Dramatic vision captures moment one of Melbourne’s worst industrial fires erupted

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Key points

• The fire at Bradbury Industrial Services in Campbellfield in 2019 took four days to extinguish.
• It was one of the worst industrial fires in Melbourne since the turn of the century.
• The firm went into liquidation a short time after the blaze with a mountain of debt and no capacity to pay for the clean-up of the toxic waste it had illegally stored.
• It will be sentenced next week after pleading guilty to a raft of workplace safety charges.

CCTV footage has captured the moment a spark of static electricity ignited what became one of Melbourne’s worst industrial blazes of the past two decades.

It took nearly 200 firefighters more than four days to extinguish the fire that erupted in April 2019 at the Campbellfield premises of Bradbury Industrial Services; a chemical recycling operator that has since been linked to the largest illegal toxic waste dumping operation in Victorian history.

The smoke plume created by the blaze forced the closure of schools and businesses across the city’s northern suburbs, injuring one employee and exposing emergency responders and thousands of locals to toxic fumes.

More than four years later, the circumstances of the incident were revealed in the County Court on Wednesday after the company pleaded guilty to six charges relating to the fire and the illegal stockpiling of millions of litres of chemical waste in five other warehouses in the northern suburbs.

CCTV shows an employee catching alight and running from the area after what is believed to be an “electro-static discharge event” caused an explosion as a highly flammable chemical was being transferred between storage containers.

In seconds, the fire melted its plastic storage container and spread to nearby drums of chemicals, with employees fleeing the premises in the midst of explosions and rolling plumes of smoke.

The employee spent three days in hospital after sustaining burns to his face and throat in the incident.

Just before the fire, Bradbury’s chemical waste reprocessing plant in Campbellfield had been under investigation by the Environment Protection Authority for amassing up to 450,000 litres of flammable solvents when its facility was only legally allowed to hold 154,000 litres.

The court heard the company had been ordered by the regulator to reduce the huge oversupply, but the fire erupted because the work was done without following key safety rules for handling dangerous goods and waste. The level of chemicals had almost been reduced to permitted levels at the time the fire broke out, the court heard.

WorkSafe and the EPA had also detected the company illicitly storing between 10 million and 16 million litres of chemical waste inside five other warehouses only weeks before the fire.

Bradbury pleaded guilty to five charges of failing to take all reasonable precautions for the prevention of any fire or explosion involving dangerous goods, and one charge of failing to provide and maintain a safe working environment for employees by failing to provide information, instruction, training or supervision to employees.

An investigation by The Age previously linked Bradbury Industrial Services to an illicit dumping operation that is allegedly responsible for stockpiling tens of millions litres of toxic waste in suburban warehouses and a remote bush property.

But the company’s guilty plea won’t prevent Victorian taxpayers from ultimately wearing a clean-up tab of more than $10 million linked to the stockpiling activity and the Campbellfield fire.

Bradbury went into liquidation in the weeks after the April 2019 fire with $56 million of debt and almost no assets. Its director, Paul Anthony Bristow, took his own life in 2020 while facing a series of charges over the company’s conduct.

The liquidator told the court there was only $9053.20 available in the now defunct company’s bank account for any fines and costs.

“The liquidator has incurred substantial time costs and legal costs in this matter and the only prospects of these being paid, and there being a possibility of a return to any class of creditor, is the potential recovery of an insurance claim,” documents filed by the company with the court said.

“There is, therefore, no real prospect of any fine imposed actually being paid by Bradbury.”

The EPA has estimated the clean-up costs at the former Campbellfield premises at more than $8 million. Emergency services spent another $2 million responding to the fire and its aftermath.

Judge Peter Rozen will hand down a sentence against Bradbury Industrial Services on June 23.

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