Victoria, April 2019

Campbellfield warehouse fire, 2019

On Friday 5 April 2019, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade was called to a fire in a warehouse, in Thornycroft Street Campbellfield. Approximately 175 firefighters attended, preventing the fire spreading beyond the warehouse and bringing it under control within hours. But like the West Footscray fire, it took several days to completely extinguish.

While it was a registered dangerous goods site, the Campbellfield warehouse’s licence had been suspended by the EPA on 15 March and a clean-up notice issued after it found 450,000 litres of chemicals, 300,000 litres above its licensed limit, stored there. The day before the fire, the EPA discovered that 300,000 litres, double its limit, were still there.

Observations

Appropriate training and skills maintenance at all levels will facilitate critical event logging and recording of other key incident information.

The rigorous application of agreed protocols for issuing community information and warnings will ensure the
delivery, by the designated incident control agency, of accurate, comprehensive, relevant, timely and consistent messages.

Appropriate processes and responsibilities established at multiple levels will help ensure information critical to incident management is available to the incident controller.

Processes to manage emergency incidents that are scalable upwards and downwards, tested to ensure they are adaptable to changing incident size and complexity, will enhance emergency management outcomes.

Sources

This incident was included in the Major Incidents Report 2018-19 (Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, 2019). See the report for further information on the incident. The report acknowledges the following sources:

Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board, ABC News, The Age.