Oops, it's an emergency!

This issue we publish the first of a series of extracts
from an interview by Francis Good of the NT Archives Service with
Les Liddell, Tennant Creek Unit Officer NT Emergency Service

With the emergency service we get calls at all hours of .the day and night for accident rollovers, and problems that are beyond the normal capability of the statutory bodies to attend.
This particular one was a vehicle that rolled approximately about three, three-thirty in the morning, a hundred and twenty kilometres out of Tennant Creek. A passing bus was able to ring from the Barkly Homestead that the road was actually blocked, and there was a problem out there.
Police attended the accident at six-thirty a.m. in the morning, and found that the driver appeared to be okay, and there was nothing more they could do at the site except to bring out heavy equipment to try and clear the road.
It was eight o'clock in the morning before I got notified by the crane driver that there was an accident out on the Barkly Highway, and our assistance would be needed to clear the road as it was completely blocked. When you get a message like this you wonder how a roadtrain can completely block a road which has a hundred meters of clear space across it.
The crane driver said to me he really couldn't go out to do any clearing until he had a guarantee of who was going to pay for the crane. Further investigations showed that it was a sub-contractor from Brambles. We contacted Brambles in Darwin and notified them that their truck had rolled over, and they gave us the clearance to go and start recovery of the load and to advise them what the biggest problems were.
We dispatched a vehicle immediately back to the scene to ascertain what type of equipment we needed, as it's fairly limited in Tennant Creek to the capacity of the lifting of these things. We knew, being a fully-loaded roadtrain, we might be looking at, say, a thirty ton crane from Alice or Darwin, if we couldn't do it with the local stuff.
On arrival at the site with the crane driver, we found the truckie had gone into a state of shock by this stage. So, although the road was completely blocked and the cars were well banked up on either side, the next thing we had to do was bring him straight back to town and into hospital. He'd got a few bumps on the head and he wasn't feeling too good with slight concussion and shock having taken over.
He had been driving a normal roadtrain travelling from Brisbane to Darwin. It had general freight on its front trailers, and a fridge van on its back trailer. It appears the driver had left the road and travelled a kilometre down in a spoon drain alongside the road, and then had probably woken up with a bit of a start, and pulled the truck back onto the bitumen causing it to either blow a front tyre and lose control, and that rolled the first trailer.
As the first trailer rolled - it actually had a container on the front and then a large tip truck - as this hit the dirt sidewards the tip truck on the trailer cartwheeled the trailer back up into the air, completely taking the full load off the front trailer, and throwing the fridge van following, I would say, through the air for twenty to twenty-five feet before it passed the back of the other trailer. Then the trailer locked into the side of fridge van, going through the side of it.
With the fridge van still on its wheels, and the trailer out the side of it, this all went sideways across the entire bitumen road from treeline to treeline, completely blocking everything. It made it impossible for us to try and undo any fittings to get the trailers apart, and being fully loaded trailers, we had a little bit of a problem on our hands.
Because of the bank-up of the traffic, everything had to stop. One of the - I suppose we'd call it the life-saver of the day, or maybe, Godsend - was a hundred-ton dump truck that had come along on a low-loader. We spoke to the driver and said, "Look mate, we really need this dump truck to give us a bit of a hand to straighten these trailers out so we can open the road again".
Quite obligingly he started this big loader up and brought it off the truck and down the road, and we were able to hook big chains to both ends of it. There were two of these low-loaders travelling together, so with them one either end, we actually dragged the trailers back along the road until we got half the road open for traffic to pass again and get moving.
The road, by this stage, had been closed for nine hours, so most of the people were happy to start moving again. There was not much they could do to help us, because only a sixty ton crane would have helped us at this stage. ...
The recovery of these loads is always time consuming. The first problem we had at this particular accident was the forty-foot fridge van involved; it was full of chickens and frozen fish. The main priority, was to get that one out of the way because of the health aspect of it. The health inspector had arrived from Tennant Creek at the accident scene, and checked the temperature of the load, which was still minus twenty-two. This was acceptable for on-forwarding to Darwin within twelve hours.
So the first of the major projects then was to get this van on its way, which took about an hour to put some new tyres on it, a new dolly under it. We sent it on its way. That was okay, it got to Darwin and the load was recoverable - so far so good.
But the other part of the loading on there - the container on the front of the first trailer was an Army container, and it was full of electronics. The computer seemed to be going off its head - it kept telling us that the container was in urgent need of maintenance. We had no way of switching it off! We had to put up with it all day long, this container telling us it was in need of urgent maintenance. It went on and on for twelve hours!
We had contacted Darwin and they said, "Look, there's nothing we can do about it, we'll have the technicians from the Army on standby when it arrives to shut it down".
Whatever it was, it's the first time we've ever had a load that actually told us what was wrong with it; even though it had been rolled off a truck.
The good thing was the load was virtually totally recoverable. A lot of damage was caused to some of the loading that was thrown off. In the end the driver turned out to be okay. It was another successful recovery for a company that was thousands of miles away.
Search and rescue missions
There was an English doctor working for the Anyinginyi Congress - he'd been here for fourteen days approximately, and this weekend he decided to go four-wheel driving. The only thing was, he didn't tell anyone where he was going. On the Monday morning he hadn't turned up for work; when they checked where he lives, he hadn't slept there for the night, so the Congress reported him as missing.
The police contacted me about nine a.m. on the Monday and said, "Les, we have a missing person. We need to search, but he's somewhere in the Northern Territory!". Now this is a pretty broad scope first up, but it's reality. He asked if I would attend the police station to discuss, if we have to do a search, what could be done to try and find this person.
During summer, as it was in this case, the limit of a person when they go missing, their life span, is about twenty-four to thirty hours at the most. We have to find them within that period. We sat down and discussed the problem of looking for this needle in the haystack.
Being the wet season, the areas where this fellow could have gone were limited by water. We thought, "If he's new to the town someone must have told him where to go, to go to water". Taking this into consideration I said, "Well, we've only got six waterholes around the area that he could go to at this time of the year - they're here, bang, bang bang".
We contacted Phillip Creek Station to look at their waterholes on the eastern side of the highway, up near the Carramon, and the different waterholes up there where he may have been told to go. We had the Threeways go and search the area where their water comes out at Bishop's Bore. We sent police cars out to Lake Surprise, Gosse River and the other holes where they could have been, and I took the run to Warrego. I was going to Warrego anyway, and I had a look at Butcher's Waterhole out there, which is at the back of the Gecko Mine.
It was about two o'clock in the afternoon when I saw one set of wheel tracks across the mud. I thought to myself, "Look, an Aboriginal wouldn't drive over there in his right mind, so this must be the wheel tracks we're looking for - the missing vehicle".
I was in a Falcon at the time, so I returned to Tennant Creek and reported back to the police station, and asked had they had any conclusive results of the searches yet. Everyone said no, they had no clues whatsoever, what have I got?
I said, "I've got one set of wheel tracks. We'll go back with the four-wheel drives and we'll check it out". The police sergeant then, Eric Courtney, said to me, "No you won't. We've got an aircraft due in three minutes, we'll just divert him to that area to have a look". Within one minute of the plane arriving at the site he picked up this bloke waving his arms at the aircraft. So we then knew where he was by the actual position relayed from the aircraft.
He was close to Phillip Creek Station so we got the station on the phone and asked them to go back to Butcher's Waterhole and pick this guy up. They went back, picked him up, found his vehicle, and took him back to the station.
We talked to him by telephone and he seemed to be okay. The station then directed him to come back to Tennant Creek via their station road to the highway, which is north of Tennant Creek - which was the opposite way to the way he went out.
All of a sudden I said to the police sergeant, "But he won't know the road. He's gone out the other way, he's never been up there, he won't know what the highway is or a dirt track is, because he'll be partly non compos probably, as we call it. We dispatched a police car from Tennant Creek at high speed to Phillip Creek Station, which is forty Ks north of Tennant Creek, to where he would hit the highway. They just arrived at the intersection as he came out from Phillip Creek, and he continued straight across the main highway and started heading east again, which meant we would have had to track him again. But they were able to pull him up in time and bring him back.
That was a successful search, because I think another two or three hours and he would have dehydrated beyond the point of time of recovery.
The preceding article is an extract from the transcript of an interview recorded with Les Liddell in 1994 by Francis Good.
Copyright is held by the Northern Territory Archives Service, and publication or copying is not permitted without permission from the copyright holder.
Next Month:
Most people know the story of Cyclone Tracy and the devastating effect it had on Darwin. Not so well known is the way in which towns like Tennant Creek met the challenge of an influx of shocked refugees who far outnumbered the locals, stretching food and accommodation resources to the limit.
Les Liddell tells the story of the operation, the sad bits and the funny parts through to its successful outcome.