Shoppers at a Melbourne Woolworths were forced to evacuate after a customer set fire to multiple products on shelves, resulting in the store reportedly \u201cgoing up in flames\u201d. <\/p>\n
Bystanders filmed a woman who allegedly deliberately lit grocery items on fire during a busy dinner rush on Sunday evening. <\/p>\n
The 25-year-old woman has now been charged by police. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s understood that multiple blazes were lit in different aisles of the Epping shop. <\/p>\n
Workers within the Woolies<\/a> store acted quickly, racing to help shoppers stay clear while contacting emergency services to help. <\/p>\n Some even attempted to bring the flames under control, but they reignited before firefighters arrived to put them out completely.<\/p>\n \u201cThe flames were getting quite big as well. Pretty crazy, really,\u201d Witness Liam Tyler told 7News<\/a>. <\/p>\n Footage of the incident was posted online by 7News<\/a>, captioned \u201cEpping Woolies goes up in flames\u201d, left social media to react with shock to the incident. <\/p>\n \u201cWhy though… what do you achieve,\u201d one person wrote. <\/p>\n \u201cWTF? Why?\u201d another said. <\/p>\n A third joked: \u201cMelbourne Melbourning.\u201d <\/p>\n Thankfully, no one was injured in the chaos.<\/p>\n \u201cWhittlesea Crime Investigation Unit detectives have charged a woman after a supermarket in Epping was damaged by fire Sunday evening,\u201d a Victoria Police spokesperson told news.com.au. <\/p>\n The woman left the store before security detained her until police arrived. <\/p>\n \u201cThe 25-year-old from Roxburgh Park was arrested by police and was taken to hospital under police guard \u2013 for treatment not related to the incident,\u201d the spokesperson continued. <\/p>\n \u201cThe woman has been charged with criminal damage by fire and commit an indictable offence while on bail. She has been remanded to appear in Melbourne Magistrates\u2019 Court on August 24.\u201d<\/p>\n The store has since reopened its doors to the public with shelving now repaired after sustaining damage. <\/p>\n \u201cThe safety of our customers and team members is always our top priority, and we are incredibly thankful that no injuries have been reported,\u201d a Woolworths spokesperson told news.com.au. <\/p>\n \u201cWe want to extend our sincere thanks to our team members who acted quickly to extinguish the fire and ensure everyone was evacuated safely, as well as the police and fire brigade who attended the scene.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the supermarket giant\u2019s first brush with unruly behaviour from customers recently, after a Sydney store was forced to display antitheft signage<\/a> that shocked shoppers. <\/p>\n One shopper posted a photo of the sign to Reddit, airing their concerns, claiming the police-themed sign seemed \u201ca bit dodgy.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cTheft is one of the main drivers of violence and aggression towards our team members, so we are continuing to proactively test new approaches to deter theft and ensure their safety,\u201d the supermarket\u2019s spokesperson told news.com.au at the time. <\/p>\n \u201cWe know the majority of our customers do the right thing, and we thank them for doing so.\u201d <\/p>\n Read related topics:Melbourne<\/a>Woolworths<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shoppers at a Melbourne Woolworths were forced to evacuate after a customer set fire to multiple products on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21926,23,133,4912,21933,1612,2601,14884,21925,21935,2602,6187,260,21929,120,21934,21928,8865,21931,21930,21932,21927,15737,68,21936,7949,12921],"class_list":["post-23339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-melbourne","tag-antitheft-signage","tag-australia","tag-australia-and-new-zealand","tag-criminal-damage","tag-customer-set","tag-emergency-services","tag-facebook","tag-fire-brigade","tag-food-label","tag-grocery-items","tag-inc","tag-lauren-robinson","tag-melbourne","tag-multiple-blazes","tag-oceania","tag-online-orders","tag-right-thing","tag-roxburgh-park","tag-setting-fire","tag-setting-fires","tag-shoppers-stay","tag-supermarket-giant","tag-team-members","tag-victoria","tag-woolies","tag-woolworths","tag-woolworths-limited"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}