By Casey Neill
Faces completely covered in soot greeted paramedic Claire Osborn at the chaotic scene that was the 18 November Springvale bank fire.
“I hadn’t seen that before, myself,” she said.
The 29-year-old has been a paramedic for the past eight years.
“This would be the largest scene that I’ve attended in my career so far,” she said.
“All scenes like that with many people around can be quite confronting, and knowing where to start is difficult sometimes when there are so many people looking for your help.
“You can’t immediately help everybody. There’s a part of you that’s a bit disappointed.”
Rohingya asylum seeker Nur Islam, 21, allegedly set the Springvale Road Commonwealth Bank and himself alight about 11.30am, injuring more than 20 people.
“It’s not good to see people who are suffering and in pain as a result of the burns they’ve received,” she said.
“It’s a distressing scene.
“It was really great to see how much involvement all the other services had, as well as the community response.
“The CFA were doing what they needed to do in order to get everyone out.
“The police were doing everything they could to keep people in an area we could look after them.
“Everyone’s working to try to achieve the same result.”
She said paramedics received training in handling such high-casualty incidents.
“I think that the patients had all left the scene somewhere between 1 hour and 30 minutes and 1 hour and 40 minutes.
“The people who were waiting to go to hospital, I could see towards the end that they were doing a really good job of supporting one another.
“They’ve experienced the whole incident.
“I personally didn’t have to go through being exposed to a fire in the way that that happened for them.
“They’ve got one another. You can’t entirely understand anything that they’ve been through.”
Ambulances transported 27 patients to hospital, and Ms Osborn said several patients presented themselves to hospital as well.
Once the dust – and soot – settled, it was time for a hard-earned meal break before getting back on the road.
“You’re so involved that it’s hard to slow down a little bit,” she said.
“You’ve got so much on your mind, and you’re going a hundred miles to make sure everything’s considered.
“Then you just stop. It’s quite a weird feeling.
“You certainly debrief with your colleagues.
“A lot of our colleagues heard the job dispatched on the radio and asked how we were going and how the scene was.
“You just try to support each other.
“My husband’s a MICA paramedic as well, so we were both able to debrief.
“He attended as well.
“We had two completely different experiences of what took place.”
In the aftermath, Ms Osborn has kept an eye on news reports about the patients, but hasn’t personally checked on their conditions.
“It is nice to get that feedback,” she said.
