Cooling House 2

Three tall window bays run up the brickwork of the cooling house wall at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, each holding a grid of multi-paned steel frames in varying states of breakage. A circular metal vent pipe pushes out of the brickwork at the base of the rightmost bay. A 'Danger keep out' sign sits partly visible behind the middle panes above. Yellow scaffolding shows through the broken lower panes on the right, the mark of active stabilisation work inside. Behind this wall sits the cooling house machinery, where coal temperature was reduced before the drying and pressing stages of the briquette process.

The cooling house was one stage in the briquetting line, the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, registered for its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens and conveyor cascades. The briquette presses themselves were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, for two factories of 2,100 tons per day. Morwell brown coal proved unsuitable for briquetting because of its high alkali and sulphur content, so Yallourn coal was railed across the interconnecting line to feed these factories. Brett photographed the cooling house wall on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.