. ” LTCOL Witenden’s Black Hawk 220 shot to national prominence after air crewman Warrant Officer Class 2 (WO2) Tony Young famously rescued young toddler Montannah from the slipping grip of her grandmother in Forest Hill.

“Warrant Officer Tony Young is essentially the pin-up boy for a lot of some of the photos that you’ll see getting around the traps,” quipped LTCOL Witenden.

Keep sending ‘em up With southeast Queensland a flood disaster zone, Archerfield Airport, the main base for EMQ’s Brisbane helicopter fleet,became the central hub for EMS helicopter operations. General manager of Archerfield Airport Corporation Corrie Metz recalled the buzz of activity throughout the flood crisis over a hectic five day period, starting on January 12.

“We had numerous aircraft that came in that required different forms of assistance, and mostly helicopters. At any one stage, we could have had up to 16 helicopters here. ” “They wanted to make sure they were able to get access, fairly quick access to send out communications equipment, to set up communication links. ” Metz, a former RAAF Chief of Staff of Combat Support Group, noted that due to Archerfield’s close proximity to Oxley Creek and the Brisbane River, a number of media helicopters were temporarily based at the airport, as news teams scrambled to gather footage of the floods. In the meantime, EMQ, as well as other EMS/ search and rescue helicopter crews, focused on delivering much needed supplies and medevac support to the hard-hit areas of Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley.

Even Archerfield itself was under possible threat of flooding, when flood waters encroached onto the western side of the airport.

Metz said, “The flood levels didn’t quite reach ’74 levels here, but we have two tenants on the western side of the airfield that were inundated about three-quarters of the way up the building in one case. ” “I also got water onto the grass secondary runways and none of that affected any of our helicopter operations, or fixed wing operations for that matter. We were able to maintain full operations throughout that period, even with that water. It didn’t get onto the main runway at all, so we were spared from that. We’re up relatively high, so we stayed fairly dry throughout. ” “If it had gone past the ’74 flood levels, our modelling showed that we may get some on the western side of the main runway, but not enough to stop operations.

We had processes in place where we would have displaced the threshold to maintain most of the runways still open. ” Against the threat of partial flooding, coordinating this armada of helicopters was a small number of airport staff. Only four groundcrew (consisting of safety officers and groundsmen) tirelessly performed checks and any necessary servicing to runways and taxiways, as well as a host of other duties.

“They were fabulous throughout. It didn’t matter what sort of time or how long it took, there were no questions asked,” Metz noted.

“Nothing was too much. There was a lot of cooperation between all parties, whether it was between my staff and the operators, the aircraft operators, or between the operators themselves, just the whole attitude of cooperation and ‘let’s get the job done’.

That really stood out to me. ”

At The Forefront

The emotional story of Archerfield based EMQ pilot Mark Kempton will be well remembered.

While Kempton was winching 28 people to safety on the night that flash flooding hit the Lockyer Valley (January 10), his Yeronga home was also inundated.

His chief pilot, Trevor Wilson, was also involved in a number of rescue operations across Queensland, and described the feeling of despair in knowing that his crews were unable to rescue everyone in floodaffected areas.

“There’s obviously the feeling of knowing that you only have a certain amount of time to get a certain amount of people,” said Wilson.

“We were certainly concerned from a welfare point of view that the crews have some personal effect [from feeling] that they have left some people out there. ” “I pulled 45 walking wounded out of Grantham [in the Lockyer Valley], people who had clambered to higher ground during the night. People who had horrific stories of riding their house down-river and when it crashed into a tree, they climbed down the tree. Nearly everyone I put on the aircraft was saying ‘I can’t find my mum, my daughter, my son’. So it’s quite, quite tragic. We were certainly their first contact, the first people they had seen, so we became the rescuer, the counsellor, the re-assurer. ” With its rotary wing fleet of three AugustaWestland AW139s and two Bell 412s, EMQ initially responded to flood-affected Central Queensland. Once there, EMQ teams were utilised as the “primary medial backup” to support other emergency helicopter operators focused on the counterdisaster support role in Rockhampton.

When Rockhampton Airport closed on January 1, and with the city itself almost entirely cut off by flood waters, EMQ had already established a temporary medical facility at nearby Gladstone aerodrome, able to support aircraft and crews and effect hospital patient transfers. In Wilson’s view, Gladstone “became the best base logistically to launch in and out of for Rockhampton operations. ” While residents in Rockhampton were prepared well ahead of time for the predicted onslaught of floods (having last dealt with a similar deluge in 2008), Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley were not so fortunate.

Though only one AW139 helicopter is allocated to each of EMQ’s three bases of Cairns, Townsville and Brisbane, Wilson revealed that a stroke of luck saw two of these highly capable machines deployedalmost immediately to the Lockyer Valley on search and rescue operations.

“We had wound up basically our support in Rockhampton and we had brought the Cairns aircraft down to Brisbane to do some servicing prior to redeployment,” he said.

“It so happened that with us having the Cairns aircraft down being utilised the week before, we had a second 139 in Brisbane that we were able to deploy straight away as well. Thank goodness we did, because we were able to respond two AW139s into the Lockyer Valley that afternoon. ” Flying up to 13 hour days out of their main Brisbane base at Archerfield Airport, a strict fatigue management system ensured aircrews would not be compromised while conducting emergency operations.

“It was very demanding. The crews themselves are all very, very experienced and highly professional aviators,” Wilson noted.

Again, we’ve got 139s and they’re fantastic . . . [one 139 was] able to get 28 people and the other aircraft got 15. So 43 people were winched off late that afternoon, but like any aircraft, it’s time to go for gas at some stage and obviously, the weather precluded them from going back in there. ” Weather conditions, by any measure, were atrocious over the southeast. Thunderstorms, pouring rain and low level cloud cover all spelt poor visibility, rendering night vision goggles useless. The bulk, if not all, of EMQ’s operations were conducted from first light in the morning to last light in the afternoon.

“When the weather got too bad, you just go, oh look, this is just getting onto the stage where it’s not safe to be here and it’s not legal to be here, so you make those decisions. . . and we wait out the storm.

“There were times when the aircraft was voluntarily withdrawn from service because we didn’t want to get it to that stage where we nearly hit a hill or we nearly hit a tower.

We trust the guys have the professionalism to be able to ignore pressures, pressures of people wanting the aircraft there, pressures we might be needing to save lives, to make sound safety decisions. And I know both of the aircraft that were out there the next day, there were periods during the day when both captains, myself and the other pilot Mark Kempton, said enough’s enough, we’re putting it on the ground and waiting this one out. ” “It’s a tough call to fly away knowing that you’re probably not going to be able to get that immediate help into that area. ” Despite all his aircrews being highly experienced in the EMS role, Wilson stressed the importance of staying focused on the job and being able to make sound decisions in the cockpit when lives are at stake. However, even this vital requirement can lead to agonising uncertainty.

“Would your decisions be different if you were trying to save a five year old boy compared to an 80 year old man? Well obviously emotionally they are, but they can’t be because you have to primarily focus that you have a crew of five on your aircraft – pilot, winch operator, winch rescue crewman, a doctor and paramedic – and you are making decisions on the basis of the safety and welfare of that crew. You really do have to work on the fact that, ok, if I feel ok and I’m safe that means everybody else on board is safe. Although it’s an exhilarating feeling. . . when the dust settles and you think wow, I made a bit of a difference out there, it’s mixed emotions.

It’s those two crews that first night who felt this total exhilaration that we got out there, we did our job, the aircraft performed well, we winched 43 [people] out of life threatening situations. Those 43 would not be alive if we didn’t get them. But then there’s obviously the feeling of we know that there was more or there could possibly have been more that we had to leave.

“It’s a bit of an emotional roller-coaster ride. ” Gold Coast based RACQ CareFlight was also on hand to conduct EMS and search and rescue missions. These in turn were primarily tasked by the Queensland Police and Queensland Clinical Coordination (QCC) centre. Equipped with two Bell 412s (one based at Toowoomba), a Bell 230 and Aerospatiale Squirrel, Care- Flight rotary wing operations chief pilot Paul Forcier recalled when he completed 13 missions on January 12.

“It had a major impact obviously with the flying that was done, so we had duty time issues to deal with. . . I was flying the Bell 230 and I did probably seven-anda- half hours or eight hours of flying on 13-odd missions in that machine. Again, primarily for evacuation, so landing in people’s backyards, people with medical conditions who couldn’t move from their houses. No ambulances could get through of course, so a lot of the pick-ups were just ad-hoc pick-ups in the backs of people’s yards or in the ovals and towns or wherever they could get us really. ” Though grounded for the most part by wild weather on January 11, CareFlight was tasked out of RAAF Amberley from January 12, allowing all four helicopters closer access to flood-affected areas in the Lockyer Valley, Darling Downs and Toowoomba.

“It was an incredibly busy airspace,” recalled Forcier.

“Amberley were even having trouble to control [it]. . . They did their best to keep us all aware of what aircraft were operating, where and what altitude. ” “It really came down to the pilots in command to see and avoid the other traffic, which was a very high workload as you’d expect. There’s in excess of eight, 10 helicopters all around the Ipswich area, and then everything gathered around the outside of that. ” Between December 27 and January 14, CareFlight flew 27 EMS, search and rescue and medevac missions. Forcier gave a glowing appraisal of how his crew performed in such difficult, challenging and chaoticconditions.

“Wonderful, they did a very good job.

They lived up to what we employed them to do of course, that’s their job. But you can’t take away from the fact that everyone rallied to be available, so guys were coming in on their days off as medical crew, paramedics, the pilots and the crewman all came in on their days off to make sure we had four aircraft manned over that four day peak period.

“It’s just the nature of the job. Obviously we’re under that every day. We don’t quite know what to expect every time a call comes. . . The reason we’re being tasked is because these people are exceptionally sick or in dire need of a helicopter rescue, so as far as mentally preparing, you know that you’re up against that. You know that you’re going to have to make decisions on the fly during these tasks, but it’s also the reason that you sign up for the job. ”

Logistics support

While the ADF and other emergency services rushed to support initial flood relief efforts in central Queensland, commercial operators were also doing their bit.

Cairns based Skytrans Airlines deployed some of its Dash 8-100s to emergency resupply operations in Emerald, Blackwater, Rockhampton, Mackay and later, Toowoomba. At least 35 flood relief flights were conducted by the airline between December 29 and January 14. Operating out of its secondary base at Brisbane Airport, Skytrans pilot and first officer Mark Davies was at the forefront of relief efforts.

“Initially, we started doing a lot of work up to Emerald when it looked like Emerald was the first place to be flooded [in late December]. We were taking a lot of sandbags and freight supplies and we were also then carrying Red Cross volunteers in there and. . . also doing combi loads. ” Skytrans’ fleet of Dash 8-100s remain the only Dash 8s in Australia that can be configured between a full 36 passenger load, a full freight configuration or a combination (combi) load, utilising 20 or 28 passenger seats with provision for freight. Coupled to the 100’s good short field takeoff and landing performance, low pressure tyres and larger nosewheel, the aircraft is ideally suited to operations out of small, rural airports or unsealed runways.

Davies explained that Skytrans used the combi load configuration on a number of relief flights into Emerald and Blackwater, taking emergency services personnel, Red Cross volunteers and supplies including food, water, and empty gas bottles. Towards the end of the airline’s supply run, freight switched to including buckets, mops and brooms as both towns entered a cleanup and recovery phase from January 2. Skytrans remained the “main operator going in with full freight configuration”.

“Once the focus shifted across to Rockhampton, we started going in there,” Davies continued. “Rockhampton was a little bit different, they had a bit more warning of what was coming, so we took a lot of stretchers and blankets and that sort of stuff into Rockhampton for the evacuation centres. ” Flying one of the last aircraft to leave Rockhampton Airport before it closed on January 1 with water literally “lapping at the runway strip”, Davies recalled the experience of flying over the near floating city, as flood waters cut off most access points.

“It was quite amazing to see it all from the air because it’s a different perspective to when you’re on the ground. You get to see how much water there actually is, but because we did several flights up to Rockhampton, every time you went up there, you could see how much further the water had come. And we knew on that last flight . . . we probably wouldn’t get in there again because the water was continuing to rise. ” Following Rockhampton Airport’s closure, Skytrans shifted freight runs north into Mackay to have the supplies trucked down. A major problem was trying to keep up with demand as the floods swept across central and southeast Queensland, given the limited crews the airline had available.

That was on top of Skytrans’ regular RPT flights and charter work.

“We did have more freight than we had aeroplanes and crew that could fly it, so it was just a matter of prioritising who needed what and trying to get it there as best we could. And then after that sort of settled down, Toowoomba got hit with the floods there, so we did a few days of flying in and out of Toowoomba as well. ” “When it was all happening, there was. . . I guess up to six flights a day at times going into Emerald and Rockhampton when we started going in there, which made it really busy because we were still trying to do all our normal operations as well”.

Given the high tempo of operations, Davies noted that the strain was soon felt on the crew. To ease the burden, extra crews were called in from Skytrans bases at Darwin and Cairns as the Brisbane based pilots reached their maximum duty hours.

It was a “good team effort”, whether it was the ground crews who tirelessly reconfigured the aircraft for passengers and freight, or the flight attendants who tended to the passengers.

“A lot of people got called in on days off and asked if they’d work some extra shifts.

You’d come back from your normal run where you’d normally just go home, and then you might go to Emerald and back as well. There was a lot of that stuff going on. ”

Pulling together

Queensland’s devastating floods certainly demonstrated the professionalism, dedication and teamwork exemplified by pilots, aircrew and ground staff, which ensured a coordinated, highly effective effort that saved lives.