ADVICE: Beware of spinifex when in the desert

On our most recent desert jaunt leading a trip for my son’s tour company, Moon Tours (www.moontours.com.au), we came across a total of five burnt-out vehicles dotted along a couple of remote desert tracks. These had all succumbed to a spinifex fire and were not vehicles that had broken down and then got torched, as you often see on our more-often travelled outback roads.

Then, as I was writing this, I heard a news report of a couple having been rescued from the Gibson Desert after their vehicle had caught fire on the Talawana Track. While there were very few other details, I could hazard a guess of what went wrong!

Two of the vehicles we’d seen had been burnt-out many years previously (I had photographed one of them, a Landie, in the late 1980s on my first trip across the Talawana Track), but three of them were pretty recent – a Prado sometime between May 2021 and June 2022, a Prado and trailer in April 2022 (more of which later), and an FJ Cruiser sometime since 2018. While the FJ was petrol-powered, the two Prados were diesel-powered, which proves spinifex fires don’t discriminate between petrol or diesel.

Endemic to Australia, what we generally call ‘spinifex’ throughout our desert country is, in fact, Triodia, while the ‘real’ spinifex is restricted to coastal sand dunes and the like.

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There are around 80 species of desert spinifex but four species are predominant: soft spinifex (Triodia pungens), hard spinifex (T. intermedia & T. irritans) and lobed spinifex (T. basedowii), the last three being the spiky ones we all hate to walk through.

In places, the sea of spinifex resembles a field of wheat with nothing else growing amongst the dense covering of golden grass, while in other places the spinifex forms an understory to an open covering of scattered mulga, other acacias, grevilleas, hakeas, and spindly gum trees and the like.

Lastly, and importantly for all of us to remember and be aware of, spinifex is highly inflammable.

Fire toll

Vehicle fires caused by spinifex are nothing new and we’ve seen plenty in our 40 years or more of travelling the Canning Stock Route, the Bomb Roads established by Len Beadell and his legendary Gunbarrel Highway Construction Party during the 1950s and ’60s, and other remote desert tracks.

The more recent fires destroyed some well set-up four-wheel drive vehicles that most of us would be proud to own and use. Modern vehicles with their Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) and petrols with their catalytic converters are much more prone than the vehicles of old. Desert travellers take note!

Prado destroyed by spinifex fire

The owner of the 2018 diesel Prado towing the trailer, Jo Poole, has been in touch with me after I posted some pics on Facebook. Here is Jo’s story.

Friday, April 29, 14:15

Stopped for a vehicle check. Lots of flowering spinifex and we were sometimes driving blind through patches two metres high. Had fitted flywire to the bullbar but it had little effect.

Friday, April 29, 16:00

One of the kids said they heard a pop and there was smoke coming from the left rear wheel well. At the same time a warning appeared on the dash that said a rear suspension airbag had a fault.

I stopped the car and the kids got out with a full detergent bottle of water and the fire extinguisher. They’d been instructed to immediately lie down and squirt out the fire. First problem was that the spinifex was up to the bottom of the car so there was no access to see where the smoke was coming from.

I reached the back of the car to see the smoke turn to fire which immediately ignited the spinifex on the ground. Dylan our 16-year-old has, with no further instruction, found a second extinguisher and was using that. I’m so very proud of both the kids, Dylan and Cassia; they were amazing!

I jumped back into the driver’s seat and moved the car a few metres to try to get access underneath the car. It didn’t help in the slightest. Andrew, my brother-in-law, approached with a couple of extinguishers, as he had pulled up behind and could see what was happening.

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I upended a 20-litre jerry of water over the tyre but you can’t direct it and it was taking too long. In amongst the turmoil and shouting, our sat-phone was already out of the car with my daughter, Cassia.

I shouted to Vicki, my wife, to move the car again another few metres. Flames are bigger and the smoke is bad and black, and it becomes apparent that if we don’t move back we will be burnt or suffocate. There’s fire inside the car!

Andrew upends another 20-litre jerry into the back. I jump in the driver’s seat and do a big U-turn on to the open next to the track. I grab my phone, camera and the wife’s phone, jump out and place them on the ground. I run around to the back left passenger door and the handle just comes off in my hand.

Dylan has hundreds of puncture marks on his feet from the spinifex, while Andrew’s fringe is singed but otherwise we are all okay.

Dylan and Andrew have finished all four extinguishers. We know there is no more we can do and move to a safer distance. It’s been less than 90 seconds since I stopped!

Andrew brings his car up and we use it for shelter and a quick escape in case the wind changes, as there is now a raging bushfire.

There is some discussion about approaching the trailer but we quickly decide that we don’t want anyone killed or injured. The jerry cans of diesel on the front of the trailer start streaming fuel out and the trailer is fully consumed.

We wait until the fire subsides enough and can get the phones and camera from where I put them; the strap on the camera was melted so we were lucky they survived.

I’m the only one from our car with shoes. Dylan has hundreds of puncture marks on his feet from the spinifex, while Andrew’s fringe is singed but otherwise we are all okay.

After the fire

We drive the 60km to the end of the Talawana Track and turn right, down the Gary Highway in the dark, thinking we can get 50km or so closer to civilisation. The track disappears and after a few attempts we give up and drive five or so kilometres back to Windy Corner (the name given to the intersection of the Talawana and Gary Highway).

We put Andrew in his swag and the rest of us catch an hour or so each of sleep over the next eight hours until it is light.

It’s during this time that I decide 500km in a single vehicle at possibly only 30km/h is going to be too hard and long. The Kunawarritji community at Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route is only 170km north and has a road out and emergency supplies if we need.

Leaving at 6.30am, we smash our way north (passing the turn-off to Veevers Meteorite Crater, our original destination) on a road that sometimes disappears completely.

We ring Newman police when we get close, in case we need to stop. They are very uninterested and remind me that it is forbidden to enter the community. I remind him that it is our only way to escape certain death in the desert and hang up.

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To get to the water in the back of the now burnt-out Prado we had previously taken out a jerry can of diesel. This survived and we end up 15 hours later arriving in Marble Bar with only fumes in the tank.

We’ve rung ahead when we had reception near the Telfer Mine and have a couple of rooms at the Marble Bar Holiday Park. Cath (legend) finds some extra clothes for the girls as my wife had only some ripped old shorts on, while our daughter is in a tiny pyjama singlet thingy. Cath brings us extra milk and cereal packets which is all the dinner we have the energy for before we are all asleep.

The next day Cath’s boss and owner of the caravan park, Lang Coppin (major legend), suggests he will take us to Port Hedland and, as there is no accommodation available in town, puts us up in his house.

We fly home the next day. Andrew drives and nearly beats us back ’cos he is hardcore.

Since then, Jo told me, the RAC paid out the insurance on the Prado, trailer and contents, although they only paid out 16 grand on the camper and a grand on the contents, so the family lost out there by 20 to 30 grand they surmise. Still, they have a new Prado and are setting up to head out to the desert once again.

Lessons learned

I asked Jo what the lessons were. He replied: “I’d had a good look under the vehicle a couple of days before, as a general inspection of everything, but annoyingly not that time when we were clearing spinifex from the radiator; it was a bad oversight! I was a little complacent as I was now in a diesel!

“I did things like the Gunbarrel and the Canning in a petrol 1998 Prado and was much more vigilant. We had just passed the burnt-out FJ Cruiser, which I commented was petrol and then the old Land Rover, which suddenly freaked us out as my daughter pointed out that it was probably a diesel.

“I had our Prado programmed previously to show when it was doing a burn of the DPF. It had started one prior to the fire but I couldn’t tell you if it was an hour or 20 minutes. We timed a couple of the burns on this trip at 25 minutes!

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“Interestingly, our replacement vehicle is a 2021 VX Prado and the DPF handbook says, in red, not to drive on long grass while it’s doing a burn, and comes with a manual button so you can do one on safe ground.”

When asked if there was anything he would change or carry next, Jo answered: “Absolutely. A 4kg extinguisher instead of a 1kg unit. A grab bag; we lost a lot of small expensive things, like cash.

“I’m also trying to think of a way to make a deluge/soaker extinguisher for just this purpose. Maybe a 20-litre jerry can-size with a battery and suitable pump, big hole so you can fill it as it’s operating and a long enough wand/sprinkler head to poke it under your vehicle through the brush/spinifex ...”

Beadell’s truck

Later in our desert sojourn we visited Len Beadell’s Gunbarrel Road Construction Party’s burnt-out truck at the remote Aboriginal community of Kiwirrkurra, and I mused on the thought that maybe spinifex had played more than a passing role in the burning and subsequent destruction of Len’s ration truck that occurred back in 1960.

Now I could be wrong, and certainly Len in his book, Beating about the Bush, which details the incident, doesn’t mention spinifex, per se. But a lot can be deduced by what is not said and from Len’s pic of the truck which shows the front of the vehicle, where an electrical fire would have had a bigger chance of starting, relatively unscathed, compared to the rear of the truck which was near destroyed – possibly from spinifex building up around the exhaust pipe!

So, if that could happen to very experienced desert travellers as Len and his men, what are the lessons learnt for mere mortals such as you and I in more modern, and dare I say, more susceptible vehicles?

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Modern diesels are just as susceptible to spinifex fires as are petrol vehicles; maybe with the DPF burn-off, even more so! Do your DPF burns – they burn at between 900 and 1200°C – on a pretty regular basis and in a cleared area free of any grass or spinifex.

When in spinifex country, check under your vehicle regularly; at least once a day! If there is a noticeable build-up, make it much more often. On some trips we’ve been checking and removing spinifex every hour or so. A pair of garden or welding gloves and a thick piece of wire will help remove the spiky stuff. This is most important – prevention is much better than trying to put the fire out once it has started!

Like Jo, we’ve found the small 1kg or 1.5kg powder fire extinguishers, commonly seen and fitted to vehicles, are, while not completely useless, pretty limited in what they can put out. Go for something bigger – we carry a 4.5kg powder extinguisher nowadays.

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Secondly, a spray water bottle is a very good option; the bigger the better. Maybe, as I suggested to Jo, the Ryobi 15-litre water sprayer would be the go – they have a big lid for refilling quickly from a jerry can and a long wand for reaching under the vehicle … and you can use it at home in the garden.

Have a grab bag with your valuables in it, including a sat phone or satellite communicator. Finally, travel with somebody else, who can transport you to safety if your pride and joy goes up in smoke!