00:02I'm standing right on Bridge Road this morning in Richmond, in Melbourne's inner east.
00:06It's about three k's from the heart of Melbourne.
00:09It's a major thoroughfare, as you just said, from the eastern suburbs into the heart of
00:15Melbourne.
00:15And about 50 metres behind me there's a tobacco shop that was set alight about half past three
00:20this morning.
00:21Fire services got there very quickly.
00:24They had to put breathing apparatus on.
00:26It took them about an hour to get the blaze under control.
00:30Luckily, no one was inside.
00:32No one was injured in an adjoining duplex building on level one.
00:36There were three people, FRV says, who were evacuated.
00:41And so that would have been very scary for them.
00:44But thankfully, no one injured this morning.
00:47We've been here since just before 6am.
00:50There's been a police cordon the whole time between Church Street and Lennox Street on
00:56this busy road in Melbourne's east.
01:00And a lot of pedestrians, a lot of drivers have had to detour their early morning commute.
01:05A lot of people trying to get to their early morning exercise have been disrupted and quite
01:11frustrated.
01:12And as one local resident, Penny Smith, told us, it's just really quite frightening.
01:17This is what she had to say.
01:19It's tragic and it hasn't happened all the 25 years I've been here.
01:25It's got worse.
01:26And this gangland that's going on with cigarette smoking is just dreadful.
01:32I don't know what the police do about it.
01:35The courts don't seem to support them.
01:37It's really hard.
01:37I don't know what the answer is.
01:41And we've also heard from people trying to do their early morning exercise on foot,
01:47just trying to go about life this morning, just couldn't get through the police cordon
01:53and just finding it really frustrating.
01:54A lot of people have said, you know, this is what Victoria's like.
01:59Someone said, oh, classic, when they learned that it was a firebombing.
02:02This is what Pilates enthusiast Maddie had to say.
02:07Can't get through.
02:08No, bit of a surprise.
02:10Wasn't sure what was going on, but a bit scary, a bit hectic.
02:14There's going to be a few of us plodding around.
02:17So, yeah, a bit of a different morning.
02:20So police are treating this as suspicious.
02:24An arson chemist is expected to be here this morning to look into the exact cause.
02:31As you can see, I'm quite a way down the road.
02:33So we haven't been able ourselves to have a really good look at the front of the business.
02:37But we can tell that it has been completely gutted.
02:40And a local business just told me before I came on air with you, Gemma, that the owners of the
02:47business she works at,
02:48they've actually seen their insurance premium rise recently because of their proximity to this tobacco shop.
02:55So we've seen a spate of arson attacks on tobacco stores in Melbourne for some months now.
03:03And this is really hitting home for business owners and for local residents.
03:08And some of the other people are seeing their parents in Melbourne for a lot of reasons.
03:08We have to be able to see what's happening.
03:09And we're looking for a little bit.
03:09To be honest.
03:09And to be honest, we'll have to provide you to the government.
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