Australia news live: large fire at Geelong oil refinery; Canavan defends Coalition’s hardline immigration plan

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Australia more dependent on imports after Geelong refinery fire as Chris Bowen warns ‘this is a setback’

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Fire officer says officials haven’t detected any contaminants spreading from blaze

Earlier this morning, Fire Rescue Victoria assistant chief fire officer, Mick McGuinness, provided an update to ABC Radio Melbourne. Shortly before 7am, he said about 50 firefighting vehicles were continuing to fight the blaze in the Mogas (motor gasoline) plant section of the refinery.

This fire has been quite large overnight. It is still burning at the moment, and we would still declare it as not yet under control … And the fire is mainly being fed by various types of hydrocarbon fuels. So predominantly liquid petrol … and also some gas and vapours that are feeding this fire at the moment.

We were concerned with the smoke that was coming off this fire, so our initial reactions were to get an alert message out to the community. We’ve since been able to have our specialist hazardous materials teams come in from locally Geelong and also in Melbourne and set up some atmospheric monitoring equipment and do a lot of sensing and sampling of not only the atmosphere but also the fire water runoff that we’re using to contain the fire. We’ve been able to determine … that we haven’t detected any sort of contaminants there.

We’re predicting that this still could burn for another three or four hours, if not longer. But we are starting to see a reduction in the intensity of the fire, which is an indication that the depressurising of the systems and the pipe work is occurring and that we will see a lesser amount of fuel being available to feed the fire. And of course, that allows us to continue to cool that area more rapidly and then be able to get crews in there to look at how we can start to isolate pipe work and valve systems.

It shows that we have very fragile, very thin energy security platform when it comes to refinery, only the two refineries left. And as mayor, I’ve been calling this out since being elected back in 2024, that Viva is not only a significant employer and corporate citizen for Geelong, but it has a significance for Victoria and Australia.

And it just shows that we, as a country, need to invest more in this type of capability.