Chemical recycling company hit with multimillion fine over Campbellfield fire

A chemical company has finally been made to pay for a raging chemical factory fire the filled the sky above Melbourne’s northern suburbs with thick black smoke.

A Melbourne company has been slapped with a multimillion-dollar fine over a chemical fire that raged for four days, spewing clouds of black smoke across the northern suburbs and forcing schools to shut.

Bradbury Industrial Services, a chemical recycling company was fined $2,980,000 in the County Court on June 23 for breaching multiple regulatory and safety codes over the April 2019 Campbellfield factory fire.

On April 5 2019, fire crews were called to the Thornycroft St factory about 6.40am after witnesses reported hearing explosions.

The fire on Thornycroft St forced multiple local schools to close. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Thirty workers escaped the blaze before firefighters arrived at the scene, with two workers requiring medical treatment.

The court heard the company pleaded guilty to five charges of breaching the Dangerous Goods Act for failing to take all reasonable precautions to store dangerous goods.

It also was guilty of breaching the Occupational Health and Safety Act as it failed to provide proper training to employees to reduce risk and perform work safely.

Firefighters battled the large factory fire in Campbellfield for several days. Picture: Alex Coppel.

The company was convicted and fined $500,000 for failing to provide a safe workplace and convicted and fined $2.4 million for failing to take reasonable precautions to prevent a fire or explosion in relation to chemical stockpiles uncovered at five other sites in Craigieburn and Campbellfield.

The court heard that on the morning of the fire, there were 136,420 litres of flammable chemicals inside the factory.

The fire started when an employee was decanting a flammable chemical from a large container into a smaller one, when the chemical became electrostatically charged and ignited.

According to the prosecution, the employee had not been trained properly on how to handle dangerous chemicals that were prone to becoming electrostatically charged.

Judge Peter Rozen said it was not the employee who had made the mistake.

“This is not a case of an employee failing to abide by the instruction given by an employer,’’ he said.

“The lack of training meant that the possibility of a fire was more than remote.

“The potential consequences were catastrophic, as the fire in April amply demonstrated.”

The court heard Bradbury Industrial Services had already been issued improvement notices by WorkSafe due to its unsafe storage of dangerous goods while a report had deemed the company’s warehouses were not adequate to store the high volume of chemicals.

The company has since gone into administration and is in liquidation.