UN official says E. Kalimantan fires are 'big disaster'

JAKARTA (JP): At least 10,000 firefighters and significant international support would be needed to extinguish East Kalimantan's raging forest fires, according to United Nations officials who have described the situation as "a very, very big disaster".

A United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team said here yesterday the situation was so grave that tens of thousands of firefighters were needed to be mobilized along with air support through water bombing if efforts to put out the fires were to succeed.

Accompanying the UNDAC team, the UN resident coordinator in Indonesia, Ravi Rajan, said "at this point" Indonesia no longer had "all the resources that it needs" to deal with the fires despite its efforts so far.

"We (the United Nations) certainly cannot mobilize the tens of thousands of people needed, but we'll help by providing expertise to the Indonesian government, mobilizing international aid and helping those (donating countries) in dialogs with the Indonesian government on what it needs," he said.

The three member UNDAC team, however, did not give complete details of its findings yesterday, saying a full 20-page report would be presented in Geneva on Tuesday.

The team spent six days in East Kalimantan earlier this month, visiting fire sites around Balikpapan, Samarinda, Kutai National Park and the Bukit Soeharto forest reserve.

The UNDAC team was made up of Finnish natural disaster management expert Simon Wecksten, Swiss food security and refugee expert Henry-Franois Morahd and Gambian forestry specialist Max Bi-Mass Taal.

They were accompanied yesterday during a media briefing here by Rajan and UNDAC leader Erik Haegglund.

The fires have reportedly claimed at least 226,000 hectares of forest in East Kalimantan, incurring financial losses of more than Rp 4 trillion.

Haegglund said the UNDAC team was impressed with the perseverance of people on the ground in their efforts to put out the fires with extremely limited means.

The remoteness of scattered fire locations, shortage of water, lack of personnel and lack of water bombers were among the factors the UNDAC team said were hampering fire fighting efforts in the province.

Given the magnitude of the disaster and extreme dry weather, Mohrahd said the fires would most likely be extinguished by rain rather than by human efforts.

Mohrahd's colleague, Wecksten -- also an experienced firefighter -- said Indonesia, however, still needed the support of the international community in handling its current fire disaster.

Indonesia suffered from its worse ever forest fires last year with an estimated one million hectares of brush and forest in Sumatra and Kalimantan going up in smoke.

The fires caused heavy smog in areas as far away as neighboring Malaysia and Singapore.

Antara quoted an official with the Provincial Environmental Impact Management Agency, Awang Faouk Ishak, as saying yesterday that 700 rangers had arrived in East Kalimantan, thus increasing the number of firefighters -- including soldiers, students and residents -- to more than 2,000. (aan)