A public meeting about ongoing problems and fire at the Bulla tip has been told there was no consultation with the CFA when Hume council granted a three-year extension to allow the tip to keep operating.
The CFA’s public safety officer for the northern district, David Allen, told the meeting late last month the agency had not been included in discussions about renewing the permit.
“There was no request for our comment . . . because it is not a mandatory referral for such a site to the CFA,” Mr Allen said in a transcript of the meeting provided to
Star Weekly.
“So the issues of access, water supply, the separation of flammable material, combustible material, a fire management plan, a strategic plan that talks about what occurs after hours or during hours if there was a fire, weren’t picked up because we weren’t referred.
“What we are doing now, though, is assuring, talking about the issues that will potentially go to VCAT. We are arranging a request to go to VCAT and try to instil some of our conditions into the permit extension.
“We’ll be talking about things like we have just talked about – access. It’s quite reasonable for an owner to secure their property, but we need to be able to get in and we weren’t aware they were putting [on] hardened-steel locks.”
Tip objector Carmel Egan said the meeting was called in response to mounting community anxiety about fires, with underground blazes burning at the tip for 15 years.
She said local residents were concerned about fumes, dust, smoke and a mysterious acrid stench emitted by the tip, along with traffic hazards of litter and mud around the tip’s Sunbury-Bulla Road site.
These concerns escalated, she said, after a recent fire exposed what appeared to be damaged cans of asbestos across the tip face.
Ms Egan said Jeremy Settle, of the Environment Protection Agency, spoke of suspected asbestos lagging kept in steel drums that had burst. “He confirmed samples had been taken and were being tested,” she said.
CFA representatives at the meeting said there had been one recent case where exposure to the asbestos had occurred, but test results had not yet come back.
CFA Melton’s David Clancy said there were records of where asbestos was stored on the tip site. “We always treat it with the highest priority,” he said.
Ms Egan said the meeting resolved to lobby the EPA and Hume council to make fire control a compulsory condition of the tip operator’s licence.
The case is due to go before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal after residents lodged an appeal against the permit.
