Firefighters Jason Dale, Kat Dunell and Adrian Lovelace, who were part of the crew tasked to fight the chemical fire at West Footscray last year. Credit:Christopher Hopkins

When a West Footscray factory went up in smoke last year, the men and women who fought it had no idea of the chemical cocktail inside. And now they are starting to get sick. This is their story.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The triple-zero call came in just after 5am - a report of a large fire at a wood pallet factory in an industrial estate in West Footscray. Local fire crews knew the complex from past call-outs - it was a sprawling, 1980s warehouse that backed onto a nature reserve along a dead-end access road. The trucks were on the scene within minutes and they found a thick black plume of smoke pouring from inside the building. But this was no pallet fire. And behind the warehouse, Stony Creek itself was burning. “We didn’t know what was in there, what we were fighting,” says Leading Firefighter Kat Dunell. “We saw a running, liquid fire heading down to the creek so the creek was on fire as well. Crazy. You just didn’t know what to look at. I’d never seen anything like it before.” It was Thursday August 30 last year, and alarms were clanging in station houses across the city, drawing hundreds of firefighters to battle what became the worst industrial blaze in Victoria in decades. Only later did they learn that the pallet business had closed up shop and the new tenant, Graham Leslie White, had secretly packed the building with steel drums filled with millions of litres of toxic and highly-flammable chemicals. Firefighters on platforms battle the West Footscray factory fire of August 30, 2018. Credit:MFB Firefighters are trained to expect the worst. But White and his associates in an illicit waste dumping syndicate had created something new — a toxic bomb the size of a football oval concealed inside a suburban warehouse. The cause of the spark that ignited it is still unknown.


With the fire now more than a year in the past, emergency service personnel are still battling distressing symptoms from illnesses that defy diagnosis. And hanging over all the men and women who served at West Footscray is a question that no one can answer: what are the long-term effects of exposure to a chemical cocktail that nobody has yet been able to identify? And will they ever recover their health? ‘It felt like it was burning you.’ “The first thing I remember is the heat through the windshield of the fire truck. There was a laneway between two factories and as the driver turned in I remember the heat that hit us - it was extreme,” Leading Firefighter Jason Dale, the officer-in-charge of Ladder Platform 35, told The Age as part of a series of interviews with firefighters. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Dale was working night shift early that Thursday morning and was on the scene within the first hour. “It only amplified when the explosions happened. It felt like it was burning you: flames and explosions 40 to 50 metres into the sky; 44-gallon drums exploding like missiles, like meteors, over the top of us. Some explosions rocked the whole concrete pad. They just rocked you.” The Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s commanders declared West Footscray an eight-alarm fire — the highest level of emergency. The toxic plume that emerged forced the closure of schools and businesses. And residents, some as close as 500 metres to the “hot zone”, were warned to remain indoors with their windows closed as health authorities came to realise the scale of the danger.


But in those first hours, the risks were poorly understood. One firefighter, who was running out water hoses when part of the warehouse later collapsed, saw a thick sludge snaking its way through the fire from the now-exposed barrels. “I could feel my skin burning under my helmet, breathing apparatus and gloves. When I took my gear off later the fumes had given me like a sunburn,” said the man who did not want to be named. Nearly five hours of blasting the fire with water made no difference to its ferocity. Jason Dale passed out while playing with his children. Credit:Christopher Hopkins The MFB’s night shift, which included Dunell and Dale, were relieved at 10am and returned to their respective station houses to decontaminate. Both say they felt they could not get clean, no matter how they tried. “I had a smell on me, a metallic sort of smell, and it was in my mouth as well,” Dale says. “I was brushing my teeth constantly and washing constantly to try and just have some normality.” Qualified firefighter Adrian Lovelace, who’d also rostered off and returned to his home only three kilometres away, watched the fire from his backyard. The taste in his mouth, which he still gets, was like “licking a coin,” he says. That night, all three of them would be back on duty.


An inversion event Large fires often create their own weather conditions through the scale and intensity of the flames. On the first day, the enormous heat from the burning chemicals produced a vacuum effect, sucking fresh air from ground level and funnelling it hundreds of metres into the air. This super-heated air punched through the air of lower temperature — known as the inversion layer — and helped push the toxic plume above and away from the fire itself, assisted by a breeze blowing south-west towards Geelong. The effect helped minimise the spread of contaminated fallout for some of those stationed around the fire zone. But as the night shift returned to duty on Thursday evening, the conditions turned against them. A cooler weather system pushed the inversion layer lower, trapping the smoke and forcing it downwards. Next morning, a light rain began to fall. The effect has been described as putting a lid on a boiling pot or slamming the flue shut on a roaring fireplace. The smoke and contaminants that had been rising into the atmosphere turned and started plummeting once again to earth. “There was no fresh air being drawn in by that point, the weather conditions were just pushing it all back down on top of us,” Lovelace says.


“When the smoke layer bottomed, you couldn’t get far enough away,” says Dunell. Another firefighter was working on a pumping relay more than a 100 metres from the fire when the change came through his sector: “I was supposed to be in a safe zone. All of a sudden there was a chemical smell. It was putrid.” Three weeks later he got pneumonia. Firefighter Kat Dunell, who was part of the crew tasked to fight the chemical fire at West Footscray last year. Credit:Christopher Hopkins Even MFB communications officers in a command bus a kilometre away reported experiencing a similar taste. Some had spontaneous nosebleeds in the weeks that followed. In the changed conditions, a support station set up in a supposed “cold zone” away from the fire inadvertently served contaminated coffee and pizza to weary firefighters. Exhausted crew slept in trucks that were later declared too hazardous to enter before they could be used again. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video “There were no safe zones, no cold zones on that job,” says one senior firefighter. In total, more than 750 MFB personnel fought the West Footscray blaze for 16 days, working in eight to 12-hour shifts. Within hours of their first exposure some had already begun to experience illness. For others it took weeks or even months for symptoms to appear.

Advertisement