With her earbuds in, a meditation track playing, Gail Keogh didn’t so much hear the first explosions as feel them, as a fully laden fuel tanker began its transformation from everyday road feature to white knuckle inferno, only about 200 metres from her Geards Place, West Wollongong front door.
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The southbound Metro Petroleum tanker had 35,000L of unleaded and E10 in its belly when its 44-year-old driver saw flame and pulled it to the side of the M1 about 8.40am Friday.
It would burn solidly for five hours, threatening nearby homes and sending spectacular fire clouds and plumes of thick, black smoke over the suburbs.
The driver walked away with some singed arm hairs, otherwise unscathed.
Meantime, a network of angry red lines formed over the city’s online road map – the M1 blocked in both directions and the Princes Highway also later closed.
With two major arteries severed, traffic flowed where it could, and jams erupted in unrelated places like Corrimal Street, Wollongong and Abercrombie Street, West Wollongong.
More than 130 firefighters had the blaze in hand by 2pm. The blackened tanker was shrouded in foam. With the front tyres blown out it sagged forward, in puddles, no threat to anyone now.
Beneath it, the road surface had melted.
A “complex and lengthy” clean up and salvage operation is expected to continue into the night, according to the RMS, before the motorway can fully reopen.
Fascinated passers-by had gathered on a pedestrian bridge overlooking the motorway in the fire’s early stages, but the vantage point was short-lived.
Police evacuated residents on Geards Place and on McAndrew Crescent, Mangerton – everything within about 200 meters of the blaze.
In that first hour, authorities feared a more dramatic explosion would reach homes or onlookers.
“Get off the bridge!” police told the crowd.
Mrs Keogh saw orange flames soar high over the treeline between her house and the motorway. She thought there had been a gas explosion at her neighbour’s home but later heard the truck’s tyres had exploded and believes this accounted for some of the early sounds – “boom – boom – boom – boom – boom”.
Police on trail bikes went door to door to move residents out, but Mrs Keogh took her cue from the colony of bats that lives in the trees behind her home.
Even the “big, old ones” were braving daylight and flying clear of the smoke plumes, she noticed, so she would too.
“That’s what scared me and that’s why I’m up here,” she said, from her spot at the end of the street, about two hours after the fire began. “I’ve lived her for 15 years and you can tell what is going to happen if you watch the nature.”
About 11.20am, Fire and Rescue NSW duty commander Bruce Fitzpatrick said fire crews remained focused on reducing the risk of an explosion.
Firefighters trained hoses on the blaze from three directions, keeping the exterior cooler.
Meantime, the blaze spread from one to two of the tank’s internal compartments.
“A petrol tanker is compartmentalised, it’s not one big tanker of 3600 litres, it’s eight tanks of about 600 litres each,” Duty Commander Fitzpatrick said.
“So it’s burning down one tank at a time. So the risk of what’s known as a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor gas explosion) .. the risk is still there but it’s being reduced because the product is venting and it is on fire.”
Residents were allowed to return to their homes about 1.30pm.
Authorities are expected to remain at the clean-up operation into the night.