Monsoon no match for invisible peat fires

Monsoon no match for invisible peat fires

The environmental catastrophe of Southeast Asia's forest
fires is far from over. Subterranean peat fires -- much harder to
detect and extinguish, but just as devastating -- could burn for
decades, as Oliver Burkeman in London reports.

LONDON: Indonesians may be breathing easier this week as the
first showers of the long-awaited wet season relieve the smog
that has choked much of Southeast Asia for two months, but an
insidious threat still lurks beneath the surface of their ravaged
land.

The forest fires that razed 1.7 million hectares (6,600 sq
miles or 17,000 sq km) of trees and vegetation, have been largely
extinguished. But in their wake, unseen and hard to detect, come
underground fires that Indonesia, and nearby states including
Malaysia, could be fighting for decades.

There are peat fires still burning in Indonesia that were
ignited 15 years ago, the year of the country's last serious
drought. Up to 10 feet (3m) below ground, the compacted,
carbonized predecessors of the forests above have smoldered
silently ever since.

Although many have been quenched, the job is far from
complete. But it is impossible to tell how far: satellite
monitoring systems can only detect "hot spots" above ground, and
firefighters are forced to rely on guesswork and local tip-offs
to identify the areas they must tackle.

Peat fires are a less immediate threat to life and property
than the recent surface fires that brought transport to a
standstill and left more than 40,000 Indonesians -- many more, in
Southeast Asia as a whole -- suffering from respiratory problems.
But they still bring smoke to the surface, and cause land and
trees to collapse. Most of the campus of the University of
Palangkaraya, the capital of central Kalimantan province, the
Indonesian segment of the island of Borneo, is built on peat.
And the fires contribute just as devastatingly to the greenhouse
effect, emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide.

"You don't see flames," says Yaha Madis, deputy fire chief of
the Malaysian state of Pahang on the shores of the South China
Sea. "You can't see the fires burning from the main road because
they are underground," he told a local newspaper. "You suddenly
see trees falling."

Another persistent risk -- which became reality during the
1982-1983 drought -- is that fire can spread from one forest to
another via peaty ground, setting fire to trees long after the
surface blazes have been thought to be extinguished.

Peat -- the first stage in the formation of coal -- consists
of the highly flammable, decomposing remains of surface
vegetation. "In its natural state, the peat would be waterlogged,
especially in the wet season," says Susan Page of Leicester
University in Britain, who until August was co-director of the
Kalimantan Peak Forest Research Project. "But in an extended dry
season, like this one, the water table drops and air can enter
the peat." Land drainage for logging and development serves to
dehydrate the peat still further, and deforested soil, exposed to
the sun, dries faster.

Associate Professor Ausafar Rahman, of Singapore's National
University, summed up the process in the Singapore-based Straits
Times: "It's like the smothered fire after a barbecue, with the
coal still simmering and emitting a lot of heat."

The only viable remedy is water: lots of it. Affected areas
can be flooded -- though on a small scale only -- and Malaysian
firefighters have recently used water-bombing planes to good
effect. But experiments with sand have met with little success,
and Dr. Page dismisses recent proposals to spread a blanket of
foam over the affected areas. "It's totally impractical, and the
costs would be beyond belief," she says.

Among the culprits is the El Nino climactic phenomenon which
brings widespread drought to Southeast Asia and unpredictable
weather patterns elsewhere. But Indonesia's rulers also have a
case to answer, in their ill-considered response to the country's
rice shortage.

Fertile paddy fields on the Indonesian island of Java once
helped bring President Soeharto a commendation from the United
Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization for his nation's self-
sufficiency. But as development projects have reduced the
Javanese land available for rice-growing, the government has been
forced to look elsewhere to protect the country from dependence
on exports. Hence, from 1995, the One Million Hectares project --
a program which sought to replace the lost fields with
alternative Indonesian land.

Much of it was peat, and the irrigation trenches which were
dug have led, in combination with the dry weather, to dangerously
dehydrated land. "Peat is not a substance on which you can grow
rice, unless you can keep water moving through it," says Page.

A traditional rice-growing technique employed in Indonesia by
the Bugi people, she adds, succeeded where the One Million
Hectares project failed, circulating the water and regulating the
minerals reaching the rice.

And the political obstacles may well be even harder to
surmount than the technical ones. President Soeharto has
apologized to neighboring states for the haze but has taken
little other discernible action, being more concerned with
Indonesia's haggling with the IMF and the aftershock of the Hong
Kong stock market crash.

As the Far Eastern Economic Review put it: "The strong winds
of market demand and the smoldering coals of collusion are likely
to keep the fires raging for many dry seasons to come."

Indonesia's efforts to recover from the recent devastation of
much of its land could be undermined by fires beneath the surface
for decades yet.

-- Observer News Service