Jambi gears up for dry season forest fires

JAKARTA (JP): Authorities in the province of Jambi are on alert against the likelihood of forest fires as the dry season nears its peak.

"We don't want a repetition of the thick smog which blanketed Jambi last year," said Jambi Military Commander Col. Inf. Muchdi Purwo Pranjono.

The military must work with the people, he said, and prevent them from resorting to the traditional practice of burning the forest and brush to clear the land for farming or plantations.

Singapore was covered with a thick haze on Monday and Tuesday, believed to have come from forest fires in Indonesia. But before Indonesia was able to establish the precise origin of the smoke, a heavy downpour reportedly cleared the haze from the island nation yesterday.

Last year, Jambi was one of the provinces in Sumatra and Kalimantan where forest fires raged, sending smog over to Singapore and Malaysia.

The government established the National Coordination Team on Forest and Land Fire Management early this year. The team is chaired by the environment minister.

Lack of coordination left the forest fires virtually unattended to last year, bringing complaints from the two neighboring countries.

Following reports that Singapore was again covered in smoke on Monday, Surna Djajadiningrat, assistant to the environment minister, called for increased alertness in Jambi, Riau and West Kalimantan.

According to a member of the coordination team, those are the three areas in which higher temperatures have recently been identified in satellite data received by the meteorology and geophysics agency.

The latest smoke haze has alarmed Singaporeans, who experienced dangerous levels of the pollution between August to October last year.

Trans-border pollution is among the issues being discussed by senior environmental officials of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in a meeting currently underway in Bali. (anr)