Sugar fires

Events > Sugar Fires

Sugar is highly inflammable, so the CSR refinery had to manage great risks. As well as the sugar, their coal and even a boat unloading chemicals could and did catch fire. They built an impressive safety record, although some of the few fires at the Pyrmont refinery were spectacular and potentially lethal.

In April 1895 fire broke out in a 30 feet (10 metre) stack of sugar bags. Every City fire station sent men and machines. Water was hosed down from the roof of the building, and the fire extinguished before it could spread to the 14,000 bags of sugar next door, or to the Company’s other buildings (Brisbane Telegraph, 17 April 1895). As the cause of the fire was not discovered, the continuing risk was very apparent.

Ten years later fire broke out in an elevator. It was soon extinguished, but the elevator and its contents were wrecked (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 1905).

In October 1918 Sydney’s biggest fire in many years destroyed 3000 tons of refined sugar and a seven-storey storage building and machinery. On a windless night fire brigades and a fire ship prevented the blaze from spreading, but when the fire reached the stacks and bins of sugar “immense geysers of flame shot into the air and then, after the fashion of a rocket, broke into myriads of sparks, and spray.” (Newcastle Sun, 25 October 1918, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1918).

More serious still was a fire in which five men were injured (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1926). This one began with an explosion in a packing room that threw the men backwards, enveloped them in flames, and brought down a brick wall. Once again, no explanation was found. This was followed two years later by a fire in a boiler station, igniting a bunker of coal (Tweed Daily, 2 October 1928) and another coal bunker fire in 1930 (Lithgow Mercury, 13 November 1930).

By this time CSR and the fire brigades had learned many lessons so that (for example) ominous fires in 1940 and 1948 were brought under control quickly and with little damage (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 1940 and 10 June 1948). In the 1948 case, the only damage was a temporary interruption in the flow of golden syrup.