Incident Commander Simon Whelan gave an update live from the scene of the fire in Hill Head
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00:00 My name is Simon Whelan, I'm the incident commander and rescue station manager in Hatch Island.
00:07 I'm a rescue specialist.
00:09 What's the current status of the fire?
00:12 The current status is we're still in an operational phase.
00:16 The fire is out but there are still some hot spots which we are dealing with.
00:22 We're also working with the gas company to isolate the gases in the building to ensure that it's safe.
00:29 In terms of the next steps and the clear up, how long do you anticipate that to take?
00:36 We're working with the gas board at the moment. Hopefully that should be resolved within about an hour or so.
00:43 We will be ongoing operations here in terms of damping down and dealing with any hot spots in the building.
00:50 We'll be here for the majority of the day.
00:53 Do you anticipate being here tomorrow at all?
00:56 At this stage I wouldn't anticipate tomorrow. It depends what happens in terms of whether there's going to be a fire investigation
01:02 to look at the cause of the fire, in which case there may be some other operations going on here.
01:09 In terms of residents and the streets, is it the same situation? Is there any advice to them?
01:17 General advice to residents is there's still a small amount of smoke in the area.
01:22 The advice would still be to stay away from the area, for local residents to stay indoors and keep their windows shut.
01:28 But it is a very small amount of smoke now that the fire has been almost knocked out.
01:34 Perfect. Were any of the local residents evacuated or anything like that?
01:39 There were four premises adjacent to the property that we're dealing with that were evacuated.
01:46 They have found their own other places to go to at the moment.
01:52 We'll keep in touch with them and keep them informed of what's happening and when they're able to return to their premises.
01:57 In terms of structural soundness of the nearby buildings?
02:02 Nearby buildings are absolutely fine. There's no effect on any of the nearby buildings.
02:07 The premises that we're dealing with have, as you can see, been fully involved in the fire.
02:13 We've got a structural engineer en route to come and have a look at the building to give us that reassurance that it is safe or if there are any unsafe areas.
02:22 And also we have our urban search and rescue team coming down as well with some specialist equipment just to do some monitoring of some of the external walls.
02:31 Just to give a little bit of reassurance to ourselves for our operations and for ongoing other agencies and the owners of the property.
02:40 Once you're all happy and the tension might be by the end of the day, will the road be all open again?
02:47 Hopefully. We'll see what happens. But at the moment the Gas Board are currently digging up the road.
02:53 So that is going to be a road closure there for the foreseeable future until that is rectified.
02:58 So that will be in that state for now.
03:02 Perfect. Thank you very much.