Friday 24 January 1997

Suddenly, danger roared up the hill

By CLAIRE MILLER

Jennifer Lindroth thought she had time for one last phone call before she and her husband, Graham, abandoned their home in Seabreeze Avenue, Ferny Creek, on Tuesday.

``We've got to go,'' she told her mother, Ms Jacqui Bell, in North Bayswater. ``It's got dark. There's a lot of smoke. It's coming.'' But by then it was too late to flee the approaching flames.

Ms Bell thinks the call took place about ``11.30-ish'' when three fires were already burning across the Dandenongs. It is possible that the blaze that claimed the lives of her daughter and son-in-law and a neighbor was barely alight.

Police believe that fire was lit about noon in Tobruk Avenue, about a kilometre from Seabreeze Avenue. It came on the residents of Ferny Creek almost without warning, sweeping up the north face of the Dandenongs in minutes.

According to Ms Bell's partner, Mr John Chappell, Mrs Lindroth was unconcerned at 11am when her mother first telephoned.

Ms Bell asked her daughter to get out, but Mrs Lindroth replied that there was no one around, no sirens and no smoke. But Mr Chappell, speaking on 3AW, said Mrs Lindroth then called her husband and asked him to come home from work. She also called the parents of the two children in her charge as a council day-care worker. The children were being picked up as Mr Lindroth arrived home.

The couple had plans in case of a bushfire. They packed up, filled the gutters with water and started hosing down the house. ``These two have talked about fire plans,'' Mr Chappell said. ``They did have things in place. They were not going to stay in the house if the fires were bad.''

Plan number one was to get out. That was still their intention when Mrs Lindroth called her mother the last time. Plan number two was to hide underneath the house.

Their cars were packed, but with the bushfire sweeping in, the couple appear to have decided plan B might be safer than trying to escape on a narrow road through the smoke and flames.

They pulled down the steel doors on the garage and holed up amid the brick foundations. It appears they may have earlier offered sanctuary to their neighbor, Ms Genevieve Erin, whose body also was found at their house.