Neighbours of Footscray West factory fire endure day of toxic smoke, smells and sirens
RESIDENTS living near today’s West Footscray inferno have endured a stress-filled day of black clouds and toxic, chemical smells after waking up to fire truck sirens.
VIC News
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IZZY Millwood was roused by the sirens and helicopters just after dawn.
Her first thought was a stabbing — street crime, she says, isn’t unknown in these parts.
When Ms Millwood heard the bangs, she assumed shipping containers. She lives close to the logistics warehouses that nestle alongside the wool sheds and timber yards of West Footscray, and her house shakes each time a container is dropped.
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Then, she looked out the window.
Soon enough, Ms Millwood, armed with her phone, was doing the same as thousands of other Melburnians, and took photos of the black blanket that hung low and sinister across the city’s west.
A TV reporter spoke of an “apocalyptic vision”. From the West Gate Bridge, the smoke rose in a mushroom shape better associated with 1945.
Ms Millwood was closer to ground zero than almost anyone else. Her Dempster St backyard was only a couple of hundred metres from a blaze said to be half the size of the MCG.
Like so many others, the sight caused her indecision and uncertainty. Disruption, too. If this suburban inferno was a curiosity, it was also a health hazard and would mean citywide chaos.
For Ms Millwood, the questions began with her dog. Could she leave Ziggy at home, given he was licking his lips and looking unwell? Should she go to work?
For families, the questions of school got muddled — which complicated the issue of work. Nearby Catholic schools cancelled classes before 9am. Government schools did not, making arrangements to keep students inside and turn off heaters.
Yet changing weather patterns scuttled these plans at about noon. Workers went to collect their children when helpful grandparents could not. In all, about 50 schools and child care centres closed.
The confusion lay in a lack of answers. A parent rang 3AW, concerned about her asthmatic boy at school. Had she done the right thing? Was he safe? Melburnians fretted because they could not access the facts they needed to assess the threat.
Nearby residents, such as Ms Millwood, felt they needed more information. She chose not to go to work, a wise decision given Ziggy vomited soon afterwards. Within a few hours, she had a headache, presumably from her proximity. So did a friend, she says, who while at a nearby train platform was subjected, too, to those whiffs of what seemed like nail polish.
She wondered about warnings issued for residents within 500m. They had been told to stay inside (along with their pets). Yet Ms Millwood had to find this out online. No one had knocked on the door, apart from the Herald Sun, despite talk of evacuations.
In pointing at the swirl from her front door, she acknowledged what authorities had spoken of hours earlier. Nature was kind to Melbourne on Thursday. Winds lifted the smoke so that it drifted southward, away from the immediate vicinity.
Drivers stopped on Paramount Rd to snap the occasional gush of flame, which prompted onlookers to whoop. They inhaled the odd gulp of burnt plastic stench. A glance at the milky grey sludge called Stony Creek at the bottom of the hill filled the setting for a dystopian wasteland.
Yet the smoke was not hanging thick. Not at ground level, where local air monitors confounded what the eye saw in the sky and continued to report clean air readings throughout the morning.
Sredna St resident Andrew wasn’t taking chances. He’d been on his roof, watching the blaze a couple of hundred metres away. The first spots of rain after midday were not necessarily welcome, he explained, given rain could mean a wind shift. He would watch the trees all afternoon, to see if and when branches swayed in new directions.
He was ready to evacuate, as was his neighbour, James White. Both men shared the wider surprise at the lack of official door-to-door notification. “It does seem pretty weird that police or someone else haven’t come along,” Mr White said.
This uncertainty — how big and how bad was this threat — underlined Melbourne’s fear. People were told about acetone and oxyacetylene fumes, but not if and why they were as toxic as their technical sounding names suggested.
There was mention of asbestos. Asthmatics were told to be extra careful, but the warnings were couched as a cover-all precaution rather than a precise threat.
Some local businesses chose to close. Others, such as engineering firm Mecal, remained open. It was all about the wind, explained Mecal’s Paul Chen, who said he was used to fires in the area after several recycling plant blazes in recent years. The factory floor would close if the wind changed, he said.
Nearby, at Summa Auto Parts, it was just another busy day despite the box-seat blaze view from the front window. After being alerted about a “big fire” at 5.47am, the owner — “being a fisherman” — checked the wind and decided there was “no worry”.
Yet his optimism was not shared by the parents and children of Melbourne’s west. They went to bed on Thursday night under the same cloud of anxiety they had woken to. They had a few facts but no silver linings. And they still didn’t know when the cloud would go away.
NEIGHBOURS WAKE TO FLAMES, SIRENS AND POLICE
— Aleks Devic and Alanah Frost
RESIDENTS living near today’s West Footscray inferno endured a stress-filled day after waking up to fire truck sirens.
Neighbours whose properties back on to the industrial precinct have braved black clouds of smoke and toxic, chemical smells drifting in to their streets after a Paramount Rd factory exploded into flames about 5am.
Father of two Alex Scott said he could see the flames sparking from his daughter’s bedroom window.
Mr Scott said he realised it was a major incident when he was leaving for work and a policeman wearing a face mask was directing traffic in his street.
“I was really concerned at how close it was,” he said.
“It was mad, absolutely mad.”
He said his daughters were able to go to school but the family was on Thursday night taking extra precautions staying inside.
Mr Scott said they were keen to leave to somewhere further away from an industrial area.
“We hate it, we want to move,” he said.
“We’ve been thinking about leaving for a while it’s not just the noise it’s the smell of chemicals, which you get even on normal days, and this is not the only fire we’ve seen. There’s been quite a few smaller ones hat haven’t really kind of caught. It’s really scary.”
South Kingsville residents Chris Worthy and Jenny Rafter said they woke to the sound of explosions around 6am.
“There was a lot of panic. The banging, popping - we just had no idea what was happening,” Ms Rafter said.
“We opened our curtain and all we could see was black smoke.”
Mr Worthy said they had no idea how serious the situation was until they took his drone out.
“We just had no idea. There was no text message or alert - we turned on the TV and saw this massive fire,” he said.
“It wasn’t until I got the drone out and into the air that we could see where it was and know we weren’t in the line of fire.”
Ash Cutchie said he could see the smoke from his front door in Altona North.
“To wake up and see that was a bit scary.”
West Footscray resident Fenny took in her washing and wore a facemask after a shift in wind saw toxic smoke from the factory fire head towards her home.
The young woman said her brother first spotted the smoke from the blaze as he headed to Tottenham railway station on the way to work.
“Yeah we are worried about it like this morning it was blowing the other way but now it’s blowing towards us and we are a bit concerned,” she told the Herald Sun this morning.
“We’re only about a kilometre away from it.”
“He called us and told us to wake up and get ready in case we needed to get to safety,” she said.
The young woman said if the fire got worse her family would make a plan to leave.
“I’m the only one home at the moment but we will see how it goes … it definitely doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere,” she said.
Neighbour Sheridan Lagastes said she first learned of the fire when she turned on the TV news.
At 11am she got a text alert from her son’s school, Kingsville Primary, telling her it was closing.
She said she spent the day with her 10-year-old son and dog and cat staying inside to escape the toxic fumes.
“The smell is chemical, unpleasant,” she said.
Ms Lagastes said it was concerning being so close to a chemical fire.
“I guess it’s one of the downsides living so close to an industrial area but yeah you probably wouldn’t have expected it to be this big.”
She said she would have preferred to have found out via a text message alert and said she hoped fire authorities would review their system.
Mr Scott agreed and said they “absolutely” should have sent out a message, especially for people who don’t have social media or don’t regularly follow the news.
“To be honest the I don’t think it’s good enough,” he said.
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