Fires rage as haze thickens in Borneo
Pastor Dale Morgan
Fires rage as haze thickens in Borneo*
JAKARTA, Sept 8 (AFP) Sep 08, 2006
At least eight million hectares across Indonesia have been damaged by
forest fires in the last month, officials said Friday as dozens of
uncontrolled blazes continued on Borneo island.
A forestry ministry official admitted that forest and ground fires had
destroyed millions of hectares of land in Indonesia last month, with a
satellite system detecting 52,599 hotspots during August.
"All those many hotspots caused 8,476 hectares of forests to burn," Koes
Saparjadi, an assistant to the forestry minister, said at a conference
in central Java Friday.
He added that around 60 percent of the burnt land was farming land, and
the remainder was forest.
Illegal burn-offs caused more damage to Indonesia's environment than
rampant illegal logging said Saparjadi.
"This destruction of the forests is much worse than illegal logging.
Because the fires cause several species of plants to be annihilated," he
said.
Separately in Palangkaraya, the provincial capital of Central Kalimantan
on Indonesian Borneo, around 60 firefighters were struggling to put out
blazes, said an official.
"The fires are vast, every day they spread further," said Ahmad Yani, a
coordinator of the teams tackling the infernos.
Elsewhere dozens of firefighters were trying to extinguish fires in
several districts, including ground fires in the Pulang Pisau area which
Yani said had been burning since last week ago.
Haze from the fires in Central Kalimantan reduced visibility to less
than 500 metres, threatening to interrupt air traffic, said an official
from the Palangkaraya's meteorological agency.
"Now visibility is down to 500 metres, planes can still take off but we
will have to see later," said the official called Hidayat.
Burning to clear land for crops, a common practice in Indonesia and some
parts of Malaysia, causes an annual haze that smothers parts of
Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand as well as Indonesia itself.
Indonesia's neighbours have urged Jakarta to prevent the forest clearing
burn-offs, warning that it is hurting business and putting off tourists.
The Indonesian government has outlawed land-clearing by fire but weak
enforcement means the ban is largely ignored.