Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt (21 page)

Célestine kept her tears for the night, sobbing into her pillow. John, her comforting rock, would sometimes slip into another room to get some sleep so he could get up for work at 5.30 am. Célestine staved off her major emotional meltdown till the day Turia and Michael flew to France for Turia’s specialist treatment in March 2013. She was immobilised for two weeks: she couldn’t cook, eat, talk or sleep – only stand in the shower for hours and sob.

Genji, the strong, gung-ho military man, still cries over what happened to his beloved little sister. Turia’s younger brothers, Heimanu and Toriki, were heartbroken about their ‘Sissy’. Happy teenage years went on hold. Turia’s survival and recovery became everyone’s focus and the boys had to mature very quickly. In 2012, Heimanu turned sixteen; he didn’t like to ask if he could have a birthday party in the middle of such sadness but he asked anyway. Célestine was too distracted to think about parties. Finally she thought, ‘He must have his party.’ And Célestine gave him one – for eighty guests – friends and family.

Michael took his daughter to the Xtreme Fitness gym in Ulladulla wearing her black face mask and worked with her to help her regain muscle strength. He saw tears in the eyes of grown men working out as they saw her determination and her pain and effort. He too cried but not in front of Turia; he had to remain strong and supportive – the dad who had always encouraged her to do more, to try harder. While having his golden girl damaged to this degree was enormously sad, infuriating and frustrating, he was nevertheless uplifted by her tenacity and her willingness to forge ahead with her irrevocably altered life.

And the love of Turia’s life, Michael Hoskin, thinks about what happened every day; he has been totally shattered about what happened to his girl. He has learnt to stay sane and deal with his emotions by running and swimming. He does not cry in front of Turia. Sometimes he goes alone to the beach and sits on the sand looking out at the waves and tears roll down his face. After several minutes he will push the memory away and refocus on their future.

Every time Turia has surgery, he wishes he could lie on the operating table for her; his stomach churns until he gets the call to say it’s over and the surgery went well. There is a part of Michael that has been scarred forever from witnessing first-hand the trauma Turia has endured.

Michael’s parents too, the calm and easygoing Gary and Julie, felt an overwhelming sadness during the year Turia lived with them. Turia never saw Julie cry but others did. Janine Austen did when Julie asked her to be Turia’s physiotherapist. Every day for months, when Julie struggled to keep her feelings around Turia in check, she would walk with two friends late in the day. And she’d walk, talk and cry. Turia didn’t see Gary cry either, but cry he did. Gary and Julie watched with admiration Turia’s determined struggle to become independent and took pride in their son’s patient and devoted care of her. At the same time they had to deal with insensitive comments from a few local people who asked why Michael, such a good-looking young guy, had stuck by Turia.

Turia’s best friends, Briggs and Nicola, live with the image of their friend, her head the size of a football, lying unconscious in the Concord Intensive Care Unit early in the morning after she arrived from Darwin. These two positive, happy young women, still devastated by that image, now focus on their belief that the Turia they know will ‘get on top of it’ because ‘that’s Turia’.

So many people affected. So many questions about how it came to be that an international event company could have put the lives of its competitors, volunteers and staff in danger.

L
IKE
T
URIA’S FAMILY
, K
ATE
S
ANDERSON’S FAMILY WANTED
answers. Kate’s older brother, Ian Sanderson, an IT specialist at a Perth university, took up the baton to hunt for the truth and make sure such a preventable tragedy was never repeated. The more questions he asked and the more he discovered, the more determined he became to push for a formal government inquiry, especially as the event had State Government sponsorship. Western Australia is one of only two States in Australia in which the coroner does not have the power to investigate a fire unless there is a death. Fortunately Ian’s sister, Kate, and Turia did not die but he felt someone should be held responsible for what he saw as deeply flawed event organisation.

In the months immediately following the catastrophe, he regularly appeared in the media calling for accountability and became a constant thorn in the side of the Western Australian Government. Ian, a former military man, said on one TV appearance that had he still been in the army, and had he organised an event with an outcome such as the September 2011 Kimberley Ultramarathon, he would have been court-martialled.

He flew to Hong Kong in January 2012, met Mary Gadams of RacingthePlanet at the airport and put to her a series of questions relating to the event, most of which she declined to answer.

In the weeks after the race, Western Australia’s Fire and Emergency Services Authority (FESA) and the Western Australia Police Arson Squad conducted a joint investigation into the fire, during which more than forty witness statements were taken. Given Turia’s and Kate’s life-threatening injuries, it was thought prudent to collect this information in case of a coronial inquest if either woman died.

The cause of the fire wasn’t established but it was found to have started about five days beforehand, around 12 kilometres southeast from where the competitors were burnt. It had ‘meandered’
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slowly until it reached the Tier Gorge, where its intensity increased significantly, assisted by a wind change plus a very high fuel load: because it was also the hot season in the far north, the grass was tinder dry and easily combustible. Its spread accelerated as it climbed the walls of the gorge, which provided a tunnelling effect for the prevailing easterly winds.
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As communications, or lack thereof, was emerging as a serious issue, Ian probed further. He found RtP used a mixture of Iridium, Thuraya and other systems for satellite phones. This was confirmed by Mary Gadams when Ian met her in Hong Kong – one of the few questions she did answer as she was confident that RtP had covered its communications well. She was probably unaware of how knowledgable Ian was in this area – in his previous career he had been heavily involved in IT and communications support for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. In this role he had evaluated Iridium, Thuraya and the Inmarsat BGAN systems.

Next Ian did some fact-finding with Telstra and was told they recommend Iridium as the only reliable sat phone for use in outback regions in Australia such as the Kimberley. Where Thuraya uses geostationary satellites, which cause significant time delays in voice calls in an outback situation, Iridium uses low earth-orbit satellites, which have time delays closer to that of ordinary cellular phone calls. Thuraya is also more expensive to use in Australia, as Telstra has discounted air time with Iridium. After gathering this information, Ian doubted that RtP had fully understood the technology.

Telstra maintains a pool of Iridium handsets for loan, which would have been available to RtP if they had requested them. Ian found that if Telstra had been asked, its advice would have been to only use Iridium. He knew that RtP had brought some Iridium handsets with them, although not enough to equip every checkpoint and every mobile member of staff.
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Introducing Thuraya handsets into the mix had added significant complexity and risk to communications because of the difficulties of getting Thuraya and Iridium to work together. However it could have been useful if every checkpoint and vehicle had carried both types of sat phone and had an agreed protocol for the use of each.

Ian also came across some discontent from local volunteers over the way the event was organised in the week prior to the race. One volunteer told him in an emotional email that RtP constantly put him ‘on the spot’ because of its ‘cost-cutting’, which was ‘a big issue for us locals as it gave us hurdles to cross on a daily basis’. The volunteer said he personally had a top-of-the-range Iridium sat phone but RtP didn’t want to hire Iridium sat phones because they were given some ‘useless Thuraya phones’ by the Western Australian Government as part of its sponsorship arrangement. He says RtP officials told him on a number of occasions throughout the race preparation week that the Kimberley was one of the only places in the world where RtP didn’t have phone reception.

Initially Ian encountered a great deal of government resistance to a formal inquiry. He had meetings and corresponded with members of parliament, in particular the Deputy Premier, Dr Kim Hames, who held the twin portfolios of Tourism and Health, and the Premier, Colin Barnett. Many reasons were offered – and documented in letters to Ian – as to why the government didn’t have the jurisdiction to conduct an inquiry. Dr Hames also suggested that the push for an inquiry was really about compensation for the victims;
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compensation was not something Ian had raised with anyone. The possibility that the government’s tourism arm, Tourism WA, could be found to hold some responsibility for the event’s dreadful outcome was never articulated.

Ian’s dogged persistence found a sympathetic ear with the Labor Opposition, in particular the Member of the Legislative Assembly who held the Opposition’s tourism portfolio, Michelle Roberts. Mrs Roberts, with the backing of the Opposition, came up with a plan to ambush the House on the opening day of the new session of parliament – the last before the forthcoming State election. Premier Barnett gave his opening speech, after which it fell to the Opposition to respond. Labor had just elected a new leader, Mark MacGowan, so there was a great deal of media interest in how he would perform at the opening session.

To the Government’s surprise, Mark MacGowan ceded the floor to Michelle Roberts. She got up to speak and opened with the words, ‘A grave injustice has been done to a group of people who participated in an event in this State last September. I am of course referring to the Kimberley Ultramarathon. The injustice is that the Western Australian Government has failed to call an independent inquiry into the event . . .’
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She continued her speech, outlining in detail the injuries to the young athletes, how the events unfolded during the day and the rescue; she also read a statement from Kate about what happened to her. The usual background House chatter gradually stopped until you could have heard a pin drop.

‘The race had a number of points spread over a long distance. What specific medical or safety preparations were made by organisers, including local medical and retrieval services, in the preparation phase and how effective was communication between race staff, competitors and those services during the race itself? Only by holding an inquiry will the Government move beyond the weasel words of false compassion. Only by holding an inquiry will the Government reassure visitors to this State that if they come and compete in an event and are seriously injured, through no fault of their own, that they will have some measure of justice . . .’
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The thirty-one-minute address to the House concluded: ‘Only by holding an inquiry will the Government begin to act with proper authentic compassion to two young women whose lives have been so terribly changed and to their families and friends.’
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Debate followed, during which the Government’s argument against an inquiry became weaker until it finally collapsed; the Opposition was acknowledged to have made its case.

Ian Sanderson, sitting in the gallery, had watched with interest, noting that Kim Hames, looking uncomfortable, left the chamber during a large part of Mrs Roberts’ speech. Afterwards, when she turned, looked up and gave Ian the victory thumbs-up, it was all he could do to choke back the tears. It was the day Kate left hospital after nearly six months and one of the most emotional days of his life.

Two weeks later, the five Legislative Assembly members that made up the Government’s Economics and Industry Standing Committee were tasked with investigating RacingthePlanet’s 2011 Kimberley Ultramarathon. The committee was given three months to report to the House of Representatives. Michelle Roberts was co-opted to sit on the committee, bringing its number to six.

The 2011 ultramarathon of 2 September was the second event the Hong Kong-based RtP had organised in the far north of Western Australia. In April of the previous year it had held a 250-kilometre seven-day event in the same Kimberley region. In the ten years prior to the 2011 event, RtP had staged more than thirty-three foot races in eight countries.
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For the 2011 race, RtP had secured a sponsorship arrangement with Eventscorp, the Western Australian Government’s events agency and a division of Tourism WA. The sponsorship money came from an allocation of funds from the tourism body to foster adventure sports in Western Australia. The sponsorship agreement with RtP, which gained final government approval on 22 August 2011, was for an amount of up to $105,000 for one year with an option for a further two years provided certain contract milestones were met (one of which was a minimum number of competitors). RacingthePlanet signed off on the sponsorship agreement on 1 September, the day before the race.
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A contract worth a further $170,000 was signed with documentary film makers Beyond Action to record the ultramarathon as part of Tourism WA’s media coverage of the event.
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The footage was to be used to promote the region through the development and distribution of television programs and documentaries both in Australia and internationally.

The committee was asked to examine the actions of the organiser, RtP, and to consider if RtP took all reasonable steps to identify and reduce risks and maintain the safety of competitors, employees, contractors, spectators and volunteers in the preparation for and running of the event. This included its response to the fire and the injuries, access to medical support and evacuations. Its terms of reference also included an examination of the roles and actions of a range of government bodies before, during and after the event. Among these bodies was Tourism WA, the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC), the Department of Health (DOH), the Kununurra Shire Fire and Emergency Services Authority (FESA), Western Australia Police, the Department of Regional Development and Lands (DRDL), St John’s Ambulance and the Kununurra Visitors Centre (KVC).