Standing at the station, facing mass tragedy on Sunday afternoon, Daylesford Country Fire Authority captain Glenn Webster was grappling with the fragility of life and the randomness of death.
“There’s always a moment of ‘this is surreal. It can’t really be happening in our town,’” he says, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea on the back deck of his home just outside of town.
It is almost exactly 48 hours after tragedy struck outside the Royal Daylesford Hotel in Vincent Street, where a 66-year-old driver missed a bend in the road, mounted the curb and drove through patrons enjoying an evening drink.
People leave floral tributes at the crash scene.Credit: Joe Armao
Webster remembers the scene in vivid detail: smashed picnic tables, grass stained with rubber, a light pole obstructing traffic, and the screams of the injured.
“There were bodies everywhere and horrific, horrific scenes ... I remember just looking at it, and I took a deep breath,” he says.
Rewind to earlier in the day, to just after 6pm on November 5. Webster’s pager dinged an alert. Something had happened at the Royal in town. The scale of the accident was unknown.
Webster grabbed his uniform, jumped in the car and raced to the station, radio blaring with reports hastily dispensed from Lieutenant Rikki Yanner.
“I hear him say multiple eight-threes and multiple injuries. So immediately I’m thinking, OK, multiple eight-threes: it means there are dead people,” he says.
He arrived at the station to bring out the rescue unit and bumped into Leanne Yanner, Rikki’s mother and also a CFA volunteer.
“She was as white as a sheet, and she says there are bodies everywhere,” Webster recalls.
“Seeing her face galvanised me because she’s a very calm, level-headed person. Never gets flustered. But she was shocked.
“There’s always that few seconds, and then you click, and you think, well, it is happening. This is what I’ve got to do.”
‘Horrific, horrific scenes’
Webster’s orders were brief and clear: pull up, split up, start triaging.
“Find someone who is conscious and breathing and stay with them,” he ordered his team. “If they’re not conscious and breathing, as in they’re deceased, move on until you find someone who’s conscious and breathing and stay with them.”
Five people were killed in Sunday’s crash.Credit: The Age
People from the town came to offer help. Off-duty paramedics, doctors and other medical professionals ran towards sirens and cries of the victims. He says bystanders, in the face of tragedy, remained stoic.
“The rescue crew were incredibly focused. None of them shied away from it. None of them stepped away and said I can’t do this,” he says. “They did exactly what they needed to do: find someone to be with and stay with them, keep them alive.”
From the time the first ambulance arrived at the scene, it was just 45 minutes before all the injured were heading to hospital in helicopters and ambulances.
Four victims died on the soft grass outside the hotel.
Vihaan Bhatia, 11, and his father, Vivek Bhatia, 38, and family friends Pratibha Sharma, 44, and Jatin Chugh, 30, were already dead when crews arrived. Sharma’s nine-year-old daughter, Anvi, was taken to hospital, where she later died.
Vihaan’s mother, Ruchi Bhatia, 36, remains in the intensive care unit at Royal Melbourne Hospital, while his brother Abeer, 6, is being treated for leg fractures and internal injuries at the Royal Children’s Hospital.
Three other people, a 43-year-old woman from Kyneton, a 38-year-old man from Cockatoo and an 11-year-old boy were also injured and taken to hospital. The boy’s mother, a 34-year-old woman from Cockatoo, was not injured and travelled to hospital with her son.
‘Tell my wife I loved her’
CFA rescuers use a technique called “one trusted voice”. A firefighter will stay with a victim so they can build a rapport and the victim begins trusting the rescuer.
Victims give dying wishes: oddities that flash through a mind coming to terms with the fact they might not survive.
“They’ll ask you to do things: ‘Oh my god, who’s going to feed the dog?’ … They’ll say, ‘Tell my wife I love her,’” Webster says.
And so it was outside the Royal Daylesford; stay with victims throughout what could be their final moments.
Local police commander Simon Brand and CFA captain Glenn Webster.Credit: David Estcourt
‘I won’t ever forget it’
When Webster debriefed his crew, he recalled a different incident that claimed two lives in Kingston, about 20 minutes west of Daylesford, a few days after Christmas 2019.
“One of the things I actually spoke about in the debrief was the randomness of tragedy and I harked back to that accident,” he explains. “[The family] came to an intersection where five roads come together and the truck was there at that precise moment and ... went through and hit them.
“The mother and the five-year-old boy were killed, along with the dog that was in the back.
“I’ll never forget seeing what I can only assume was the last moments of [the mother’s] life where the car was upside-down, she’d managed to release herself, and she had turned herself around and she had her hand… ”
He trails off.
What he couldn’t bring himself to say was that in her last moments, the woman had placed her hand on her little boy, who was dead.
The memorial on Tuesday night in Daylesford.Credit: David Estcourt
“On Sunday I worked on a little boy with a Daylesford paramedic. I think he’s about three years old, I think, terribly, badly injured. His mother laying beside him, she was deceased.”
You can’t forget these things, but you can move past them, Webster says.
“What I do, which is just for me, which I did last night … if we go to a really bad crash and someone dies, I always go back to the spot.
“Last night I waited until all the media had disappeared, and I went to where all the flowers have been piled up at the statue and I made peace. That’s the way I get over it.”
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2023-11-08 04:42:06Z
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