'Inside I was screaming': The unexplored trauma of sudden and extreme weather
Published 18 February 2025 5:39am
The approaching fire looked nothing like Donna Andrews had expected.
Instead of seeing a front of flames burning over the distant hills of the NSW Southern Highlands where she lives, she saw a cloud growing.
Andrews and her husband, John, had been told at a town hall meeting days earlier that they had time; the flames were still days away.
Advertisement But on the evening of 3 January 2020, a pyrocumulonimbus cloud — a violent thunderstorm generated by the energy of bushfires raging on the ground — grew in the sky.
"We could see it moving, and it went up so high, and it ended up being like a piston — it dropped and threw fire. So, our fire came out of the sky," Donna says.
We can see for miles, and there was no fire. And then all of a sudden we were on fire. Beyond the windows of their small wooden country home in the small town of Bundanoon, there was now thick smoke.
"And then our neighbour rang and said: 'We're on fire. Get out, get out'."
The couple raced around their home, grabbing what they could and hauling chickens into their cars before pulling out onto Bundanoon Road.
They were surrounded by spot fires and by the time they were driving, they were racing the flames.
At one point, Andrews saw her husband, who was ahead of her, drive through a wall of fire across the road. She says she watched him disappear and stopped the car for a moment, although it felt much longer to both of them.
I thought: 'Are you driving into hell?' And then I thought if I stay where I am, I'm not going to survive, so I put my foot down and went in. "But John was on the other side, he was up there, and still can't talk about this part because he went through it and then I didn't come through because I'd stopped, and that's very distressing for him still."
The pair stayed with friends in nearby Bowral that night, and while they weren't allowed to drive back to the property the next day, they soon discovered what had happened to it.
Image provided by Donna Andrews