Carrington fire: GrainCorp assesses damage after Saturday night blaze sees residents evacuated over fears of fumes and potential explosion of burning grain

As the video above from Saturday afternoon shows, flames were clearly visible from the top of the dust unit before Fire and Rescue NSW was able to reach the fire and bring it under control.

A Fire and Rescue spokesperson said the brigades were notified at 5.05pm yesterday over concerns about a fire in the dust extraction system, which had the potential to set fire to 20 tonnes of grain in that immediate part of the plant.

The amount of grain stored in the main silos is much larger, with GrainCorp saying its shiploaders can handle up to 3000 tonnes of grain an hour.

The GrainCorp terminal sits at the southern end of Carrington at the Western Basin, with access from the end of Denison Street.

Denison Street and the surrounding thoroughfares have a mixture of housing and commercial/industrial properties, and the Fire and Rescue spokesperson said this area was subject to an initial evacuation zone that was later reduced, but maintained throughout the night.

The spokesperson said the fire had been "stabilised" by about 8.30pm and fully extinguished by about 1.30am on Sunday.

Residents said the fire had been going for hours before the evacuation began. Police had the streets between the terminal and the main Cowper Street entrance to Carrington blocked off.

The Fire and Rescue spokesperson said at least five units remained on the scene throughout the night as the fire was stabilised and controlled and the temperatures inside the dust unit lowered by continual spraying with water from brigade pumpers.

Water was still being sprayed over the fire site yesterday morning.

A GrainCorp spokesperson said yesterday afternoon that that an "exclusion zone" remained around the fire site.

"At this stage, GrainCorp is working with emergency services to understand the cause of the fire and the extent of the damage, so it's still too early to know what the operational impact will be," the spokesperson said.

"Importantly, no one was injured in the incident and no grain stock has been affected. It's our priority to ensure the safety of the site and to get operations up and running again as soon as possible."

From the time the first work went ahead to turn the original Bullock Island into Carrington, the waterfront suburb has had to handle the competing mix of priorities that typify a suburb that is both residential and home to a range of waterfront and industrial businesses.

Although the fire was brought under control without damage to surrounding areas, it has rekindled memories of the much larger Wickham wool store fire of February this year.

The grain terminal has also been the site of earlier fires, including one in 2017.

GrainCorp had a monopoly on grain shipments through Newcastle until a decade ago when an independent operator, Newcastle Agri Terminal, obtained a lease on land at the nearby Dyke Wharves to build a competing terminal.

The NAT team led by founding director Jock Carter built the five steel silos that stand prominently at the end of Cowper Street on the Dyke wharves, and which have in recent years shipped almost as much grain as the physically much larger GrainCorp business a few metres to the southwest at Western Basin.

NAT was bought in late 2021 for $90 million by logistics company Qube Holdings.

Mr Carter said yesterday that dust suppression was always an issue as far as grain movement and handling was concerned, and that NAT, as a newer terminal, used a different method of dust suppression to GrainCorp.

The Carrington terminal's Environment Protection Authority operational licence describes a "baghouse" system, by which dust from the various parts of the terminal are pressurised or blown through pipes into a series of filters or "bags", from which the dust is then collected and taken off-site in trucks.

The accompanying photographs of the fire and its aftermath show the fire took hold in one of the three main sections of the baghouse, which stands at the south-western corner of the terminal site, and is clearly visible from the Newcastle side of the harbour on Honeysuckle Drive.

Grain handling creates the potential for dust at every stage of handling, from the emptying of trains and trucks when the grain arrives, to the conveyor belts that dump it into the various silos, and on the wharf during the loading of the bulk-carrier ships taking it to its various export markets.

Neighbouring residents told the Herald yesterday that wind-borne grain dust still ended on their properties, but the Carrington terminal's EPA licence shows eight dust-related "pollution reduction programs" (PRPs) completed between 2004 and 2016.

The latest PRP was due to be completed in September last year after a 2018 pollution reduction study.

The licence says Graincorp was "reviewing the applicability" of spraying grain with water. It had agreed to fit new sensors to minimise dust when emptying trucks and filling ships, and "investigate" ways of minimising atmospheric release of the fumigant methyl bromide.

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