Wet Section Walkway

The central grate walkway runs the full depth of the screening and crushing floor at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, flanked by rusty yellow handrails and a row of large multi-pane windows on the left wall. The conveyor on the left returned oversize coal from the shaker screens, anything 4 millimetres and above, back through the cog roll crushers for a second pass. An overhead gantry structure and a dense run of machinery to the right occupy the mid-ground, where the crushing and recirculation equipment converged. The walkway draws straight back through the floor, every surface darkened, the grating and handrails the only clear lines through the packed plant.

This floor handled the recirculation stage of the wet section, where raw coal was broken down by hammer mills and cog roll crushers and passed over shaker screens until pieces reached 4 millimetres or finer before moving on to the briquette factory. The briquetting machinery this floor fed was supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, and the Victorian Heritage Register lists the surviving wet sections, hammer mills and shaker screens as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria. Brett photographed the wet section walkway on 30 March 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.