Fire at Wessex Foods, Lowestoft

There I was wondering what to do to avoid watching the World Cup Final when my alerter solved the problem for me!

Just before 6.30pm I was jogging across to the fire station, hoping we weren't off to Corton Cliffs again. Cheesey beat me in and as the appliance bay doors thudded open he called, 'It's Make Pumps 8." I seem to remember my reply was something like 'Oh for f**ks sake!"

As more of the crew arrived it was obvious there was something big kicking off in south Lowestoft as a huge plume of smoke was visible right across town. Sure enough, the shout was to Wessex Foods on Hadenham Road in the South Lowestoft Industrial Estate.

With a crew of six Cheesey was off and negotiating the increasingly heavy traffic through Oulton Broad and finally passed queues of traffic up Bloodmoor Road.

We were fourth pump in and were greeted by thick black smoke billowing from the factory roof. Cheesey was required to put messages back to Control including 'Make Pumps 12 and 2 aerial appliances required', so I took over as pump operator. Very quickly we were supplying two 70mm lines of hose to the South-East corner of the building – cooling a very large Nitrogen tank and the sides of the smoking metal skinned factory. It became obvious, quite quickly, that we would be over-running the water supply as most of the fire engines were being fed from the same water supply (just different hydrants on that same supply). I therefore had to regulate the flow of water to each of my deliveries to ensure neither was left without something to squirt at the fire.

With the arrival of the Command Support Vehicle (CSV) from Beccles, Cheesey was able to take over as pump operator while I had a few minutes to survey the scene.

The factory processes chickens and as such has a whole lot of nasties (from our point of view) to deal  with – top of the list being Ammonia with Nitrogen and many gas cylinders adding to the fun. On the Western side of the factory I had heard that gas cylinders had been removed from the dnager area while attempts were being made to stop the Ammonia from leaking. Hopefully the thick cloud of smoke rolling away to the South West had persuaded anyone in its path to shut all their windows and doors!

By now we had fire engines and specialist vehicles arriving from all parts of the county. Fire engines from Lowestoft, Beccles, Wrentham, Southwold, Leiston, Stradbroke, Eye, Elmswell (near Bury St Edmunds), plus the Turntable Ladder and support pump from Ipswich and the Operational Support Unit plus pump from Haverhill. And from Norfolk we had their Hydraulic Platform from Great Yarmouth (they'd actually been at their own shout in Holt before coming on to us) and pumps from Yarmouth, Gorleston and Harleston.

To get round the water problem Harleston were sent off to Pakefield Hall, just south of the Morrisons roundabout to 'set in' to their pond. I then found myself with about 10 other firefighters running hose back up the A12 towards the incident.

Over 100 firefighters were called to the fire last night – a huge chunk of Suffolk's resources.

And there was me worrying that we were off to Corton Cliffs! But I wasn't far wrong. While we were at the incident we heard Bungay get tipped out to the cliffs followed by Orwell coming all the way up the A12 to assist them!

I'll hopefully get a few pics on here later today plus any other updates…

*** Just added some pics taken from the incident.

Sponsored links:

• The Full Monty – the hit musical at the Marina Theatre!
• Great value family breaks at holiday parks in the UK