Rains Clear Smog In Sumatra, But It May Be Back
8/11/99
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Title: Rains Clear Smog In Sumatra, But It May Be Back
Source: Reuters Limted
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 11, 1999
Byline: Lewa Pardomuan
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Rain over Indonesia's Sumatra island Wednesday
cleared smog from fires in Riau province, allowing residents to see a
clear, blue sky for the first time since last week, government
officials said.
"The rain has washed away the smog. The sky is clear today," said an
official at state-run environmental impact assessment agency in the
Riau provincial capital of Pekanbaru, about 560 miles northwest of
Jakarta.
But experts at a fire detection project elsewhere in Sumatra warned
that this might be a temporary respite and more fires and smoke were
likely if dry weather returned.
The area around Pekanbaru was the worst affected by the smog, which
has also drifted east to Singapore and peninsular Malaysia.
"The weather is much better today. People do not have to wear masks,"
another official said.
Sumatra residents were forced to wear masks last week to keep out the
choking smog from forest fires, which also hit Kalimantan, the
Indonesian side of Borneo island.
Experts say they have largely been caused by plantation firms trying
to clear forest land, although small farmers using slash and burn
agriculture have also been blamed.
A top official at an EU-funded satellite fire detection project said
the rain almost certainly did not mean the problem was finished for
this year.
"It means it is temporarily going away," said Rod Bowen, project
leader of the Forest Fires Prevention and Control Project in
Palembang city.
"As soon as the weather gets dry the burning will resume in Riau.
That is the history over the past two or three years in Riau. They
tend to burn at every opportunity.
"It will almost certainly return if there is another dry period and
the wind drops a bit."
Experts have predicted the fires and smog could stay for two to three
months.
The fires have sent a pall of smog to Singapore and peninsular
Malaysia, raising concerns about a repeat of the thick smog which
engulfed the region in 1997 and hit tourism.
The fires of 1997 were widely blamed on the drought induced by the El
Nino weather pattern. But experts said El Nino, which is due to
return next year, could not be blamed for the fire this time and in
stark contrast many parts of Asia suffered floods.
An official at Indonesia's directorate-general of forest protection
in Bogor, about 40 miles south of Jakarta, said satellite images
showed that 15 hot spots were recorded Tuesday. Some 200 were
detected last week.
But the official added that the decline might be partly caused by
cloud cover hampering satellite imagery. Each hotspot represents an
area of fire measuring at least one square kilometer.
The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) said it
had brought forward by two months a meeting to tackle the smog. ASEAN
ministers had originally agreed they would next meet in Singapore in
October.
Indonesian President B.J. Habibie last Monday called for action to
stop the forest fires and warned of an environmental disaster
if the problem was left unchecked.