12 May, 2010 12:52PM AEST Nobody believed the sugar would burn By Nathalie Fernbach / Paula Tapiolas Forty-seven years after the bulk sugar terminal fire at Townsville Port, locals recall the intensity, the damage and the stench of what was Queenslands biggest structural fire. If you arrived in Townsville in May 1963 you might have thought it was a pretty unpleasant place. The centre of town was covered by foul smelling smoke and fumes, the rivers in town were discoloured and full of dead fish. This week is the 47th anniversary of the fire at the sugar shed at Townsville Port. It was the biggest structural fire Queensland had experienced, it blazed for 5 days and the after effects of molasses pollution and fumes continued for weeks afterward. On May 9th 1963, 27 year old fireman Alfie Need was on day shifts as he rehabilitated from a broken leg. Mr Need was quickly reinstated to help fight the blaze. There we were ploughing through this what looked like a moving mass of quicksand, that was the wash from the fire. And this fire was actually burning and destroying the building ...the building was starting to distort at this stage. The sugar shed fire was the first time in Queensland history that fire fighting services from other regions were called upon. Mr Need says that while the extra manpower was welcomed, some of the equipment and systems the fire crews were using were not compatible. We discovered that because Queensland had fire boards at the time no two (well we might have been lucky to have two) brigades had the same couplings. But then the brigades had different commands, we used to work on whistle signals. In Townsville one blast of the whistle meant you turn the water on. And one blast of the whistle in say Ingham meant all out, danger. The facility sustained six million pounds of damage and was thought to be the biggest insurance payout in Australia at that time.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 03:08:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015