Fire fighters tackled a fire in a front end loader in a warehouse full of flammable palm kernel and soya meal overnight.

Fire fighters from Mount Maunganui and Tauranga were called to the Aerodrome Road warehouse at 2.40am to find the loader fully ablaze in a smoke-logged building.

Fire fighters check the burned-out loader today.

They arrived to find smoke coming out of the building and discovered a large front end loader was ablaze inside.

'It had caught fire and filled the whole building, which was several hundred metres long, with smoke,” says Tauranga senior station officer Phil Price.

'Fortunately it was parked clear and the fire didn't spread to any of the soya meal or the 8,000 tonnes of palm kernel in the building.

'It was so smoke logged you couldn't see anything. Especially when the wind started to blow the stuff back through the building.”

Because of the danger of sparks from the fire plume igniting the palm kernel, fire fighters kept a watch until daybreak, and checked everything out with a thermal imaging camera.

Two Mount Maunganui crews and a Tauranga crew fought the fire.

'The cause at this stage hasn't been determined, we suspect it would probably be an electrical fault in the unit,” adds Phil.

'The reason we got the call is because the smoke drifted from the building and set off a smoke detector in an adjacent building. They called us thinking their alarm had gone off.”

In July 2011, 8,000 tonnes of palm kernel caught fire in J Swap's warehouse on the corner of Totara Street and Hull Road. The fire destroyed the warehouse and sent a plume of smoke across the central Mount.

A cargo of palm kernel caught fire in the No 1 hold of the freighter Lucy Oldendorff alongside the Mount Maunganui wharf in August 2012.