Jambi gears up for dry season forest fires

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)