A fiery Friday night
Just as everyone was getting ready to knock off for the weekend, disaster struck. Leighton Keith reports on how emergency services dealt with one of New Plymouth’s worst industrial fires in decades.
Okato fire chief Jared McBride was tinkering in his shed and intended on having a quiet night when the alarm went.
‘‘I had no plans, I was at the workshop just doing some maintenance on the bailer.’’
It was just after 5pm on October 26 – a warm and hazy Friday night.
The Okato volunteer brigade had been called out to cover New Plymouth where a grass fire had been reported at Molten Metal scrapyard near Paritutu Rock.
Within a matter of minutes the volunteers had dropped what they were doing and swarmed to their station, many hoping they’d be home again within an hour or two.
But as soon as they left Okato to drive the 26 kilometres to New Plymouth they could tell they were in for a long night. From their vantage point in the fire truck they could see the massive plume of billowing grey smoke rising from the city.
‘‘It was a bit more than a grass fire,’’ McBride says with a grin.
Arriving at the New Plymouth station there was no time to waste. The crew were immediately dispatched to assist on the frontline where their colleagues had already been battling the fire for more than an hour.
At the scene of the fire on Centennial Dr in New Plymouth’s port zone industrial area, what had started as a needle of white smoke from burning grass was now a tempest of flaming metal as the fire ripped into stacks of scrapped car bodies.
The fire, which was ignited when a crane at the scrapyard touched overhead wires that sparked on to dry grass, quickly sucked in 18 fire trucks, water tankers, aerial and command units and brigades from New Plymouth, O¯ akura, Inglewood, O¯ kato, Stratford and Waitara, along with more than 65 firefighters.
This was no ordinary blaze. Not only was it burning in a complex mix of materials, it was within a matter of metres from the Paritutu tank farm, a collection of five giant tanks used to store thousands of litres of explosive gases and
‘‘It was definitely difficult to extinguish. It essentially required us to dismantle the stack of vehicles one by one.’’ New Plymouth senior station officer Jason Crowe
flammable liquids.
Though the risk of the contents of the tanks somehow igniting was almost zero, no-one wanted to be forced into fighting a fire there. It was imperative it did not spread beyond the scrapyard.
New Plymouth senior station officer Jason Crowe got to the scene 18 minutes after the first crews and says he knew en route the fire was going to be big.
‘‘As we were going along St Aubyn St you could see a large plume of smoke in the vicinity of the scrap metal yard,’’ Crowe says.
‘‘You could see at that stage it was a pretty reasonable developing fire.’’
When Crowe arrived there were fires at either end of the yard and he was advised the crane driver was trapped inside his machine by live wires.
‘‘That’s all got to be taken into account when we carry out the sizeup. We are looking at the potential for escalation, identifying any potential hazards and looking at mitigating and minimising risks where we can.’’
Some of those risks included a 5000 litre diesel tank, six 1000 litre containers a mix of diesel, petrol and oil and LPG bullets that had to be removed from the path of the flames.
Adding to the anxiety was the knowledge the area is peppered with abandoned oil wells from so long ago just a handful of people know where they are or if they posed a risk or not.
As Crowe was deciding how to bring the fire under control an evacuation of the area was under way. Though not immediately next to residential areas, dozens of people had been working nearby when the alarm was sounded.
Many of those who did evacuate the area, and plenty of curious onlookers coming home from work, went straight to the nearby Mt Moturoa Domain.
From there they could look down on the firefighters in action and trace the great curls of smoke billowing first out to sea and then back to land, encircling the city in a ring of dark grey smoke.
Though the wind pushed most of the smoke out to sea and helped keep the fire from spreading to the grass around the tank farm, the Taranaki Regional Council was soon warning people to stay indoors behind closed windows and doors due to the risk the smoke could be toxic.
Those watching on the hill were soon told to go home. Vehicle access to Centennial Drive was shut to all but emergency services and, as a precaution, all shipping operations at Port Taranaki were halted.
From its wispy beginnings the fire had escalated to a fourth alarm level, requiring all hands on deck.
Despite what it looked like, the blaze was actually brought under control just two hours after it began. So from 7pm the fight had turned from one of containment to a logistical operation of how to extinguish a complex scrap metal fire.
‘‘It was definitely difficult to extinguish. It essentially required us to dismantle the stack of vehicles one by one,’’ Crowe says.
This is where Molten Metals employees got stuck in, assisting firefighters by removing vehicles from the pile and dropping them to the ground where the flames could be extinguished before moving on to the next one.
‘‘If we hadn’t have done that we could’ve been there for days,’’ says New Plymouth’s Fire and Emergency NZ acting area commander Steve McSweeney.
Once the plan was in place to extinguish the fire there was no need to rush, he says.
‘‘We had the fire contained but we didn’t know how long it was going to take to extinguish the fire.
‘‘We were attempting to mitigate as much damage and harm as possible while keeping everyone safe, including the town.’’
Making sure the fire stayed under control was a logistical juggling operation.
Crews had to be rotated during the night so staff got time to rest and recuperate, while not allowing the fire to get away from them.
Not only that, as brigades were brought in to help fight the fire other brigades had to be moved to cover those stations to ensure emergency services could carry out their normal functions if needed.
‘‘We were lucky there was a change in shift so there were numbers around.’’
By the end of the operation almost all available firefighters in the region were used – that included the professionals, volunteers and rural staff. Calling in additional staff from Whanganui was considered at one stage but eventually deemed unnecessary.
Scaling down the operation began about 3am and the fire was fully extinguished as daylight arrived about 6am. But it would be almost another seven hours before the final truck left the scene at 12.45pm on Saturday. All in all, it was a successful operation.
‘‘It was a balancing act to maintain operations at that call and also carry on business as usual in covering the New Plymouth fire district and also recognising our volunteers and rural staff had to go home or back to work the next day,’’ McSweeney says.
One of those volunteer crews was McBride’s Okato brigade. Once the crew was on site about 7pm, they just had to knuckle down and get into it.
‘‘We are trained for it but there is nothing like actually being there to get on-the-job training,’’ McBride says.
The crew ran out more than half a kilometre of hose before donning breathing apparatus and attacking the seat of the blaze. ‘‘We had to just keep drowning it.’’
The volunteer firefighters worked at the scene until 1.30am, when they were released to drive back to Okato.
‘‘The crews were pretty knackered by the end of it. They had all done a full day’s work and then basically another full day’s worth on their own back,’’ McBride says.
‘‘We got back to the station filled out some paperwork and then went home to bed because the start of the next working day was rolling around pretty quickly.
‘‘Some of us didn’t even go to bed, we just carried on.’’