Victoria St fire raises concerns over Auckland’s firefighting resources - The Front Page

Thick black smoke engulfed Auckland city after a fire broke out at the New World supermarket in Victoria Park. Photo / Dean Purcell

A major blaze at an Auckland supermarket this week has once again highlighted the incredible work of our firefighters.

The fire at New World in Victoria St, which started in an area of the building being refurbished, burned out of control for several hours as more than 80 firefighters battled to put it out.

Foodstuffs North Island chief executive Chris Quin has said staff will continue to be paid as owners work through what’s needed to get back into business.

But it’s not the first major blaze the city has seen this year.

In April, two firefighters had to be rescued during a fire at an industrial business on Auckland’s North Shore after their aerial unit malfunctioned.

Another fire near Queen St last month saw a back-up appliance called in from Hamilton, which hit a road closure and had to turn back. The same appliance was called in for the Victoria St fire this week.

New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union Auckland president Terry Bird told The Front Page it’s a challenge for an emergency organisation to have enough resources to deal with an immediate emergency.

“It’s a nationwide problem that there hasn’t been an injection of new appliances into the large centres for some time ... If you go back to the large fire we had at the International Convention Centre in 2019, one of the recommendations out of that review was that Fire and Emergency New Zealand should develop a strategy on aerial appliances, and if should investigate what kinds we need, how many, and where they should be.

“Six years later, there is a draft of that document. I have not seen the draft but I’m gonna speculate that it suggests, or recommends, that we should increase our stock of aerial appliances and that we should refresh them more often,” he said.

NZPFU Auckland representative Josh Nicholls told The Front Page that the situation is frustrating.

“We need to understand that a fire doubles in size every 30 seconds. So, when you put that into perspective, time is of the essence. When we’re having to pull specialist appliances from our fourth-largest city into our largest city at a two-to-three-hour response time, you can see where we start to face some of our complexities.

“We co-share a heavy aerial relief appliance, which is 27 years old. It’s currently out of commission at the moment, awaiting what its future looks like, with some significant structural rust, and it’s 17 years overdue for a major rebuild on infection,” he said.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand’s acting deputy chief executive of service delivery operations Ken Cooper told The Front Page their approach for managing the fleet of trucks is twofold.

“Firstly, we are investing in replacement trucks and have replaced 317 trucks since 2017. A further 70 trucks have been ordered, including five aerials.

“Secondly, in line with our network approach, we have proactive maintenance schedules in place for our current fleet. When one truck is having its scheduled maintenance, a backup is made available.

“Our officers are trained to be agile using the resources available, as we always expect to be responding to multiple incidents simultaneously. I trust our officers to make the right tactical decisions using the resources that are available to them,” he said.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the complexities facing firefighters -

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

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