East and West

Hand-painted bunker labels read across the conveyor structures at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, 'Power coal' on the left and 'Briq cal' partly visible on the right, applied when the site switched away from Yallourn coal. Below them, large magnets hung at the end of each conveyor to catch stray metal in the coal feed, though the system was not foolproof. When something got through and split a belt, the briquette factory and power station had roughly 5 to 6 hours of fuel left, with workers using air lances to push every last piece of coal through while the station offloaded turbines and lowered boiler temperatures to buy time. The west bunker was divided down the middle to handle 2 coal types; the east bunker carried 2 types but was never split.

The turbines those bunkers fed back to were set, in the 1950 contract scope, as two 30,000-kilowatt back-pressure turbo-generators supplied by Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Co. Ltd. of Manchester, with feed-heating plant. The 1954 revised plan added a 20 MW low-pressure condensing turbine to lift power output. Coal was conveyed from the west into the site and distributed to the power station or the briquette factories, with electricity or briquettes leaving from the eastern side. Brett photographed the east and west bunker conveyors on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.