Riau residents wake up to a blue sky after rain

JAKARTA (JP): People in Pekanbaru, the provincial capital of Riau, celebrated a haze-free, sunny day yesterday after overnight heavy rain.

Smoke continued to hang over the town, but it did not affect morning visibility and flights at Simpang Tiga Airport returned to normal.

Two hours of rain came as a surprise to the city as Indonesia is in the midst of a prolonged dry season.

Some people said the rain refilled their wells which had dried up in the past month, while flooding was reported in the downtown area.

Forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan, the Indonesian half of Borneo island, have contributed to the haze in the past two months. Nearby airports have been intermittently closed due to low visibility.

The National Aviation and Aeronautical Institute has identified some 500 hot spots across the country detected by satellites since May.

President Soeharto banned Tuesday the use of fire to clear land for cultivation.

A Reuters reporter who toured South Sumatra Tuesday saw a series of uncontrolled scrub fires, some as high as five meters, dotted across the province, which lies across the Strait of Malacca from the Malay peninsula.

Singapore and Malaysia have issued health warnings to citizens about the dangerously high level of smoke pollution.

Malaysia has called the pollution a national disaster and launched cloud seeding operations to induce rain and clear the air.

Kuala Lumpur woke to blue skies for the first time in eight days yesterday, but officials conceded that Mother Nature was partly responsible for the good weather.

Deputy director general of the Malaysian meteorological department, Chong Ah Look, said visibility had improved by seven kilometers in most areas in Kuala Lumpur from about two kilometers two days earlier.

"The cloud seeding operation has been quite successful in expediting rainfall to alleviate the haze, although a natural downpour late Tuesday also helped ease the situation," Chong told AFP.

The department launched the eight-day exercise Monday to relieve Kuala Lumpur from the smothering haze which is blamed on forest fires in Sumatra.

While Malaysia has previously seeded clouds to boost water supplies during the intermonsoon season from September to November, it is the first time it has been employed to clear the smoke.

Chong acknowledged the program was merely "temporary relief" to clear the smoke. "But even temporary measures may be useful," he said, rejecting criticism that the 50,000 ringgit (US$17,000) exercise was a waste of taxpayers' money.

Haze particles caused by forest burning in Indonesia highlighted the local air pollution problem, caused mainly by the country's 7.2 million cars and millions of motorcycles, he said.

"We need to remove the sources of pollution -- from forest fires in Indonesia to local sources such as open burning and vehicles," he said.

Chong said a possible change in wind direction toward the east would further reduce the smoke, although it was still too early to tell. (amd)