Victoria, August 2018

West Footscray warehouse fire, 2018

On Thursday 30 August 2018, a fire broke out in a large warehouse in West Footscray, an inner-western suburb of Melbourne. The fire emitted a large plume of toxic black smoke, visible across Melbourne and from as far away as Geelong and took the Metropolitan Fire Brigade 14 hours to bring under control and several days to extinguish.

WorkSafe Victoria and the Local Government Authority confirmed that the warehouse was not registered to store dangerous chemicals. This prompted the establishment of a state government taskforce, led by Worksafe Victoria, which commenced the inspection of other industrial properties across Victoria to assess compliance with the Dangerous Goods Act.

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.