In April 2019, a fire broke out at a Bradbury Industrial Services warehouse in Campbellfield. It burned for four days, closed nearby schools, and sent two workers to hospital.
The fire itself is not why this case matters to every business handling dangerous goods. What matters is what happened next. WorkSafe's investigation didn't stop at the site where the fire started. Inspectors went through five more Bradbury warehouses across Craigieburn and Campbellfield and found the same pattern at each one: more than 10 million litres of chemicals stored with bulk containers stacked four high, incompatible dangerous goods stored in close proximity, and containers left swollen, damaged, or leaking.
That pattern, not the fire, is what turned into a $2.9 million fine in June 2023. Segregation wasn't a footnote in the investigation. It was the finding.
Bradbury is not an isolated case. In 2024, a blaze gutted chemical manufacturer ACB Group's Altona Meadows factory, again triggered by static electricity during decanting, again sending drums flying and requiring more than 180 firefighters and four hours to bring under control. That same site had already seen a fatal fire in October 2023, when a 44-year-old worker died and two others were injured. WorkSafe laid charges over both fires in 2026, with each charge from the 2024 blaze carrying a maximum penalty of $1.78 million.
The pattern nobody wants to see
These are not stories about businesses with no dangerous goods systems at all. Bradbury was a licensed operator running multiple warehouses. What WorkSafe's investigation documented was not an absence of process. It was segregation that had drifted out of date as inventory changed: incompatible goods ending up stored close together, containers stacked and deteriorating without anyone catching it, stockpiles that grew past the point anyone had last checked.
That is precisely what AS 3833 (the Australian Standard for the storage and handling of mixed classes of dangerous goods) exists to control. Section 6 of the standard sets out separation distances between stores and protected places, and segregation requirements within a store, because chemicals with different properties can react violently when they end up next to each other. The standard's own guidance material is blunt about the stakes: if incompatible substances mix, the result can be severe heat, fire, toxic gas release, or explosion.
The standard also anticipates the exact failure mode that shows up in these prosecutions. Where a dangerous good carries a subsidiary hazard alongside its primary class, the more stringent of the two segregation requirements has to be applied, not the more convenient one. Two classes that look fine sitting side by side on paper can still carry an escalation risk: they may not react under normal conditions, but a fire involving one can cause the other to decompose and release toxic or corrosive fumes, a scenario the standard says should be built into emergency planning, not discovered during it.
Why this is harder than it looks
Segregation compliance is not a one-time chart lookup. It is a live cross-reference problem: every product, every class, every subsidiary hazard, every packing group, checked against every other product on site, every time inventory changes. A spreadsheet or a wall chart can tell a trained person the rule. It cannot tell them, at 2pm on a Tuesday, that last week's new delivery of an oxidiser is now sitting three metres from something it should be five metres away from, or that a subsidiary hazard on a product buried in aisle 12 changes the segregation distance for the whole bay.
That is the gap the Bradbury and ACB Group cases sit in. Not a lack of awareness that dangerous goods need segregating. A lack of a system that keeps checking, automatically, as reality changes faster than a manual audit can.
DGXprt's own dangerous goods consultants see this pattern constantly. Segregation is one of the most common non-compliance issues they find on site, and it is one of the questions workers ask most often: what can this actually sit next to.
The question worth asking today
If a WorkSafe inspector walked onto your site this afternoon, could you show them, with confidence, that every product is correctly segregated against every other product on that site, right now, including subsidiary hazards? Not "we did an audit last quarter." Right now.
For most businesses handling dangerous goods, the honest answer is somewhere between "mostly" and "we'd need a few hours to check." That gap between "mostly compliant" and "provably compliant" is exactly where the $2.9 million fines come from.
This is the problem DGXprt's segregation module was built to close: converting AS 3833 from an advisory document you interpret into a deterministic result you can check against live inventory, at the product level, including subsidiary hazards and packing groups, not just the DG class on the label.
The standard has always told businesses what good segregation looks like. The harder question, the one that actually shows up in WorkSafe prosecutions, is whether anyone can prove it is happening today.
Sources
- WorkSafe Victoria, "$2.9 million fine for chemical fire and stockpiles" (June 2023): worksafe.vic.gov.au/news/2023-06/29-million-fine-chemical-fire-and-stockpiles
- WorkSafe Victoria, "Company charged over chemical stockpiles in Campbellfield" (January 2020): worksafe.vic.gov.au/news/2020-01/company-charged-over-chemical-stockpiles-campbellfield
- News reporting on WorkSafe charges against ACB Group, Altona Meadows: examiner.com.au, "Chemical company charged over blaze that gutted factory"
- AS 3833:2024, Section 6 (Separation and segregation).
- Storemasta, "How to Segregate Incompatible Classes of Dangerous Goods" (2023).
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about dangerous goods compliance software.