After this Australian town burned down, experts warned against rebuilding. Nobody listened

Los Angeles Times

12-02-2025

MARYSVILLE, Australia — As fire raged several hillsides away from their house on the afternoon of Feb. 7, 2009, David Barton reassured his wife: 'Don't worry. Entire towns don't burn down.'
By that evening, as he watched a 150-foot-high wall of flames closing in, it was clear he had been very wrong.
'Everything so very quickly turned so very ugly,' he recalled.
Weeks of record heat had baked the region to a crisp, and the fire, sparked by a downed power line, had spread in the 80-mph winds before sharply veering into town.
Barton climbed into his old Toyota and began evacuating stunned residents. His eyes stinging from the smoke as the sky rained embers, he finally rushed home to grab Jack, his dog, and a bottle of water before driving away as fast as he could.
Black Saturday, as it is known today, turned out to be the deadliest fire in Australian history, killing 173 people, including 39 in Marysville, which saw all but 14 of its 550 buildings burn to the ground.
His home destroyed, Barton was eager to move back in as soon as possible — and to see Marysville restored to its old-world charm.
But not everyone shared that vision. The town of just over 500 suddenly found itself facing the same questions being asked in the Los Angeles neighborhoods that burned last month in two of the most destructive fires in California history.
How could Marysville be rebuilt to be safer from fire? Or should it even be rebuilt at all?
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Marysville is surrounded by forests of mountain ash, a species of eucalyptus once called 'the tallest trees in the British Empire.'
Well over a century ago, these trees made Marysville a major timber town. When the logging industry faded in the early 1900s, the town, with its proximity to waterfalls, walking trails and a ski resort, became a picturesque tourist destination and a popular retirement locale.
Many came from Melbourne, a two-hour drive away. Nearing their 50s, Barton and his wife, Jennifer, arrived in 2006, quitting their respective jobs as a government child protection officer and a receptionist to open an antiques store.
They bought what Barton liked to say was 'the worst property on the best street,' renovating it into a tidy cottage that served as both their store and their home.
As far as anybody could remember, the town had never experienced a major wildfire. The government did not classify it as being at risk.
In the immediate aftermath of Black Saturday, Barton and his wife rented a place outside town while most of their friends moved into Temporary Village, which the government had set up for the displaced. He visited often.
Nerves were raw in the tightly packed grid of pop-up dwellings. Many were furious at the authorities, who for weeks blocked off the town, preventing survivors from recovering their dead pets or salvaging their belongings.
With the townspeople desperate to resume their lives, the then-state premier, John Brumby, promised that the government would set the town to rights.
'It is important to get a commercial heart back in Marysville,' Brumby said. 'It is such a beautiful part of the state that its natural beauty and surrounds will attract people back.'
But that vision faced serious dissent.
After the fire, the government convened a panel of experts to assess the risk and determine whether it made sense to rebuild. The answer was no.
Even if all the structures were built with added fire safety features, the town's inherent vulnerability was deemed too high.
'Some towns you can never protect from another Black Saturday-style fire,' said Roz Hansen, a planning expert on the panel. 'Marysville is one such town.'
She points to the dense forests and a shortage of escape routes as immutable risk factors.
'Bushfire risk is, in my opinion, enough justification to override people's freedom to live where they please,' she said. 'Why? Because they put other people at risk, especially firefighters and emergency service staff.'
When Hansen suggested the government embark on a resettlement plan, opponents accused her of being a 'Stalinist planner.'
The commission eventually recommended against building new houses in especially high-risk areas, in addition to buying out homeowners to help them move.
But by the time those recommendations came out, rebuilding was already underway, backed by tens of millions of dollars in both government funding and public donations.
''My home is my castle' mantra is common in Australia,' Hansen said. 'No politician is going to say you cannot rebuild. That could be political suicide.'
In Marysville, work began on a new police station, more temporary housing and a 'small business hub.'
There was no turning back.
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The fire destroyed Barton's books, his letters and other writings, his antiques and every photograph he had taken as a young man.
'I could tell people stories about what I've done in the past, but I had no evidence of it,' he said. 'That person didn't exist anymore.'
Barton felt that rebuilding his life in Marysville was the only way to heal.
He spent weeks sifting through their property by himself, filling 14 trailer loads of burned items that he'd salvaged. Marysville, where he volunteered as an emergency responder and helped found the town's chamber of commerce, was home. He already had ideas for a new storefront.
But many of his neighbors were starting to have doubts.
'A lot of people, of course, were very concerned about the ongoing fire risk,' Barton said. 'Others were so psychologically and emotionally devastated by what had happened that they couldn't bear to even come back and look at the place.'
One couple moved to France, while others scattered across the country, leaving behind for sale signs all over town.
For the well-insured, generous payouts allowed them to start fresh elsewhere. Others whose destroyed homes met the criteria of being within about 100 yards of 'significant forest' accepted the newly elected Victoria state government's offer to buy them out.
The uninsured and underinsured were priced out by the cost of rebuilding, which far exceeded a stipend offered by the government.
Jennifer, too, wanted to leave.
In early 2010, Barton relented and the couple sold their empty lot for $152,000.
With that money and an insurance payment of $460,000, they bought a five-acre property in the town of Gruyere, about 25 miles from Marysville.
But even after moving, Barton had trouble staying away.
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At least once a week, he would make the drive back to Marysville to join the rebuilding talks.
He hoped to persuade his wife to eventually move back, but it was getting harder to make the case. The once-serene town had become tense, as neighbors fought with one another over what its future should be.
The government had brought in Boston Consulting Group, which noted Marysville's 'potential to be a showcase environmentally sustainable place.'
Many chafed at what they saw as the replacement of Marysville's historic beauty with a sterile new vision cooked up by out-of-towners with fancy business cards.
Despite petitioning from residents, new structures were erected in sleek urban styles, among them a 'rebuilding advisory center' and a visitors' information hub.
'The place feels like it's been burgled and they left us with all the crap,' one resident told Barton. 'They took all the good stuff.'
Barton, who had become an outspoken critic of the way things were going, eventually found himself excluded from the community's rebuilding discussions.
Back at his new home, he was suffering from PTSD, anxiety and depression that he attributed to the fire. His marriage was in trouble too.
Nearly two years after the fire, he and Jennifer split up, and the following year he returned to Marysville alone.
He moved into Temporary Village — which had been turned into an educational camp — where he worked as a caretaker for two years before buying a nearby plot of land, where he lived inside a camper.
He was so unhappy with the rebuilding of the town that he started working on an ethnography chronicling its problems. Barton argued that the government's refusal to let displaced residents return home for weeks exacerbated their grief and anxiety.
He coined a term for this: 'Post-Disaster Attachment Trauma.'
His project, which took seven years to complete, earned him a doctorate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2017.
'The whole process was very cathartic, but also very difficult, very confronting, very emotionally challenging,' he said. 'It wasn't necessarily a way for me to 'make sense' of my own trauma and loss — you actually can't 'make sense' of it, as there is no 'sense' to be found.'
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Today, the forests around Marysville are once again lush and thick. The road into town is lined with gum trees with canopies that shake out beams of sunlight.
Nearly all the lost buildings have been replaced — many with the newer, synthetic sheen of fire-resistant cladding. Restaurants, lodges and cafes cater to hikers and tourists.
Only a handful of clues point to the town's painful past: a fire-scarred truck and a Black Saturday memorial that includes the names of the dead and the inscription: 'We must all move forward but must never forget.'
In the end, about 60% of Marysville's residents ended up leaving. But the town has been repopulated with newcomers. A 2021 census counted 453 residents.
Bill Mitchell, who moved here in 2012 and now works at the visitors' information center, recalled how he had half-expected the town to be a disaster zone but found it 'pristine.'
He built his retirement home on a parcel of land he bought for just $60,000. The topsoil had to be completely removed because of the asbestos left by its burned-down predecessor.
'It's a beautiful community,' he said.
Marysville has been rebuilt to be much safer. Bushfire building codes, which were first introduced in Australia in the 1990s, underwent a major overhaul after Black Saturday.
Permits are now required for new homes in 'bushfire-prone areas' — which almost all of Marysville now officially is — and mandate a strict checklist of fire resilience measures.
These include a minimum of 'defendable space' between homes and vegetation, a fixed water supply and nonflammable construction materials.
But some fire experts say that Marysville will almost certainly burn again.
'They shouldn't have built it back,' said Greg Mullins, a former fire commissioner for the neighboring state of New South Wales. 'No question.'
It was an unpredictable wind pattern common in the region that doomed Marysville on Black Saturday, creating what some described as a 'fireball rolling down a mountain.' Some had died clutching melted hoses, others after being trapped in their homes.
Mullins said that all the engineering in the world could not change the winds — and that climate change was increasing the danger.
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As for Barton, he began to realize that despite his best efforts, Marysville would never make him whole.
'I felt increasingly dominated by the whole history of Black Saturday,' he said. 'I felt as if I was never actually really going to be able to fully recover myself until I left that area.'
In 2022, when rural property prices spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, he sold his plot of land and moved to Tooborac, another small town about two hours away.
Now 68, he visits Marysville occasionally, recognizing fewer and fewer faces as the years march on.
Being back leaves him with a strange feeling: The town seems to have willfully forgotten its painful history — one that he feels is also a crucial reminder for vigilance.
'I'm still amazed to meet people in Marysville who don't even recall the fact that Marysville was burned down during the fires,' he said.
Times staff writer Kim reported from Seoul and special correspondent Petrakis from Marysville.