Fighting fire with fire: How burns are helping to protect SA’s national parks.

Eigh­teen months on, the sto­ries of those who fought the fire have been cap­tured in a mini-doc­u­men­tary, which also under­scores how decades of pre­scribed burn­ing are help­ing reduce bush­fire risk and pro­tect our parks.

Read more about how the Wilm­ing­ton fire played out, and how the strate­gic pre­scribed burns pro­gram played a crit­i­cal role in get­ting the blaze under control.

You can also watch the 9‑minute doc­u­men­tary below and check out some new case stud­ies here, here and here, where we delve deep­er into the impor­tance of fuel-reduced areas when it comes time to fight a fire. 

How pre­scribed burns helped con­trol a bushfire 

How old burns help fight new fires

It was hot and windy on Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 3. Local NPWS staff in the Yorke and Mid North region were on high alert with dry light­ning strikes forecast.

As staff were on call for the evening, a fire broke out in the north­west sec­tion of Mount Remark­able Nation­al Park. 

Two NPWS quick response vehi­cles were sent, fol­lowed by two tankers from the local Wilm­ing­ton Coun­try Fire Ser­vice (CFS) brigade and CFS air support.

But the fire quick­ly grew more intense in rocky, steep ter­rain with lim­it­ed access tracks. 

Aer­i­al bombers and a ground crew on hose­lays tried to con­tain the fire, but intense fire behav­iour made this unachiev­able and a wind change ear­ly in the evening led to the fire spread­ing in all direc­tions and jump­ing tracks.

Expert plan­ning pays off

Fire man­age­ment plans are pro­duced with the help of a fire sci­ence team, park rangers, ecol­o­gists and lots of exper­tise from local staff. 

There’s also input from bush­fire man­age­ment com­mit­tees, First Nations, local coun­cils, Land­scapes SA and envi­ron­men­tal peak bodies.

These his­tor­i­cal burns were part of a long-term strat­e­gy to help stop bush­fires burn­ing the entire park in a sin­gle event and were crit­i­cal in allow­ing fire crews to stop the fire spread­ing. Plan­ning puts these burns, fire tracks, fire breaks and oth­er pre­ven­tion mea­sures into our beloved parks.

A pre­scribed burn planned for the fol­low­ing autumn also meant staff were very famil­iar with the area. This made it easy to put a plan of action in place quick­ly, as they had already iden­ti­fied low fuel ridges to the south­west to use as con­trol lines, in com­bi­na­tion with retardant.

A bush­fire in this large, drought-affect­ed nation­al park dur­ing Feb­ru­ary, with more hot weath­er on the way, was a worst-case sce­nario and CFS was quick to declare the bush­fire a major inci­dent. This meant an Inci­dent Man­age­ment Team (IMT) was deployed to Port Augus­ta the fol­low­ing morn­ing, made up of spe­cial­ist staff and vol­un­teers from cross the state.

The fire increased sig­nif­i­cant­ly overnight in all direc­tions due to hot con­di­tions and dry fuels.

The dif­fi­cult ter­rain and lim­it­ed tracks meant that a com­bi­na­tion of con­trol strate­gies had to be imple­ment­ed to con­tain the fire to the north of the reserve.

The IMT col­lect­ed and eval­u­at­ed infor­ma­tion quick­ly and put to good use a net­work of pre­scribed burns put in the park by NPWS staff. 

A com­bi­na­tion of con­trol strate­gies was used to con­tain the fire to the north of the reserve with these low­er fuel load sites giv­ing fire­fight­ers options, includ­ing the time and space to put in back­burns, that helped stop the bush­fire spreading.

Thanks to the low fuel load foot­prints of the most recent pre­scribed burns (2021, 2022 and 2023) the back­burns were con­fuct­ed safe­ly and were suc­cess­ful in help­ing to get the bush­fire under con­trol, pre­vent­ing the whole park from burn­ing and threat­en­ing local com­mu­ni­ties; the orig­i­nal objec­tive of the burns.

It starts and ends with a great team effort

The fire was declared con­tained after 13 long days and safe after 36 days, with less than a third of the park affect­ed. This was thanks to the mam­moth efforts of hun­dreds of fire­fight­ers and sup­port crews from CFS, pri­vate landown­ers with Farm Fire Units, air oper­a­tions and NPWS crews who per­se­vered in steep, rocky ter­rain even when tem­per­a­tures reached the mid-40s. Oth­er sup­port agen­cies and ser­vices were also invalu­able in look­ing after the fire­fight­ers while they worked on putting it out.

Speak­ing on ABC Coun­try Hour on Fri­day Feb­ru­ary 14, the day the bush­fire was declared con­tained, CFS Chief Offi­cer Brett Lough­lin praised fire­fight­ers for their ded­i­ca­tion on the Wilm­ing­ton fireground.

“I’m incred­i­bly proud of every­one achiev­ing that result in these hor­ren­dous con­di­tions and heat. As a state we should be proud. That’s super­hero stuff to keep a fire of that size in a box in those kinds of conditions.”

Get­ting the fire under con­trol didn’t just help save the park.

Thanks to the work of the Nat­ur­al Val­ues Team in the IMT (trained ecol­o­gists who focus on min­imis­ing neg­a­tive envi­ron­men­tal impacts where they can, as work is being done to sup­press the fire) mea­sures were tak­en to avoid affect­ing sig­nif­i­cant species and ecosys­tems where pos­si­ble, while still min­imis­ing the fire’s impact.

Post fire mon­i­tor­ing of threat­ened species, such as yel­low-foot­ed rock wal­la­bies and dif­fer­ent orcid species is ongo­ing, and unburnt habi­tat has been vital for local fauna.

Head­er image: Nation­al Parks and Wildlife Ser­vice Fire Crews work­ing from an aer­i­al retar­dant line. 

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