Fire heading
Blurb in here
Words by Kirsty Johnston
Design by Paul Slater
Motion Graphics by Phil Welch
Photography by Michael Craig, Dean Purcell, Jason Oxenham
It appeared in the sky just after lunch - a great throb of black smoke against the grey backdrop of Auckland city.
The foreman saw it as he came down the stairs from the unfinished roof of the vast construction site, and then he saw flames licking at the newly-laid bitumen, and ran to raise the alarm.
Mayor Phil Goff, above left, saw it as he sat in his office, and posted to social media at 1.13pm: “Huge fire at the SkyCity Convention Centre. Fire engines on route.”
Firefighter Martin Campbell, above right, saw it while attending another job at nearby Victoria St and raced up the hill with his crew to the construction site, guessing it must have come from there.
“We didn’t wait,” he says. “There were three trucks of us at another call-out just a minute down the road, and from there we could see a very large black plume coming from near the Sky Tower.”
When the crews arrived around 1.20pm, construction workers were pouring from the building out on to the street below, wearing boots and high visibility vests
“Shit, someone’s left a blow-torch on,” one said to another. “On the roof.”
Speculation spread rapidly through the group - it must have been one of the waterproofers laying the bitumen membrane in the building’s top west corner.
A team of 12 from MPM Waterproofing Services had been working there, using gas-powered torches to heat the bitumen. The story that rapidly emerged was that they must have left one on accidentally when they went for smoko.
Later, the company’s general manager, Andrew Pardington, said the team had been downstairs when the fire started. Like everyone else, they were asked to leave.
"Obviously it's a shock for everybody at the site,” Pardington said. But he said the rumours could be just that - rumours. He didn’t want to comment further until an investigation had finished.
Once workers were evacuated, the fire crews began to figure out the best way to safely get access to the blaze.
“With the building being under construction… we knew it wouldn’t be easy,” Campbell said. “But all of the worst things seemed to come together.”
First, there was the height. The SkyCity Convention Centre is technically seven storeys, but only has five levels, with the ceiling in the fifth level - the theatre room - a huge 13m high.
Secondly, because it was an active site, sprinklers and fire hydrants were yet to be installed on the top levels. So instead, the firefighters had no choice but to get the water up to the roof on their own.
As more and more fire trucks arrived, the crews began to unspool endless lengths of thick orange hose and drag it inside, each firefighter carrying around 25kg of the heavy rubber in addition to 25kg of breathing gear. They climbed up, through the internal stairwell, and up ladders, and arrived on the roof to be confronted with a sheet of flame 80m wide.
“By the time we got to the roof we were already exhausted,” Campbell said. “And then we had to fight this fire.”
Campbell would go on to pull a 19-hour shift, not leaving the site until 8am the next day, his entire body aching by the time his shift ended, going through four breathing tanks as the crews rotated in and out, in and out, trying desperately to dampen down the flames.
The task was made even more difficult by the sheer scale of the building. The roof itself was a hectare, all-up. And not only was the roof at stake, but the entire $700m project, including the two largest pieces of public art ever created in New Zealand.
Sara Hughes' installation of 550 enormous glass pieces, including the distinctive "fins" flanking the eastern and western side of the building, were begun in February this year. Peata Larkin had been creating a separate work of 13,500 terracotta tiles. The flames were at risk of shattering both.
For hours, water pouring on to the fire from hand-held hoses seemed to make no difference. After a briefing from the construction company, Fletcher Building, the firefighters realised the flames had chewed through the bitumen and plywood and taken hold in the straw-filled panels used for insulation, embedded between steel purlins.
The problem was, by the time each piece of bitumen stopped burning, the fire had already crept further into the roof. Largely, water from above was unable to get into the internal panels - ironically because those areas had been waterproofed. It was also extremely dangerous on the roof for the crews, as the panels weren’t designed to take the weight of heavy humans and firefighting gears.
Inside the building wasn’t much better. The combination of high ceilings and a half-finished site created numerous, unknown hazards for anyone working in the huge theatre below.
“We are having real difficulty getting into it,” said Fire and Emergency Auckland Regional Manager Ron Devlin. He called the fire “one of the largest and most difficult structure fires in recent times”.
Through the afternoon, the firefighters kept working, and working. Crews were brought from Hamilton, with Auckland having no more resources to spare. But by 5.45pm the fire was only growing larger.
At 6.15pm, fire bosses made the call: They would have to let the entire roof burn out. It was estimated it would take a further 12 hours.
“It is the only safe way,” Devlin said.
Fire and Emergency Auckland Regional Manager, Ron Devlin
Fire and Emergency Auckland Regional Manager, Ron Devlin
On the ground, smoke had settled over the central city in an acrid haze. Offices shut their air-conditioning units down to prevent fumes being dragged in. Some pedestrians were wearing masks, others covering their faces with clothes. The smoke could be seen from Ponsonby, from Devonport, from Waiheke, a dark smudge in the sky.
In the afternoon, local bars were full, including some with Fletchers’ workers, helplessly watching months of work go up in literal flames, over a beer. Many had tools or wallets or keys stuck at the construction site, and so were stuck themselves. They hoped, falsely, the flames would be put out and they would be let back in.
As the sun went down, however, hope began to fade. The fire hadn’t abated. The city emptied out. The afternoon commute - which had been building into logjams since the blaze began - descended into chaos. Clogged by the cordons closing arterial streets, the city ground into gridlock. And with hundreds of workers’ cars stuck in the casino complex, lines for buses grew and grew.
“Please be patient,” Auckland Emergency Management pleaded. “We urge people to use their common sense; not put themselves in harm’s way by standing in smoke plumes or downwind of smoke.”
At 3.40pm SkyCity closed the Sky Tower and casino complex. It hoped, it said, to keep its two hotels open. But by 4.10pm, it changed its mind.
"The safety of our staff and customers remains our priority,” it said. All guests had to be rehoused, with other hotels taking the load.
Commentators were already trying to estimate the economic loss. By the close of the day, share prices for SkyCity and Fletchers had fallen, SkyCity down 2.8 per cent to $3.83, and Fletcher Building down 1.7 per cent to $4.64.
Goff, who spent the entire afternoon as an eyewitness reporter, said the fire would be a major setback for the the already-delayed convention centre - and for Auckland tourism too.
“Inevitably there will be events we will lose,” he said. He mentioned the APEC summit, scheduled to be held in Auckland in 2021. He was concerned the convention centre would no longer be ready in time.
“They say this will be burning all night. We won’t know until there is a full assessment, but I can’t imagine this will take anything other than months to repair, construction put on hold and a lot will have to be torn down and started again.”
On Wednesday, dawn brought more bad news. Huge towers of flames were still sheeting across the building, now urged on by strong winds, yet untouched by heavy downpours of rain and hail. The rest of the city appeared from the gloom as a post-apocalyptic film set - rubbish blowing across deserted streets like urban tumbleweed, the only sign of human life the police officers in masks guarding the cordons.
A spokesman for Fire and Emergency New Zealand said there had been little change overnight. There were 21 crews on the scene who were still in a “defence mode”, he said, with the fire continuing to burn through the roof. About 30L per second of water was being pumped at the blaze, but the wind was blowing it back.
At 6am, the neighbouring TVNZ building was evacuated, with its Breakfast show forced to broadcast from a backup studio. Auckland District Court was shut, and the art gallery closed. Aucklanders were warned to avoid travelling into the city, instead asked to work at home. Heart of the City, the business association, said it was an “upsetting situation” with immediate impacts likely to be felt across many businesses in the city centre. At least 25 local businesses were shut. Cafes were empty.
At a 10am press conference, SkyCity chief executive Graeme Stephens, below left, sat next to Fletchers' CEO Ross Taylor and said: “This has been absolutely devastating for us.”
Stephens, sincere and immediately likeable, told how on Tuesday morning he had been on a tour of the construction site in a hard hat, signing off hotel rooms and inspecting the layout.
"We have worked incredibly hard to get to where we were. I left the site very buoyed, very excited,” he said.
Just hours later he was watching all that work burn down.
"Very thankfully we are not dealing with human loss," he said. "This is a discussion around buildings and money and time - but not people."
Taylor, lacking Stephens' charm and empathy, refused to comment on the cause of the fire, but confirmed it began in the area where blowtorches were being used.
He too said he felt immense disappointment.
“A day can be a long time,” Taylor said. “Only yesterday you could see the momentum on the site you could see when we were going to finish, and how it was going.”
The fire is the latest in a long line of woes for the convention centre project. At first, it was beset with controversy - beginning with the way the deal was struck between former Prime Minister John Key and SkyCity, and then shifting to outrage at the agreed 230 new gaming machines allowed as part of the agreement.
It has also faced huge delays and cost blow-outs, with the project a major contributor to Fletcher Construction’s near $1 billion of construction losses over an 18-month period.
Then it had to replace the cladding at a cost of $25 million as it was the same material that was partly responsible for London's Grenfell Tower fire.
Fletcher Building was meant to have completed the centre in the first quarter of this year, but that had been pushed out into the second half of 2020. SkyCity Entertainment Group has withheld $39.5 million in liquidated damages over the delays.
The delays were understood to impact as many as 8000 delegates who had booked events early in 2020. Those will now likely be pushed back again.
By 2pm on Wednesday, more than 24 hours after the fire began, wind had pushed away the smoke and the sky was blue again. Workers were allowed to get their cars from the SkyCity carpark, traipsing down five floors with gritty eyes and mask-covered mouths to a dark and smokey basement.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visited the scene of the fire, shaking hands with emergency services workers and staring up at the smoke.
Ardern said she wanted to acknowledge firefighters who had been working under difficult circumstances.
"The team on the ground, have been incredibly professional, very focused on what they can do to preserve the building,” she said.
She said there would be financial compensation for the businesses affected.
When asked for comment about what went wrong, experts explained that unfortunately, fire was a relatively common risk during construction because there were fewer safety systems like smoke detectors, and at the same time there was grinding, welding, and torching taking place.
They listed other casualties - the recent Notre Dame cathedral fire in France, the fire at Windsor Castle in 1992.
Notre Dame Cathedral in April, 2019, top, and Windsor Castle in 1992, below. Photos / Getty Images
Notre Dame Cathedral in April, 2019, top, and Windsor Castle in 1992, below. Photos / Getty Images
Dr Geoff Thomas, from Victoria University's School of Architecture, said precautions against fire including checking for flammable materials prior to using a gas torch, or providing suitable portable extinguishers.
However, he said it was unhelpful to speculate whether Fletcher’s precautions were adequate until an investigation was complete.
By Thursday morning, the fire was deemed officially out, barring some hotspots and flare-ups. The clean-up would soon begin, including pumping water from the carpark basement, where some cars were water up to their wing mirrors. The impact of that will not be known for some time - water quality in the Viaduct Harbour is in question after some eight million litres was pumped out through the wastewater network. On Thursday, authorities issued a warning against swimming at St Marys Bay.
The fire service said it was happy with the way the fire had been managed, with the burn-out of the roof going largely to plan. There were minimal injuries, with only one fire-fighter suffering injuries from falling debris, and a handful of other civilians needing attention from ambulance staff for minor issues such as smoke inhalation.
SkyCity said it was expected that shops and the casino complex would re-open next week at the latest.
How long it would take to remediate the site and fix the damage was yet unknown. Images from inside the ravaged theatre on the fifth storey show an intact roof structure, but huge burn-out holes in the ceiling and a flooded floor. And yet the two chief executives remained resolute.
"We will get the phoenix out of the ashes," said Graeme Stephens. “It was an amazingly iconic building yesterday and it will be again."
Taylor, the Fletcher Building chief executive, said despite the huge setback, he did not think there would need to be a full demolition. It was thought the art would be saved.
Fletchers was in a strong position, Taylor said, and it would survive the delays. Both SkyCity and Fletchers had robust and credible insurance, he said. At the end of the day, Fletchers was committed to seeing the building done.
"We understand this is a very important project.... and we are resolute that we will get this project finished,” Tayor said.
Someone asked if, in hindsight, he wished he’d never got involved with the building. Taylor gave a wry smile.
“Hindsight is wonderful thing and a luxury.”
