Residents gasp for air in smoky Indonesian Borneo
Date: 23-Aug-02
Country: INDONESIA
Respiratory and health problems were mounting, schools were closing and some airline flights were delayed in Indonesian areas of Borneo island yesterday as smoke pollution from forest fires worsened.
"The smoke is becoming thicker and thicker every day. We hardly can breathe," said Warsadi, a resident in the West Kalimantan provincial capital Pontianak.
The smoke has pushed air quality to hazardous levels in at least two of Indonesia's four provinces in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo.
A hospital official in Pontianak - 750 km (465 miles) north of Jakarta - said the number of new respiratory cases was running at 30 people a day, with children hardest hit by those and haze-related eye problems.
Clean water was also becoming harder to find.
Water is limited during the dry season in Kalimantan and now smoke has polluted what is left, triggering an outbreak of diarrhoea.
"In one hospital alone, we have a total of 206 people suffering diarrhoea. We had to set aside a room for an unexpected rise of patients," Muhay Menon, head of information at Dr Sudarso hospital in Pontianak, told Reuters by telephone.
SCHOOLS CLOSED
Antara national news agency reported schools across Kalimantan sent children home and banned outdoor activities.
Flights had been delayed up to four hours, and airports in Pontianak and the Central Kalimantan capital of Palangkaraya have asked all morning flights to be rescheduled because air quality yesterday was still above hazardous levels.
Officials said most of the smoke came from plantations that clear their land using slash-and-burn practices.
"Around 63 percent of the fires are in burning plantations and other areas, and the rest are from forest fires," Tribowo, forest fire control chief at the forestry ministry, told Reuters from a fire scene in Central Kalimantan.
The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) agreed in June to cooperate in implementing measures to prevent fires, most of which originate in Indonesia and stem from land clearing at major plantations and also from slash-and-burn small farmers.
Haze from major fires on Borneo and the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 1997 and 1998 cost regional economies $9 billion in damage to farming, transport and tourism.
Weather satellites show hundreds of "hot spots" indicating fires in Sumatra this dry season, but so far they have not caused problems as serious as those in Borneo. The Sumatra fires were the source of much of the air pollution that hit neighbouring Singapore and peninsular Malaysia in 1997 and 1998.
MALAYSIAN PLEA
Malaysia's environment minister had sent a letter to his Indonesian counterpart asking Jakarta to take more action to deal with the fires. Malaysia has two states on Borneo, also the site of the small independent country of Brunei.
Environmentalists said the government should spare no effort in dealing with the problems.
"This is an environmental crime," said Longgena Ginting from Walhi, Indonesia's leading environmental group.
"We need to enforce legislation to control open burning until (there is) zero burning, no more forest conversion, and control of plantation companies," which he said were mostly foreign-owned.