MELBOURNE FIRE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29107, 20 January 1960, Page 15

MELBOURNE FIRE

Wool Stores Gutted (Rec 10 p.m.) MELBOURNE, January 19. An early morning fire caused damage estimated at £1,500.000 to-day when it gutted four wool stores and damaged four others in Melbourne's worst fire in 30 years. It broke out shortly after dawn at the Australian Wool Bureau stores in suburban Footscray and burned fiercely for three hours Fifty firemen from six city brigades were mobilised to fight the inferno. At the height of the fire, flames leaped 50ft as a stiff south-westerly swept the blaze from store to store. The fireman, Richard McColl, aged 22, was treated for burns to the face, arms and hands when wind blew a sheet of flame over him.

A resident gave warning of the fire at 5.25 a.m. Howling fire tenders raced to the scene to find one store blazing furiously and (lames licking an adjoining store.

Sixteen pumps and trucks and miles of hose were used to get water to the stores. But the wind was too strong. The fire spread and, half an hour later, four of the hardboard and timber stores were infernos. Heat and acrid smoke kept firemen from the heart of the fire. Wind sent sheets of burning cardboard flying through the air, and flames began scorching the western walls of the next line of stores.

Firemen chopped their way through the walls of these stores and sprayed them .with hoses. But the blaze partly destroyed two of the stores and raged through half of a third, destroying scores of bales of wool. Twenty police controlled traffic and crowds.

Hundreds of people in pyjamas and nightgowns stood in the streets of surrounding suburbs to watch the pall of smoke billowing over Western Melbourne.