(AU) Two Dry Wet Seasons Spark Early Start To NT's Grass Fires, Leaving Experts Worried

ABC News - Laetitia Lemke

Bushfires NT lighting a series of fires for a mitigation burn at Acacia Hills. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

Key Points Bushfires NT says there have been more fires than usual this year It is worried about a bad fire season because of fuel loads in the bush One of the tools for managing fires in northern Australia is under funding threat

In Australia's tropical savannas, property owners are accustomed to the risk of wildfires in the long months of the dry, but one specialist team is warning of an early start to this year's fire season.

Bushfires NT works with firefighters and landowners to help manage the environment to protect lives and property from fire.

One of the greatest challenges is gamba grass, a quick-burning savannah grass introduced in the NT in the 1930s and originally from Africa.

"Over 50 per cent of the fires that I've been to this year would have been impacted by Gamba," Bushfire NT's Fire Management Officer Nathaniel Staniford said.

"It means a faster-moving fire that's more intense [and] a greater spotting potential, which is where embers will fly ahead of the fire front," he said.

"So we are constantly having to be vigilant and look beyond the control lines."

Bushfires NT run mitigation burns in Australia's Top End. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

And it's not just gamba grass changing the risks.

After two record-breaking dry wet seasons in the NT, Mr Staniford said the landscape had received just enough rain to deliver grass and shrub growth, but that flora was now drying much earlier in the season.

"The fuel is curing at a rapid rate, we are already at 90 per cent cured across most of the Top End, so we are very close to reaching a level where we will start seeing fire ban days declared," he said.

Mr Staniford, who is part of the team that helped fight the recent bushfires in the Shoalhaven Region in New South Wales, is now back in the Territory, moving the Bushfires NT into its new purpose-built facility in Rural Darwin's Acacia Hills area.

The team is working to achieve total compliance on firebreaks and encouraging mitigation burns.

"It's really important to have these mitigation burns in place," he said.

The North Australia Fire Information website can show up a fire within an hour of it starting across parts of Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the NT. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

"The firebreaks that people put in might be the 4-metre depth but with a mitigation burn on top of that, it increases the strength of that containment line and gives us more options when we are out fighting a wildfire."

Bushfires NT Chief Fire Control Officer Andrew Turner said the strong message was that the window of opportunity to do that work safely was closing quickly.

"We've had 16 wildfires to date just in the last two weeks predominantly and a number of those have caused some significant damage to properties," Mr Turner said.

"Our fires are every bit as dangerous as those down south.

"Every year, there are many cases of people losing property, losing their livelihood and potentially putting themselves in a great deal of danger."

But as preparations ramp up, one of the key resources used to manage blazes in northern Australia is under threat because of a lack of certainty over funding.

Bushfires NT staff create a fire plan. (ABC News: Hamish Harty)

The North Australia Fire Information (NAFI) website can detect a fire within an hour of it starting.

It covers 5 million square kilometres of land stretching across parts of Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and all of the NT.

Dr Andrew Edwards is a research fellow at the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research that runs the NAFI website at Charles Darwin University.

Dr Edwards said NAFI could show where fires had burned and when, which he said was vital information for large property owners and Indigenous rangers.

"We've gone from huge figures of fire frequency down to 20 or 25 per cent of what was going on before," Dr Edwards said.

"We're talking about hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions abatement in Northern Australia over the last seven or eight years."

A back-burn underway in the NT. (ABC News: Laetitia Lemke)

"It's world's best practice, there is not another website like it in the world."

"In fact, we are about to export it to Africa and to South America, where they are hoping to implement similar programs in their savannas," Dr Edwards said.

"We are not for profit, we are not out to make squillions of money, we're just out to help a lot of people do really good fire management."

The University said as of this week it may have secured another 12 months of funding from the Federal Government for the NAFI site.

But with a growing focus on fires across Australia and around the world, the University said it hoped more permanent funding could be secured.

Links

• Indigenous groups earn millions in carbon credits to burn country to cut emissions — but only in northern Australia 
• Savanna burns reduce emissions by half a million tonnes
• 'A tinder box': why do we burn the Top End black every year?
• 'Enough to dampen the dust — if that': WA farmers face driest conditions in 40 years
• Water deficiency declared on WA's south coast amid animal welfare concerns
• Drought a bigger impact on Australian agriculture than coronavirus, new figures show