Photo: Collected
Indonesia is making ‘all kinds of’ efforts to control devastating forest fires. Although dozens of aircraft and thousands of personnel have been deployed to put out the fires, it is struggling to cope with the situation. A senior official of the country said this on Monday.
Firefighters have been battling fires on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra for several weeks. Smoke from the fires has shrouded different areas of Indonesia and parts of neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore in toxic haze.
News agency AFP reported this from Pontianak, Indonesia.
Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya said the government has deployed 64 aircraft and 54,000 personnel on the two islands since last month to douse the fires with water.
He said, ‘From the air to the ground – all forces are working. Everything is being done to put out the fires, reduce the impact of the smoke and, most importantly, protect people from the threat of forest and land fires.’
He further said, ‘The vast size of the area and the complex condition of the peatland are creating major problems in tackling forest and land fires in different regions.’
Daniel Senior, spokesperson for the disaster management agency of West Kalimantan, one of the worst-affected areas, said the situation has become more difficult as fires continue to burn at different depths of the local peat soil.
He said, ‘Another problem is that water sources are limited for the forces working on the ground. Usually, water sources decline in fire-affected areas and at some point dry up completely.’
Last week, several indigenous and civil society organisations of West Kalimantan filed a joint lawsuit against the government, alleging failure to prevent the fires.
In a statement, the organisations’ lawyer Glorio Sanen said, ‘This is not a new disaster, it happens every year. The repeated recurrence of the same incident itself proves that the defendants knew about the disaster arising from forest and land fires and its potential smoke-related catastrophe.’
About 350 members of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces arrived in West Kalimantan this month to assist in the firefighting work.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has also said he is ready to accept assistance from Malaysia.
In Indonesia, forest fires regularly occur in the dry season, usually from July to October.
However, the intensity of the fires is greater this year. Added to this is the fear of the strongest El Nino conditions since comparable records began four decades ago.
Experts are also blaming climate change, decades of deforestation and the practice of clearing land with fire for this. Because of these, the characteristics of land that is naturally fire-resistant have changed.
According to official data, more than 202,000 hectares of land burned across Indonesia from January to July.
By the Nusantara Atlas project’s count, about 300,000 hectares of land burned during the same period. Adding the August figures, the total affected area stands at about 896,000 hectares, it said.
