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)