Boxing Day blaze at Select Harvests damages storage site

A storage site at Select Harvest’s Carina West almond processing facility was damaged by a fire on Boxing Day.

Select Harvests chief executive Paul Thompson recently announced plans to transform almond hulls into liquid fertiliser.

A fire that broke out on Boxing Day at an almond processing facility near Mildura has damaged a storage facility and will force Australia’s largest almond producer source external storage for its 2022 harvest.

Select Harvests’ managing director and chief executive Paul Thompson said a pile of almond hulls “spontaneously combusted” and embers from the fire set a storage site on fire at the company’s Carina West site, between Mildura and Swan Hill.

“With the prevailing wind some of the embers affected some of our storage assets,” Mr Thompson said.

“It singed a couple of the walls, impacted one of the canopies (awnings) and some of our storage handling equipment went up in flames,” he said.

“Fortunately all of the main processing assets weren’t affected. So everything will be operational in time for harvest in February.”

“But it has compromised our storage capability, so we’re going to have to look at using some external warehousing.”

The Australian Securities Exchange listed company holds 9000ha of almond orchards in South Australia, Sunraysia and the NSW Riverina.

Select Harvests uses almond hulls – the shells and skins that encase the almond nut – to power electricity at its manufacturing site.

In September the company announced it would build a new pilot plant to transform the almond waste product into liquid fertiliser at the site.

Temperatures at the closest weather station in Mildura had tipped more than 30 degrees celsius for 10 consecutive days by December 26.

Temperatures on Sunday reached 30.4 degrees celsius, and winds reached maximum speeds of 50km/h.

The company has staff on site 24/7, Mr Thompson said, and it took them 24 hours to bring the fire under control.

Fire authorities sent out a Watch and Act message for the area surrounding the facility on Hattah-Robinvale road at 11.16pm on December 26, and at 4.07pm the following day the fire status was updated to “under control”.