A quick-thinking bus driver has been labelled a hero after rescuing a child lying on the Midland Highway at Buninyong.
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The Ballarat driver was heading to Geelong on Saturday just after 6am when he noticed a child, 10-year-old Charlie Lorch, on the side of the road near the Buninyong Golf Club.
He turned the bus around at the Warrenheip Street roundabout and saw a truck swerve to avoid Charlie who was lying in the middle of the road.
After taking him to safety and phoning the police, Charlie was reunited with his mother Melissa Lorch.
“There’s no doubt in my mind we’d be standing here having a completely different story if it wasn’t for that bus driver,” Ms Lorch, a single mother who hasn’t slept since the incident, said.
The bus driver, and the company he works for, declined to comment.
Charlie lives with an intellectual disability - he only began speaking 18 months ago, but can memorise passcodes quickly.
He’s made something of a career of escaping from his home in Buninyong, and it’s driven Ms Lorch to her wits end.
She described her house as “Fort Knox” - there are heavy duty locks on all the doors with keys stored in high-up lockboxes, screws to stop windows opening too much and a self-closing gate.
“We have to put the keys in the safe at night-time,” Ms Lorch said.
“We’re forever changing (the lockbox codes) and you don’t know he knows what it is until it’s gone.”
While Charlie is well-supported by the National Disability Insurance Scheme, through occupational and behavioural therapists, and a support coordination team that Ms Lorch cannot praise highly enough, he has specific needs that require more help.
Ms Lorch, who has five children, said the NDIS had declined funding for sensors on the windows and fingerprint locks.
Not only does this put her family more at risk in case of a fire - she has begun removing door handles at night - it’s also taking a psychological toll.
“(If) I put him into care, suddenly all these government houses have all these locks, the same government that says I’m not allowed to restrain him in my house with his loving family that are surrounding him,” Ms Lorch said.
“I feel like I’m the most selfish person ever keeping him here ... as opposed to putting him somewhere that I know he’s not going to be happy and he’s not going to be cope with, but he’s not going to be squished on the road at 5am either.”
In January, Charlie made it to the BP petrol station, where the two young attendants looked after him until she picked him up, and it was a similar situation on Saturday.
“It’s a handful of strangers that didn’t have any idea, they saw a kid and they helped,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want to be living anywhere else.”
