Derrimut fire not the first and won’t be the last
When a chemical blending warehouse in Melbourne’s western suburbs went up in flames on 10 July, it produced a plume of black, toxic smoke so large and thick it could be seen from across the bay.
Storage drums were catapulted onto a nearby highway, and residents were advised not to return home due to the unknown nature of what was being pumped into the air. Meanwhile, 180 firefighters, several of whom later presented to hospital with symptoms of toxic inhalation, were deployed to the inferno which is now being classed as the worst industrial fire of the past six years. A warning to people and pets from the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to “avoid contact” with local waterways, which were deluged with chemical run-off from the fire, remains in place.
There are many emotions stirred among residents by fires in the western suburbs, but none are a surprise. This is not the first fire the company responsible, the ACB Group, has caused. The last one, in October 2023, was fatal, claiming the life of 44-year-old factory worker Reece Martin, and seriously injuring two other workers. Since then, the EPA had investigated the site nine times, and WorkSafe has inspected it 24 times, resulting in multiple warnings and compliance notices. Yet ACB continued to operate after the 2023 fire in a way that the father of Reece told the Sydney Morning Herald was like “a timebomb just waiting to go up”.
In 2022, hundreds of fish died when 12,000 litres of chemicals were spilled into the Altona creek system after an unreported fire in the Melbourne Transport and Warehousing factory that stores agricultural fertilisers. The company was fined $1.8 million but continues to operate.
In August 2018, an illegal chemical warehouse in West Footscray exploded in a major fire described at the time as second in scale only to the 1991 Coode Island disaster. The West Footscray fire released toxic sludge, including the “forever chemical” PFAS, into nearby Stony Creek and connected waterways. Earlier that month, the EPA and local council had inspected the site and found no issue with its chemical storage. The waterways took months to recover, and court cases to recognise the health impacts on firefighters who experienced ongoing symptoms like unexplained nosebleeds, vomiting and PTSD, continued for years after.
Then there’s Kealba, where residents have been in a five-year-long battle for action against a landfill fire that has been burning since 2019. Only metres from hundreds of homes, the almost constant odour from the fire has been reported as causing chronic physical and mental health conditions. Yet in a common tale, despite the EPA suspending the licence of tip owners Barro Group, the company remains largely unaffected, and is worth at least $1.8 billion, according to the AFR Rich List in 2022.
In the western suburbs of Melbourne, the profits of reckless and destructive corporations come before the residents who live alongside them and who bear the consequences of the companies’ toxic operations. The bosses of ACB Group should have been shut down and jailed long before this most recent disaster, which could easily have caused more deaths. As long as we have toothless, underfunded regulators like the EPA policing these corporations it’s only a matter of time before another dark cloud covers the west.
