Mark Kempton talks to Jenny Woodward

Transcript

We went up there thinking we were going to look and try find a couple of people trapped on a fire-truck surrounded by water. When we arrived at Grantham I think for a moment there, there was stunned silence in the aircraft. And I’m just like, my god, this is just a massive flood, we are going to have to start working and get these people out of this.

Jenny - Mark thanks for talking to us today. Now tell me what’s the attraction of being a helicopter pilot?

I think being a helicopter pilot is the best job in the world. You get to strap this machine to your back and go for a walk in space. Your office window is continually changing and you can just see life from a whole different perspective. At the point when you are flying you are just so engrossed, I mean you, you’re a part of that machine. You just, you just. You are linked into it is what I am trying to say. And it’s almost like slow motion in your head for, for a second, but it’s such instantaneous. But we also have the ability to land anywhere with the helicopter, which is why it’s such a beautiful machine. The trauma and things we can get to and deal with immediately really enables us to operate and help people within what they call the golden hour.

Jenny - Talking about Grantham and the rescue that happened there. Did anything in your training in the past prepare you for the situation that you confronted?

Jenny, Grantham was just an extraordinary situation to be faced with. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon by the time we arrived in Grantham. The weather that day was absolutely atrocious. They were the worst flying conditions you could ever imagine. If you had a choice, you wouldn’t fly. There was a lot of heavy rain. There was low cloud. There was storms around. There was a lot lightening. There was sheet lightening. There was bolt lightening. There was every terrible part of weather you could imagine. And we ducked and weaved up that valley to get there to start with and as we arrived over Grantham, the flood water that was smashing through was really just a total shock to us. There’s trucks being pushed along, there’s boats, there’s an airplane floats past in front of me with the tail of the airplane sticking out of the water.

And there’s people dotted on every roof you can see. 50-60-70 people just sitting there looking at us. And I said to our guys “What are we going to do here? How are we going to tackle this? And then you start to think wow there’s all those people on the roofs. Who’s in the water?

Jenny - So how did you tackle that? You are there and you are thinking I’ve got all these people I need to rescue. How do you approach it? Who do you take first?

Well, well that’s the biggest question, Jenny. And as it turned out, for us we looked at were there any people in the water? Who was in the most dire circumstances to start with. And we couldn’t see anyone because of the amount of water that was moving, and the debris that was in it. So we started at the most western point of town and just worked our way logically. Fill the aircraft up with as many as we could then take them back to a higher ground. Place them off and then go back and start the process again. We had about two hours approximately worth of fuel. Over the period we winched 28 people on aboard our aircraft, which is pretty amazing. Even now, I think about it and I, it’s hard to believe we got that many people. I mean we had no idea at the time, we just kept going, and going, and going until. Well I landed back at Archerfield with five minutes of fuel left in the tank before we went into the fixed reserves, so I couldn’t cut it any finer than what we did.

Jenny - Of those, 28 people that you rescued which was the most difficult rescue in that two hour time?

I think the most difficult one, was the one with Fran and Ken Heart, that’s because they were clinging to trees and what was extraordinary with this, Jenny, was the fact that we were going towards a house with about five people on top of this roof, but as we were going towards them they were pointing toward the trees and I said to Paseo these people are pointing at something mate, I can’t see anything. We couldn’t see anything in the trees. And we got closer to the house, the downwash of the helicopter blew the trees apart and we could see these two little heads sitting down in the trees looking up at us. Wow, these people are trapped there, let’s get them first. So when Paseo wrenched Mark down, Mark was swept under the trees and we lost sight of him. That’s a very dangerous situation when you are wrenching because if you get snagged on something and the aircraft moves in the wrong direction. The aircraft would act like a pendulum attached to the wrench cable and we would end up crashing the aircraft into the water, or into the roofs or the trees which we were hovering next to. That was really a dangerous time for us. Paseo said that he’d lost sight and that he might have to cut the cable. I said to Paseo let’s just wait. Just wait a little while. And which seemed like forever, but was probably only seconds, and I said we’ll just give him some time and then when you are ready just wrench the cable in. And as it turned out as Paseo wrenched Mark up, he popped out of the trees with a survivor, which happened to be Fran. And based on what had happened on that first one, we knew he’d go into the trees and we give him a period of time. He’d get the strap around Ken and then we’d wrench them both up. So that was pretty extraordinary that one, to get through that one and get those two out of that scenario.

It’s still very raw for us, as well. You know. I don’t see myself as a hero. And neither does Paseo or Mark or anyone else. We just went and did our job and we wanted to help people. I mean we were all on an emotional tightrope. We were stressed to the maximum with what we did. We were concerned that we had left people behind. We, I was horrified that people had died out there and that we couldn’t help them. I think it’s going to take quite a while to just process the whole thing. I mean for me, it was very emotional because my house was flooded as well. So I’ve been on both sides of the fence. So I was the rescuer and then I needed to be rescued as well. So I really saw the other side. That perhaps. That in other jobs I hadn’t seen before.

Jenny – Where were you when you heard that your own house was going to going under the water?

It was on the second day. On the eleventh of the January, I’d gone back to work that morning at about 4am, to, to get back on board the aircraft and fly it out. And then my mobile phone rang and it’s Julie my wife saying “Ross has just came in from next door and said we are going to be flooded. And by the way there is water pouring in the back from the storm water drains and the gutters are overflowing. What am I going to do?”

I just said ‘Jules, Just get our boys and get out of the house. Leave everything and just get out of the house. ‘Cause I’m suddenly thinking, oh my god, if, if it’s flooding there. Is it going to come through there like it did with Grantham? Not knowing exactly what was happening.

In the next day or so, friends and strangers just came from everywhere.
“Can we give you a hand mate?” “Can we help you?” You know. Everyone just saw the community response. The thousands that wanted to come. It really, it heartened the soul to think, you know, yeah people are out there and they do feel for other people. They do want to help. Just things on that level, you start to think about with having been flooded, and with having been through the disaster. And with having the interaction with some of the survivors, like the Martin family, and what they’re going through. You really. You just. Everyone is in their own level of pain. But the pain is relative to what you are going through. Because you are all going through the same pain. It’s the same mud in your house, you know. It’s the same memories that have been destroyed and lost, that are never going to come back. But in amongst all that my thirteen year old son, Mackenzie said something one day when we were standing in the house. I think I was pretty upset at the time and he said to me, he goes, put my hand, he put his hand on his shoulder “Dad, don’t worry we will rebuild our kingdom of awesomeness”, which is what he called our home.

And that just blew me away. Wow, that little fella has taken on that role to support me. Which was just a magnificent thing. For us. I am alive. My wife is alive. My sons are alive. You know, that is so important. They now understand that no matter bad anything can get – even if our house is destroyed – we will always be alright, even though we go in and out of emotions, and you know we might be angry. We might be sad. We might be happy. That is, we will always be strong together as a family and be able to support each other. And we will get through it.

And I have to say now. I have to say to people, when they talk about the floods, I say yeah well 2011 floods – we lived through that and that’s something pretty special. You know, even though it’s not something that you ever want to go through, but you know, we have lived through it. We have survived it.

We have helped people survive it. We have lived through it ourselves. And as a group and as a family we have been able to come together again and just talk about that and it’s really important for all of us.