Stories of the Storm

Wendt and Edwards quickly become part of a growing crowd of onlookers caught in the awesome moment.

Wendt remembers: “It was unbelievable, and it was more unbelievable that it was happening in front of everyone who were just standing there with hands on their mouths.’’

But to Edwards, a veteran of decades of police work with a passion of Nobbys Beach and its iconic status, these were worrying moments.​

He watches, hoping against hope it does not run aground between the Cowrie Hole and Nobbys Beach “because we could have still been picking it off the rock shelf’’.

“It was getting hit by these massive sets because Nobbys, when we get big seas the swell gets that big it breaks in one massive wave. And that is what occurred here,’’ he says.

“There were a number of set waves and it got hit sideways and got pushed in slightly, got hit again and then there was a break.

“There was a definite break in the sets.

“ And whilst I was still in the doors of the kiosk, the engines, the propeller, took grip and for 30 seconds or so it started to move forward across the bay here.

“And I thought ‘my God, it’s going to come aground here in the corner’.

In all the “bad positions”, the Pasha lands “in the best of those bad positions’’.

But even through the howling gales strong enough to hurl people across the slippery pavement, the noises from the Pasha emanate.

Wendt says you could hear the moans of buckling steel and concerns move to whether, like the infamous Sygna which crashed into Stockton Beach 33 years previous, the big girl would break up.

“But the Pasha Bulker was a fairly new ship and apparently that might have helped a little bit.

“It was also sitting on some sand so the back half of it was jammed on the reef and the propeller had gouged into the reef.

The cavalry quickly arrive - Edwards helping to set up a command post for emergency services as authorities work out how to get the 22 Filipino seamen off.

Two Westpac rescue helicopters hover overhead and the rescue operation begins with crewman Glen Ramplin beginning the first of seemingly endless descents onto the deck to start carrying the seamen to safety.

“[Helicopter crew chief] Graham Nickisson said every time [Ramplin] went down the rope and touched the ship he got a massive electric shock because the blades had set up its own static electricity,’’ Wendt says.

“So he was getting these zaps that were contorting his body. Every time. But he knew he had to keep going.

“And he said the last one was the worst one but he went about 18 times out there and brought them in. They had to get them in, check them out, debrief them, customs and everything was there. It was a giant quarantine station.

“The chopper was into the wind and the pilot must have been flying blind with the weather.

“It would break for a little while, you would get a little bit of a reprieve and another cell would come in again. It really was difficult conditions for us, so I hate to think what it was like out there hanging above this ship and a slick deck and all that sort of thing.

“[The ship] was still pitching, even though it was stuck fast, it was still moving every time the waves hit it. Terrible conditions.’’

Veteran lifeguard Warren Smith and others jump on jet skis and into the washing machine of the boiling sea next to the ship, hoping no one would fall but patrolling just in case there is a need for a quick rescue.

After 90 minutes, the extraordinary rescue - which continues to be lauded as one of the great maritime operations - is complete.

Ramplin collapses on the sodden turf outside the surf club. Spent.

Nickisson tells people that if you can rate rescues with a difficulty of one to 10, “then this was definitely a 10’’.

No one is injured. Everyone is safe.

And even in such precarious times, there is still time for some humour.

“It was pretty slick,’’ Wendt says.

“Towards the end of it, quite a few of these [Filipino seamen] were run past the media and were shepherded into the club, and one of the radio blokes yelled out to one of the seaman coming up the ramp: ‘how are you feeling’’.

“And we all looked and thought how is he going to answer, he probably doesn’t even understand the question.

“But he stopped, and looked, and he went: ‘I okay. Captain f---ed’. And that was it. He took off inside.

“And we thought that has to be the headline but we will never be allowed to use it.’’

Whoever may or may not have been to blame is for another day, week and even month. There is still work to do.

AS the big red ship called Pasha Bulker was hogging the world’s attention after wedging itself onto Nobbys Beach, Bob and Linda Jones were obliviously heading back home to Clarence Town after an early morning doctor’s appointment.

Boliermaker Nigel Beeston was just as ignorant, working deep underground at Centennial Coal’s Myuna Colliery at Wangi Wangi.

And Wayne Bull was busy at his panel beating job at Lambton.

By the end of the weekend, and as the rain and wind subsided, the four of them – and an extended Central Coast family of five – would become forever linked as the heartbreaking faces of the devastating East Coast Low known as the Pasha Bulker storm.

“Every time you see the Pasha Bulker, you think about it,’’ Linda Jones’ sister Libby Herington tells Fairfax Media.

“It was the worst day of our lives.

“I don’t think people realise that there were lives lost that day.’’

Jadie Beeston, a young mother and wife of Nigel, adds: “I think people remember that weekend was just an exciting storm, you hear people remembering the Pasha Bulker, the cars and homes being flooded.

“But they are all replaceable.

“It should also be a time where we honour those who we lost.

“It is difficult for everyone. His parents. His sisters. You don’t get over it, you just learn to live with it.

And Wayne Bull’s sister, Michelle Schmitzer, is even more passionate about the need to remember those lost.

“I don’t like the Pasha Bulker at all. I hate it,’’ she says.

“A ship’s captain is told to lift anchor and take a boat out to safety. He doesn’t. My brother is missing and he is on page three.’’

The painful memories are the same. The ache of loss never completely dissipates. And the levels come in waves.

Libby Herington remembers that her sister Linda didn’t always go with her husband to his doctor’s appointments.

No one will ever know why she decided on June 8, 2007.

But she did. The love of her life, whom she met while they both worked at Stockton Hospital, also had a love of the rural life. And the pair settled in beautiful Clarence Town.

“He was very clever with his hands, Bob, and he loved a drink,’’ Ms Herington says.

“Linda was quieter but had such a beautiful heart, she loved her family”.

The pair had been to the doctors and were heading home as the rain continued to bucket down.

It was 11.20am when they reached a small bridge on Clarence Town Road which spans Wallaroo Creek, between Glen Oak and their home town.

But the creek, borne in Columbey National Park before it gathers momentum into Stony Creek and then the mighty Williams River, was already swollen from the endless rain.

Bob stopped the couple’s four-wheel drive before the bridge and watched on as a truck successfully navigated through the rising floodwaters.

Fatefully, he decided to take it on – they were just a few kilometres from the safety and dryness of their own home.

Witnesses watched on as the four-wheel drive hits the bridge before the wall of water took control – and all before it.

A Westpac rescue helicopter was called from the Pasha Bulker rescue to help in the frantic search.

But the Joneses never stood a chance and would later be found just metres from the bridge. Still in their seatbelts. And, importantly for their families, still together.

“We couldn’t believe it,’’ Ms Herington says.

JUNE is the hardest month for Jim and Helen Bragg, when Palmdale lawn cemetery on the Central Coast becomes “our second home”.

Their daughter Roslyn, 29, her partner Adam Holt, 30, their two granddaughters Madison, 3, and Jasmine, 2, and their daughter Sharon’s son Travis, 9, died when a section of the Old Pacific Highway collapsed during the Pasha Bulker storm on June 8, 2007 and the five were swept away in the raging floodwaters of Piles Creek.

Mr and Mrs Bragg visit Palmdale each year on the anniversary. They go to Palmdale again on Roslyn’s birthday, June 23, and on the birthday of their baby son, James, who was a cot death baby at three months old, many years ago, and also in June.

“June is not a good month, but no month is a good month when five members of your family die. It never leaves you, ever,” Mrs Bragg said.

“There’s always birthdays and anniversaries and holidays when you’re reminded of what you’ve lost, so we go to Palmdale.”

Mr and Mrs Bragg travel to Somersby regularly to visit a memorial near the bridge that was built after the tragic events of that night nearly 10 years ago, and named the Bragg-Holt bridge after the family that was lost.

They take a lawnmower and whipper snipper to care for the memorial, weep at times, and renew the anger they feel towards Gosford City Council – now the amalgamated Central Coast Council – which an inquest found was largely responsible for the road’s collapse.

The council’s failure to care for the memorial is indicative of the council’s response to the tragedy, Mr and Mrs Bragg said.

“We live with a lot of hate for people who didn’t do the right thing. You’d think they could mow the grass around the memorial and make sure the weeds don’t come up but that seems to be beyond them. It’s in the past for them. We’ve got to live with what happened every minute of the day.”

Mr Bragg wept as he remembered the hours that passed on June 8, 2007 after Roslyn and her daughters dropped in to the Darrell Lea store in Gosford that her parents owned. The long weekend storm that eventually claimed nine Hunter and Central Coast lives was already wild on that Friday afternoon.

“Roslyn said she was going to our daughter Sharon’s house and she also had to take Adam to work at Somersby,” Mr Bragg said.

A few hours later, and after the storm dramatically increased in intensity, Mr and Mrs Bragg grew alarmed when they could not contact Roslyn or Adam.

They went to their daughter’s house, they rang friends, family members, police and local hospitals, and several times went to The Entrance police station for news.

It was at the police station that they learnt of the Old Pacific Highway collapse at Somersby, near where Adam Holt worked.

“As soon as we walked in and said our name about six coppers looked up with funny looks on their faces and we just knew,” Mr Bragg said.

The memory reduced him to tears.

“We can’t believe it’s been 10 years.”

At an inquest in 2008 into the Old Pacific Highway collapse NSW Deputy State Coroner Paul MacMahon said the deaths of Roslyn Bragg, Adam Holt and the three children was an “unnecessary” tragedy.

He criticised the council, and compared its failure to act on warnings about the road with the Sergeant Schultz character on the 1960s television show Hogan’s Heroes, “whose defence to everything was ‘I know nothing’.”

“It must have been apparent, even to a layperson but especially to a qualified engineer, that the loss of the structural integrity of the culvert pipes due to rusting and the continual washing away of material from the area of the culvert would at some time lead to its collapse,” Mr MacMahon said.

Mr and Mrs Bragg sold their business in the immediate aftermath of the storm and the deaths.

“The council’s incompetence basically destroyed a lot of people’s lives,” Mr Bragg said.

They take comfort from the support they continue to receive from the community. The Entrance Bateau Bay Football Club, where Travis Bragg was a player, presents a trophy each year in his honour.

“Sharon says a few words each year until she starts crying,” Mrs Bragg said.

Mr Bragg takes a single rose to a beautiful area at Palmdale where there are plaques for his daughter, her family and his other daughter’s son, and heartbreaking photos of five lost young lives.

He places the rose beside the plaque where his daughter is forever smiling.

“He always called Roslyn his rose when she was alive,” Mrs Bragg said.

The extended Bragg family will leave the Central Coast for the 10th anniversary of the Pasha Bulker storm and gather at a location in the Hunter.

“It’s very hard to talk about it,” Mr Bragg said.

“The pain of what happened confronts you every day. There’s photos on the walls. There’s significant dates. Others can forget. We can never forget.”

GLEN Ramplin wasn’t meant to be working on the day a chopper lowered him to the deck of the Pasha Bulker.

The Westpac rescue helicopter crewman, then 33, had swapped shifts so he could go to an antenatal class with his wife Amanda.

Their daughter Monique would be born about six weeks later at John Hunter Children’s Hospital.

But on June the eighth, 2007, when fate was still scattered in the storm, the service’s Bell 412 helicopter was diverted from the grounded ship at Nobbys beach to Clarence Town because local couple Bob and Linda Jones had been swept away. The Joneses wouldn’t survive.

By late morning the Bell had winched four of the ship’s 22 Filipino and Korean crewman to safety. The only way onto dry land for the remaining 18 men was aboard the smaller BK 117 chopper of Westpac Two.

Another ship was threatening to ground at Stockton, and another near Redhead.

It felt to the rescuers as if their mission, in cyclonic gusts and gunshot waves that licked up the sides of the bulk carrier, was being spread thinner by the minute.

“The wind was gusting up to over 100km. It made it really difficult for the pilot to manage his power, and every time I touched the deck the static discharged through me.”

The noise of the blades grew whisper-thin in the storm, Mr Ramplin remembers, as his boots slid onto the deck.

The helicopter’s pilot, Mr McFadden, considered landing on the deck but decided against it. Social media was in its infancy, and local radio-primed onlookers huddled on the road beneath Fort Scratchley to watch the rescue unfold on their doorstep. Few had expected to see a ship this size.

Mr Ramplin touched down on the 40,000-tonne Pasha Bulker’s oily deck and fought the salt spray whip. The chopper funneled overhead, and he braced for a shock from its cable. But not this.

One by one, Mr Ramplin wrangled, harnessed and lifted the ship’s fuel-soaked crewmen into the chopper. Some cried, prayed, and hugged their rescuers. Few spoke much English, but one later quipped to reporters that the captain was “f---ed”.

Eighteen times the static jolts ran through the deck and through Mr Ramplin, most violently on his final rescue of the captain.

Subsequent findings about the ship’s grounding didn’t read well for the ship’s South Korean master, who was exhausted from a lack of sleep, hadn’t ensured enough ballast on his ship, and was found to have taken an ill-timed breakfast.

“I didn’t see the captain until he was the last one we got off. I guess you could tell what had unfolded was weighing heavily on him,” Mr Ramplin said.

“We didn’t exactly have a conversation about it. I just told him, ‘time to go’.”

After two-and-a-half hours, the last man airlifted to the makeshift emergency centre of the Nobbys surf club was the captain.

Chief crewman Graham Nickisson – winchman throughout the rescue – said later he “really felt for him”.

“It was a pretty emotional business.”

Of all Glen Ramplin put himself through that day, his dry-retching in the Nobbys grass was private and brief. But it’s dry-retching he remembers.

“I get seasick real easy, and all the static shock had taken its toll on me.”

By June 8, 2007, Ben Donaldson was better-known as a gravel-voiced Merewether builder with a passing resemblance to Buzz Lightyear than as a Newcastle Knight who’d played nine games at dummy-half.

That morning Mr Donaldson, 28, was one of three jet ski operators who rode out with Newcastle’s head lifeguard Warren Smith asked to support the helicopter rescue mission on the Pasha Bulker.

The other two were Josh Ferris and Mr Smith’s son Rhys. They pushed their skis off from Carrington boat ramp and roared out through the billowing grey mouth of the harbour.

“My son said, ‘you're not going out there alone, dad’, so he and a couple of his mates came out with me,” Warren Smith recalled later.

They were to assess the damage to the ship’s vast red hull – “a bit of cracking, but not too dramatic” – and retrieve anyone who fell from the chopper or the deck. Their only shield from the wind and the 18-metre white tongues of water, Mr Donaldson said, was the mass of the Pasha Bulker.

“The tugboats were just getting engulfed. Because the waves were rollers it was nonstop, and for a while going out there we couldn’t see the Pasha Bulker,” Mr Donaldson said.

“When a gust of wind came through, that chopper was blown 20 metres like a pendulum.”

All day the radar image of the storm glowered over the Hunter “like a purple scroll”.

Night fell and Mr Donaldson went home to Frederick Street, as his neighbours’ yards sloshed under 160mm of rain and their cars bobbed and scraped against the kerb.

His place seemed clear of the floodwaters, so he slipped on a wetsuit pushed out into the canal of Frederick Street on his “Mal” surfboard, just so he could say he’d paddled down his street.

“Then people were asking me to get them out of their houses,” Mr Donaldson said.

“I did six or eight people on me Mal. An elderly lady asked me to get her out with her cats.”

He paddled from house to house, ferrying the elderly, shivering occupants to the higher ground of Helen Street.

The water was rising and cold by now, about 10 degrees, and he swapped his Mal for his jet ski; it meant he could putt back through the streets and collect the lady’s wary cats in their cages.

There came a scream.

Christina and Victor Wang were doctors from Western Australia who’d moved to Merewether with their little boys Ethan and Jeremiah, who was seven months old.

Christina was at home with Jeremiah that night. There was a moment at her kitchen sink when the water wouldn’t recede down the plughole. Outside the window, water brimmed over the back fence.

Victor Wang was stuck at work at John Hunter Hospital and growing quietly desperate to get home.

He’d picked up Ethan from childcare, but couldn’t get through to his wife.

“Trees were down everywhere. The mobile network was down. I had to go back to the hospital just to ring her. I was new to Newcastle and I kept getting lost on the roads,” Dr Wang said.

“So I rang my friend who was a few streets away.”

The Wangs’ family friend Jim Lai arrived in his four-wheel-drive to collect Christina and Jeremiah but the car, as so many that night, drove into water that was deceptively deep. The engine died and they began to float. Water gushed in and pushed inwards on the doors.

“By the time we realised we could be flooded in it was already happening,” Christina said.

“The car started filling up and we had to get out; the water was up to our shoulders and we needed help fast because the baby was frozen and couldn’t handle much more.”

When Mr Donaldson found them and wrenched open the doors, Christina was shoulder-deep and holding Jeremiah above her head. The baby was purple. He didn’t cry until they splashed into Mr Donaldson’s indoor heated pool, and then they waited on his couch in footy tracksuits until Victor and Ethan arrived.

The family has since moved back to Perth, and Jeremiah is ten years old.

Before the storm, Mr Donaldson had had terse dealings with Newcastle City Council about the requirement to build his house to withstand a once-in-a-century flood.

On the day of the storm Naomi Roskell-West was 29 and increasingly aware of the rain that was blasting through Hamilton.

Her boss had left early to pick up her kids and Ms Roskell-West, of Valentine, decided to close up and collect her own three-year-old son, Zac, from his grandparents.

“I was a single mum. This was the Friday of my first week in a new job working in the office of a distribution company,” she said.

“I had to take a detour towards the stadium and I couldn’t believe how flooded it was. In the traffic near the service station on St James Road I thought, this is a bit scary. I decided I was going to pull up in front of a bowser and stay there listening to updates on ABC radio.”

Then she saw the cars being washed down the road and the quivering people between them.

It’s a struggle to explain, and Ms Roskell-West puts it down to being “analytical”, but she still feels anger towards some of them.

Ms Roskell-West, an office worker who’d “never been in the SES, Scouts, or anything like that”, climbed the bull bar of a four-wheel-drive to reach a man clinging to a car’s side mirror.

“I reached out to grab him before he could move away any further,” she said.

“I can’t imagine what this guy must’ve been thinking, with this chick coming up at him on the front of a four-wheel-drive.”

On higher ground, the service station attendant decided it was time to close – but a woman and three children were still huddled on the roof of a car.

The servo doors slid open. Ms Roskell-West found a ball of fine rope on a shelf and tied a length around her waist. Shaky and numb, she told herself to tie a proper knot. She tied the other end to a light pole and fought the chest-deep surge.

Unseen objects brushed her legs. The only permissible thoughts were “keep going” and “don’t slip”. She hasn’t seen the woman or children since she held their hands in that cold water, but she’d like to.

Not, she adds, because of nostalgia.

“I don’t see it as a positive outcome. I mean, it is, because those people are OK, but I think it’s quite sad,” Ms Roskell-West said.

“It’s a massive reminder that Mother Nature holds all the cards.”

Instead, she says it’s complicated. The days after the storm were “very much a reality check”.

Ms Roskell-West and Zac were evacuated to a hall around the corner from their house in Valentine and given blankets and soup. She still wraps herself in one of those blankets.

Later that night the police were ferrying people to Wests. She called her whole family and told them she was OK.

In the weeks that followed, the Hunter gradually realised that a series of brave interventions had stopped the death toll from climbing into the dozens.

Cardiff was a microcosm of the heroics; as staff from the suburb’s vet surgery carried a German shepherd with a broken back through the storm, five locals put down their beers to help rescue 80-year-old Pauline Eichman from her flooded home.

The five mates tethered themselves to the Lemon Grove Hotel and helped paramedics Al Qvist and Scott Hardes carry their elderly patient to an ambulance.

Thursday’s 10th anniversary of the storm, for Glen Ramplin, will be overshadowed by the realisation his daughter is nearly a decade old. He doesn’t think about the Pasha Bulker much, but says helicopter crewmen think about things like the significance of a shift swap.

The June long weekend is saturated in history for Ben Donaldson, who celebrates his wedding anniversary and the birthday of daughter Saoirse.

For years, Naomi Roskell-West couldn’t drive past the BP on St James Road.

“At one point I was painfully affected by it all,” she said.

“Then one day, without even realising it, I’d done it. Now it’s just a heaviness in the pit of my stomach.”

And she still gets nervous about the forecast of an East Coast Low.