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