Pivot Fertiliser flood loses $80K
• It’s estimated around $80,000 worth of fertiliser was lost when Incitec Pivot Scottsdale was inundated on Saturday morning.
By Taylor Clyne
February 10, 2021
Following the torrential downpour on Saturday morning which saw a dumping of more than 50mls of rain between 3am and 6am Scottsdale’s Incitec Pivot has been left with a hefty clean up bill after the massive storage full of fertiliser flooded.
Depot Manager Drew Hall, who discovered the situation on Monday morning, said unfortunately it was the second time in under 12 months that it had happened.
“We have no idea to the extent that we’ve lost this time but last time we lost about 140 tonne of products and pumped out roughly 140,000 litres of water,” he said.
Mr Hall said they were dealing with the water environmentally with all the appropriate permits in place before extraction.
“We’ve given the job to Josh Millwood to remove the water.
“Obviously there is a fair bit of downtime, we’ve now got clients like McDougall's who are waiting to spread which is unfortunate, but we’ll be working as fast as possible to clean it up the best we can and get moving.”
It's believed the combination of the high volume of water over a short period of time and the infrastructure of both Incitec and Council were the reasonings behind the flooding.
“The storm water drains are struggling a little bit to keep up, both ours and the Council’s, so we just need to work together to get that fixed for the future.
“We will need to take some pressure off the storm water drain so this doesn’t happen again.”
Mr Hall said last year’s flood took the local company between six and eight months to work through all of the stock that was affected.
“Our fertiliser is held in large bays which we need to go through and scrap all the top off and then the bottom six inches will be wet and unusable.
“Because we have stock still coming in to keep everyone going, we just have to deal with the wet at the bottom as we can.”
At the end of the day the company hopes there will be limited impact on their clients and the great service they provide them.
“We just ask for a little patience. We’ll be back to normal as soon as possible.”