Young's Fire and Rescue NSW team has received a unit commendation for courageous action at a chemical fire at a solar thermal power station at Jemalong, near Forbes five years ago.
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Chief Superintendent Greg Buckley, Fire and Rescue NSW's Southern NSW Commander, visited the station on Tuesday night to present the unit commendation, as well four individual commendations to firefighters who responded to the incident on June 30, 2015.
On arrival at the incident, firefighters were faced with a tank containing 120,000l of leaking liquid sodium spilling and igniting in contact with the air.
This caused crystallised caustic soda to form on the base of the tank and pipe work.
Young's unit was the second to respond following Forbes.
"In a dangerous and volatile situation firefighters performed fire suppression within the hot zone in a continuous rotation for five hours in an environment where their safety was not guaranteed. Fire and Rescue NSW commends the crew of Young for their courageous action which are in the finest traditions of the service," Mr Buckley said.
Young's captain Ryan Terry said tonnes of soda ash was used to contain the fire.
"Being a HAZMAT scenario we put a massive exclusion zone in place. Sodium reacted with moisture in the air so we had to figure out how to contain it and let the leak slowly come out," he said.
The incident lasted days and required specialists to respond across the state.
Individual commendations for courageous action were presented to captain Ryan Terry, retained firefighter Angus Randall and retired firefighters Jake Dawe and Trent Jamieson.
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