Friday, October 06, 2006
evitable haze
News courtesy of CNA... ...
Indonesia dousing fires causing haze: forestry official
Posted: 06 October 2006 1745 hrs
JAKARTA: Hundreds of firefighters in Indonesian Borneo, aided by police and volunteers, were dousing illegal forest fires causing acrid haze blanketing western parts of the island, officials said.
The billowing, polluting smoke from the fires, ignited annually to clear land, has already forced schools to shut, disrupted regional travel and drifted thousands of kilometres across the Pacific.
Forestry ministry spokesman Masyud, who uses one name, said at least 200 firefighters were trying to contain fires around the West Kalimantan provincial capital, Pontianak.
"They are working round the clock," Masyud told AFP, adding that they were being assisted by "hundreds of local policemen and civilian volunteers."
He insisted that most of the fires -- often lit by Indonesians in rural areas to prepare land for the planting season -- were raging outside state-controlled forests.
"Fires within the state-owned forest areas are less worse compared to ground fires outside those areas. The problem is classic, and that is, the people's long-standing culture of slash-and-burn before planting season," he said.
"We are absolutely doing our best to tackle this issue," he added.
Satellite images taken over Indonesian Borneo on Wednesday showed that the number of hotspots -- large areas with high temperatures indicating fires --
stood at 713.
In Pontianak, visibility was a lowly 100 meters (109 yards) early Friday and just 500 metres by midday, said Sutowo Aji, an official with the meteorological agency at Pontianak's Supadio airport.
He said the smoke had delayed at least two flights early in the morning.
The haze also stung residents' eyes and caused breathing problems, said Habiri, an official with Pontianak's forestry agency.
"This is a thick smoke. There has been hardly any sunshine since this morning," said Habiri.
The annual burning causes a haze that typically smothers parts of Malaysia,
Singapore and Thailand along with Indonesia itself.
The Indonesian government has outlawed land-clearing by fire but weak
enforcement means the ban is largely ignored.
The haze sure is acrid. Whether they are uneducated or non-environmentally friendly, the nomads had made a regional phenomenon. All beacause of their tradition of "slash and burn before the planting season". This excuse is inadmissible as such event has been present a long time ago."We are absolutely doing our best to tackle this issue" as said by a representative of their government. However, it's the same impuissant government that made the tackling futile. Well, everyone should know how their law enforcers work. All we can do is to suffer from their negligence... ...and I can sense that the cycle will repeats itself yet again!
DSZeng scribbled this at 8:54 PM
