Tanami Road truck fire – Driver saves over 100 head of cattle

Image credit ABC Rural

Cory Stirling was transporting six decks of cattle to Alice Springs via the Tanami Road when he heard a loud bang at about 10pm.

Notorious for its poor condition, the Tanami Road connects Central Australia to the Kimberley region of WA and stretches over 1,000 kilometres.

Mr Stirling told ABC Rural that after Stirling said.

Mr Stirling acted quickly to separate the trailers to ensure the safety of the cattle. "You've got love animals and if you love doing something, like I love carting cattle … it's really tough to watch."

A representative of the station where the cattle came from has informed ABC Rural that the remaining cattle on the front two

the bang, he pulled the road train up immediately and ran down the side of the 50-metre-long road train to find his rear airbag brake had blown and was all on fire.

Running back to his truck, he grabbed the fire extinguisher and tried to put the fire out, but the extinguisher ran out of fire powder.

The fire started to spread and got under the tyres. “Once they lit up, she was all over,” said Mr Stirling. "I dropped the front run-throughs and then just started jumping as many cattle off [as possible]," he said.

One died on the crate and another had to be euthanased. "It is tough — it's really tough," Mr trailers have safely arrived in Alice Springs.

The cattle let off the burning trailer were tracked by helicopters the next morning and moved to a water point on a nearby station and will be collected at a later date.

Mr Stirling pointed to the poor condition of the road as the primary culprit for the loss of cattle and damage to his truck and said that regardless of how you prepare yourself for it by letting the tyres down to half the per cent of PSI, that it is still terrible.

For decades, truck drivers have been calling for maintenance of the Tanami Road.

Local companies in the Northern Territory told ABC Rural they were losing up to $10,000 a week to repairs.

The NT government is funding upgrades to the Tanami Road, with work underway to seal a further 60 kilometres of the road beyond the Yuendumu turn-off. There are reports that 150 kilometres of the Tanami Road is set to be sealed over the next two years.

NT Road Transport Association CEO Louise Bilato said the expansion of the Tanami gold mine meant there were a lot more trucks on the road.

The corrugations on the Tanami Road are very well known and this incident was not the first time Ms Bilato had heard of a bad road causing a fire in a truck.

Minister Alannah MacTiernan has faced calls to step down from her agriculture portfolio after saying that a foot and mouth disease outbreak would lower meat and dairy prices because of domestic oversupply.

The Minister has brushed of the calls for her to resign and said she made the comments to explain that a FMD outbreak wouldn’t close down the local industry.

“What we were responding to were claims that there wasn’t going to be any food on our shelves and we were concerned that would lead to panic buying,” she said. “I just want people to understand this; this is a serious threat, but it is one that we can manage and the state government was doing everything it could to stop an outbreak.”

Farming Groups have warned an outbreak in Australia would be catastrophic to the industry and would mean empty supermarket shelves.

WA Farmers Federation chief executive Trevor Whittington told Radio 6PR the brutal reality is if we get FMD outbreak in the southwest of the state, there’ll be no milk, no meat on the shelves within hours because the mad rush will be 10 times worse than on toilet paper during COVID-19.