Inside the inferno
By MARTIN DALY and LINDSAY MURDOCH
Part II
Quine knew he had a huge emergency on his hands when his vehicle
turned off the Seaspray Road into Garrett's Road, about 3kilometres from
the plant.
Dozens of workers lined the road, some of them perched on top of cars
to get a better look at a giant fireball thrusting into the clear, blue
sky. Quine was surprised to see them. He knew Esso's emergency
marshalling point was the carpark next to a guardhouse at the plant's
entrance. ``Quite obviously the bang was big enough that those boys were
not hanging around,'' he says.
Quine ordered the two trucks behind him to stop on a ridge about
half-a-kilometre from the plant. As the officer in charge, he had no
option but to go in and assess the situation.
``For years people speculated there could be such a big bang at
Longford the whole place could be flattened,'' he says. ``I was thinking
to myself: `how true are those stories? Is this one of those days?' You
have to be cautious so I told the trucks to hang back.''
When Quine arrived at the guardhouse there were no workers pouring
through the gates or milling around.
``It was quite odd. In some respects it was business as usual,'' he
says. ``The guards were in the guardhouse but I suspect that all the
rest of the workers had already been evacuated.''
It dawned on him then the brigade had received a very late call.
Under Esso's emergency plans a representative of the company was
supposed to be waiting at the guardhouse to accompany the brigade into
the plant. But nobody was there. Quine felt uneasy. He could see the
fire was out of control, creating dangers about which he could only
speculate.
Quine thought at first the guards were not going to let him in. ``It
was really weird. They were stunned.''
Under normal procedure, anybody entering the plant has to swipe an
identification card or give their name and details. Quine insisted the
guards open the gate quickly. ``Getting into the plant can be like
getting into Fort Knox,'' he says. ``I half expected to be questioned
about whether I had seen Esso's latest safety video.''
While standing at the guardhouse an explosion rocked the plant. ``It
had such force the ground shook like an earthquake,'' Quine remembers.
``But we soon discovered it was only modest compared to what was to
come.''
The guards eventually relented and Quine drove in with Doug Brack,
the brigade's fourth officer in-charge who works full-time at the plant
and knows the narrow pathways and myriad of pipes like the back of his
hand.
They went straight to what is known as the fire shed but it was
empty. They got their first good look at the inferno, which showed no
sign of abating. Quine remembers its noise more than anything else. The
fireball was giving off an immense roar. He couldn't be heard without
yelling. Quine says the fire shown on the television news that evening
was only a fraction of its size in the first 60minutes after the
explosion. ``It was giving off every bright fire color you could
imagine," he says. ``It depended where you looked ... bright blues and
orange and billows of dense black smoke.''
Quine urgently needed to find Esso's supervisor in-charge but the
plant appeared deserted until they walked into the emergency planning
room, a few hundred metres from the inferno.
There were four or five men there but none of them could tell Quine
if the whole plant was in danger of blowing up. ``I guess everybody -
myself included - was a little bit overcome by the enormity of what we
were looking at,'' Quine says. ``I was asking whether everybody was out,
what's going on. But all I could get was `look at that, that is what's
going on'.''
``A couple of fellows were running around almost in tears,'' he says.
``I think they were looking for radios to use. I don't know why because
there was hardly anybody still at the plant.''
Quine is not sure how long it took but he eventually found Esso's
day-shift supervisor, Bill Visser. They went to the fire shed to talk
about what to do, where they were joined by Bob Brockerly, a former
metropolitan fireman who runs the plant's fire services. The men agreed
the inferno was virtually impossible to extinguish.
``No amount of water was going to put it out,'' Quine says. ``But it
was important to get water on it to calm it because of the potential of
it spreading from one end of the plant to the other.''
The men decided that if all the plant's pipes had been shut, as they
understood they had within minutes of the first explosion, the fuel
feeding the inferno would eventually dry up.
Some stationary water cannons were spraying the fire but Quine was
anxious to get more on to it. He radioed his pumper crew and ordered
them into the plant to set-up a stationary cannon pouring 1200 litres of
water a minute on to the blaze. But the guards at the front gate refused
the crew immediate entry, claiming they needed an Esso escort.
Told by radio of the delay Quine sent Brack back to the guardhouse to
help argue the crew's case. ``I felt getting the pumper crew in at that
time was a matter of urgency,'' Quine says. ``It was taking a long
time.'' Quine says things got tense at the guardhouse. ``Somebody said,
`there is no alternative, we just have to get in there ... open the
bloody gate'.''
Quine says the guards were just doing their job but the brigade also
had a job to do. As the fire continued to roar valuable minutes were
lost. Under intense pressure, the guards relented and opened the gate.
Quine was extremely worried about having his crew close to the fire.
He had learnt that four 22,000-litre cylinders of LPG gas were at the
edge of the fireball. If they exploded an area up to several kilometres
could be devastated.
Quine instructed his second in-charge, Col Skeen, to set up the pump
as close as he could to the fire. Quine needed to know if the flames
were reaching the cylinders. ``The Esso people couldn't really help us
at all,'' he says. ``We needed to know if the automatic deluge (pump)
system was working on the cylinders. If they weren't and they were
exposed to the heat, we had a definite problem.''
Quine asked Brack to lead him to a position where they could see the
cylinders. As Brack led him closer to the fire, Quine instructed him to
take safer routes. He insisted they always be within a few paces of a
building or equipment so they could duck behind them if there was
another explosion. It probably saved both their lives. A massive blast
far bigger than any other that day rocked the plant. ``It was a bloody
ripper,'' Quine says. ``We were probably less than 100 metres from the
seat of the fire. I was facing the fire about to head down its eastern
side. I saw this huge flash ... then a blast hit me.''
Quine is not sure whether he tripped or the force of the blast pushed
him to the ground. ``I ended up on one knee with my head in the
stones,'' he says. ``I had a thick jacket on but the heat went straight
through to my backside. I couldn't see what was going on behind me. I
was thinking, `is this as bad as it gets? Was it (the fire) about to
come past me?' I eventually pulled myself around a corner where Doug was
already. He was trying to grab me. I think the blast did knock me over
and it was hard to get up. I was probably panicking a little bit and my
legs were going a thousand miles an hour.''
Quine will never forget the noise of the blast. ``Obviously something
had split and there was a big crack to start with. Then there was a
noise like a huge, slowly developing thunder ... I haven't heard
anything like it before and don't expect to again.''
Skeen saw Quine and Brack disappear behind equipment and pipes
shortly before the blast. ``My immediate thought was that they were
gone,'' Skeen says. ``I thought for sure they would have been too
close.''
Skeen was also lucky to survive. Despite the scorching heat he had
ventured within 40metres of the fire to set up a stationary water cannon
and was walking back towards the pumper.
``The blast was so great it knocked me to one knee. It was something
you can't imagine,'' he says. ``The main thing I remember is the noise.
It was like nothing I have heard before ... I looked up and saw a huge
mushroom cloud, just like a nuclear blast you see on television. I never
want to see anything like that again.''
Skeen looked to the top of a processing tower that was engulfed in
flames. ``It was so hot the metal ladder was melting like ice,'' he
says. ``It was absolutely frightening and incredible.''
Country volunteer fire brigades bring together people from all sorts
of jobs and backgrounds. Skeen is a sheet metal worker who works
offshore on the Bass Strait oil and gas rigs. Over the years he and
Quine had become close friends. ``Our kids go to school and that sort of
thing. My immediate concern was for him and Doug,'' Skeen says.
``I ran up to Bob Langridge (a CFA officer who had arrived at the
plant) and asked `have you heard from Bob and Murray?' and he said `yes,
they are all right, I have just spoken to Murray on the radio'.''
Quine decided it was too dangerous to continue towards the cylinders
and told Brack to lead the way back to the fire shed. ``Doug said he
would take a short cut but I said, `no, go the long way, I have plans
for tonight and I won't be toast for anybody'.''
Quine was now even more worried about the LPG cylinders. ``At that
stage a few of us had a little discussion and it didn't take long to
decide to evacuate the plant,'' Quine says.
The pumper crew had finished their job and a cannon was pumping water
into the centre of the fire. It was to run unmanned for 22 hours.
Everybody evacuated to a heliport about 300 metres beyond the plant's
high wire perimeter fence. Brack stayed at the guardhouse to keep an eye
on the fire.
A crowd of people were milling at the helipad. Quine doesn't know who
they were but thinks some were Esso managers.
Quine called another brief meeting where it was decided it would be
helpful to take a look at the inferno from the air. After a short flight
in a helicopter Quine, CFA officer Mark Jones, Visser and Langridge
agreed the fire was at last settling. But they still needed to be sure
that all the pipe valves were turned off and the LPG cylinders were not
about to blow.
Several Esso workers went back into the plant to check. They found
some valves that needed to be turned off, which also helped ease the
fire. ``Mind you, it was still enormous,'' Quine says.
Quine went to see his brigade members, who were waiting outside the
plant. He had a grave matter to discuss with them. Quine is not sure
exactly when he learned two workers were missing, presumed dead. But one
of them was John Lowery, the maintenance worker and 12-year member of
the brigade. Everybody knew Lowery as a good bloke. He was always in the
front line of the brigade's marching team and was like a mascot for the
younger boys in the running team. Quine told his crews they might find
the body of a mate if they went back inside. ``If anybody was going to
be a mess by seeing that I didn't want them to go through it.''
It turned out to be a prophetic warning. When the crews returned to
the plant late in the afternoon Brack discovered an unrecognisable,
blackened body. Brack and Lowery were not only good brigade mates they
worked together. ``He (Brack) couldn't tell it was John ... I guess it
was,'' Quine says.
CFA officer Dave Sherry later told journalists the two men killed in
the first explosion ``wouldn't have known anything.'' (Peter Wilson's
body was not found until Saturday morning.)
By late Friday afternoon Quine saw signs the fire was diminishing, if
only slightly. The smoke was becoming less black. ``We all decided it
was safer to get a bit closer,'' he says. ``We set up a control point
back at the fire shed.'' But other problems quickly emerged. Water pump
connections at the plant did not fit those on CFA tankers. Quine and
several other volunteers spent valuable time searching for compatible
connections.
Shortly after nightfall Esso reported an acute water shortage. ``We
were actually using more water than the system could keep up with,''
Quine says.
``The storage ponds were close to empty. Then around 7pm Esso
reported they were empty so instructions were given for the CFA units to
withdraw.''
Quine and his crews once again gathered at the fire shed. ``The pumps
must have been just managing to keep up because the flow never actually
ceased.''
About 8pm, shortly before Quine and his crews were relieved and
returned to Sale for a few beers and some sleep, they went into the
plant's canteen.
The place was surreal. ``We were starving ... the pickings during the
day had been slim,'' he says. ``Meals were half eaten ... a knife was
halfway through cutting a sandwich. You could see how everybody must
have just left everything and ran for it.''
As the exhausted Sale brigade members were leaving the plant Mark
Jones, a full-time CFA officer, told them the fire was the scariest he
had ever seen and they had done a magnificent and courageous job, even
if it was to continue to burn until Sunday.
There were other heroes in this drama but Esso refuses to allow their
stories to be told. Ron Webb, the affable if wooden public face of Esso,
sat in his Melbourne office this week, explaining the corporate policy
of refusing virtually any public disclosure about the disaster despite
the enormous suffering it has caused.
A subsidiary of the United State's giant Exxon Corporation that has
reaped almost $3billion profit in Australia since 1993, Esso maintains
it does not know what caused the explosion or that a leak had been
discovered hours earlier.
Webb, a former operations manager at Longford, says he doesn't know
what happened or even if there was a leak.
What else could have caused the explosion if it wasn't a leak?: ``I
don't know.''
Had Lowery and Wilson been working on anything specific? ``I don't
know.''
A mechanical engineer who has worked for Esso for 23 years, Webb
admits the Longford workers have been ordered not to talk publicly about
what happened, apparently on the threat of severe disciplinary action.
``Look, you know as well as I do if you have 20 employees talking there
would be various aspects of their points of view which could cause
confusion for everybody,'' he says.
Esso is unlikely to make public the findings of the company's
investigation into the disaster. Its report into a pipe blockage in
June, which cut Victorian supplies, remains commercial in-confidence
although it cost Victorian business hundreds of millions of dollars.
Webb does not consider Victoria's gas consumers to be Esso's
customers. Esso sells its gas to Gascor, an agency the State Government
wants to privatise, which has a monopoly to distribute gas to 99per cent
of Victoria's consumers.
Webb refuses to commit Esso to reviewing its emergency disaster plan
for Longford or to comment on the delay in calling the Sale fire
brigade, its failure to have a company representative meet the fire
fighters, delays in their gaining entry to the plant and the critical
shortage of water to fight the fire. ``You say these things, but nobody
has told me,'' Webb says.
About the only subject Webb is happy to talk about in detail is
Esso's history of safety. ``We have a safety history in Esso we are
proud of,'' he says. ``Ex-this event the last lost-time injury that we
had in our total operation was November 1996.''
The events at Longford on Friday of last week devastated the state.
The explosion and fire quickly developed economic and political
dimensions as factories and businesses closed and tens of thousands were
laid off work.
Some speculated the statewide gas shutdown would knock almost as much
out of the nation's economy as the Asian financial crisis.
And as lawyers signed up clients in what is expected to be the
biggest class action in Australian history, there were claims all was
not well at the Esso plant: that while Esso's safety standards were
always highly impressive, there were concerns about maintenance
standards. Esso rejects any assertions maintenance was a problem at the
plant.
A profound sense of grief has emerged in the towns and farmlands of
East Gippsland, where the workers live. Loved ones, friends and
neighbors had been killed and injured. There is also some fear among
those who have gone back to repair the crippled plant.
Within the community, there is anger that their loss has been
submerged by concerns in Melbourne and elsewhere about cold showers and
a lack of gas-baked bread.
Pastor Robert Hayman, of Sale Baptist Church, says his community is
sick of hearing about deprivations such as cold showers and seeing young
mothers on TV complaining about not being able to cook when microwaves
can be seen on their shelves.
``What about the poor families sitting at home without a father or a
husband, for God's sake,'' said Pastor Hayman. ``I would rather have my
wife and family safe at home than a hot shower.''
