Indonesia faces challenging problems to quell ongoing forest fires

Indonesia is facing challenging problems in dealing with the annual forest fire issue as it is related to perilous attitude of people living around the forest and plantations.

A senior official said 99 percent of fires in the forest were incited by intentional torching, conducted both in rain and dry seasons.

"During February to July, the hotspots were even higher than in the previous years. It means that the torching was also conducted in rainy season," Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesperson of National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) said in his office here on Wednesday, explaining the ongoing forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan provinces whose haze has disrupted activities in several cities, spreading to neighboring countries of Singapore and Malaysia.

Sutopo added that while the nation's largest forest fire in 1997 was ultimately contributed by the El Nino natural phenomenon, "now 99 percent of forest fires were caused by intentional torching, (which)makes the fire razes on and hard to be controlled. "

"This nightmare may continue until peak of dry season estimated in October," Sutopo said.

Citing satellite monitor data, Sutopo added that the hotspots in Sumatra and Kalimantan has been sprawling high, as in Sept. 13 they were detected at 351 locations, but two days later the hotspots in two islands have expanded high to 1,644 locations.

Provinces affected by forest fires include South Sumatra, Riau, Bangka Belitung, Jambi, Lampung, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan and South Kalimantan.

BNPB has dispatched seven water bomber helicopters to extinguish fires in forests in those provinces. The agency also reported that Singapore and part of Malaysia have also been affected by the haze, raising air pollution index to moderate level.

Sutopo added that problems faced by the BNPB to quell the fires in the forest include outnumbered aircraft to bomb water in the affected areas, unfriendly atmosphere and terrain to access the fires locations.

He said that the water bombing efforts require fixed wing planes to make artificial rain, but somehow those planes were not available at the moment.

Water bombing or massive amount of water from heavy rain would be the most effective way to extinguish the ongoing forest fire as most of areas razed by fire were peatland.