Forest fires may be manmade, says official

Forest fires may be manmade, says official

JAKARTA (JP): Satellite images and aerial photos suggest the
fresh forest fires in East Kalimantan may have been started
intentionally, a government official said yesterday.

The director for environment damage control at the
Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedal), Yon Artiono
Arba'i, said he would dispatch a team to the province tomorrow to
investigate.

"If the allegation is true, we will refer the case to the
police for further investigation," Yon told The Jakarta Post.

"We are worried that unless we deal with it quickly, there
will be a recurrence of natural disasters on the scale of 1982 or
1997," he said.

He was referring to the 1982-1983 forest fires in which around
1.7 million hectares of forest in East Kalimantan were ravaged.
There has been no official estimate of losses wrought by the 1997
blazes, but some have put the affected area at more than one
million hectares.

Yon said the U.S.'s National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) satellite images showed the fires were in
plantation and logging companies' concessions.

"But we can't name the alleged culprits for the time being
until we have sufficient evidence," he said.

Yon added that the investigation team from the Coordinating
Team for Fighting Forest and Land Fires would be in the province
for three days to undertake field check.

The coordinating team was set up by President Soeharto last
year. It is chaired by State Minister of Environment Sarwono
Kusumaatmadja, assisted by Secretary of Development Operations
Lt. Gen. AM Hendropriyono.

National disaster

Last year, forest and brush fires raged in many parts of
Kalimantan and Sumatra, spreading smog as far as Malaysia and
Singapore for almost four months.

It was declared a national disaster because it put the lives
of millions of people in danger. The danger eased in November
with the start of the rainy season.

However, the rain that has brought some respite has proved
insufficient due to the El Nio weather phenomenon, whose effects
are believed worse in the last six months than ever before this
century.

East Kalimantan has been asked to be on "full alert" because
of the imminent threat of the forest fires that returned last
week.

The smoke from the latest forest fires, reported to be
smoldering on plantations and logging concessions near the Bukit
Soeharto forest reserve in the Kutai regency, disrupted flights
to and from airports in the province last week and on Sunday.
(aan)