Firefighters were confronted by a volatile situation when they arrived on the scene of a truck fire north of Wollongong on Monday.
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The fire, in the cabin of a B-double tanker carrying 50,000 litres of ethanol, shut the M1 Princes Motorway in both directions at Cataract about 6.30am.
NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) crews from Helensburgh, Bulli, Austinmer and Mount Keira worked with their Fire and Rescue NSW counterparts to tackle the blaze and keep the truck’s cargo cool.
“They brought the cab under control relatively quickly and stopped it from interfering with the load,” RFS Illawarra district officer David Hitchens said.
“It was a loaded truck … so, quite possibly it could have been a lot worse than what it was.”
Mr Hitchens said minimising the extent of damage to the trailer was firefighters’ number one priority.
The cabin fire was contained within 10 minutes but crews used “copious amounts of water” to cool the trailers for about half an hour.
Mr Hitchens said the area between Bellambi Creek and Bulli Pass was a “common location for trucks to catch fire”.
“[The trucks have been] working extremely hard climbing Mount Ousley Road and then … they’ve got another climb out of Bellambi Creek and that’s generally where we’ve been getting them [fires],” he said.
All northbound and southbound lanes were initially closed before the motorway was progressively reopened.
One northbound lane remained closed until just before noon to allow a salvage operation to be undertaken.
The driver was not injured.
Earlier: All lanes on the M1 Princes Motorway have reopened after a truck fire near Bulli Pass Road on Monday morning.
The road was closed earlier to allow emergency services to extinguish the fire which broke out in the cabin of the truck just before 7am.
The truck was carrying dangerous goods.
Traffic has returned to normal.