Water bomber readied to fight forest fires

JAKARTA (JP): The government is to dispatch a Pilatus fire bomber to East Kalimantan to fight the spreading forest fires there, a provincial official said yesterday.

"The National Disaster Management Coordinating Board will send the water bomber this Friday to help fight the fires," said Deputy Governor Suwarna Abdul Fatah, as quoted by Antara.

He said 1,335 hectares of land and forest in the province have caught fire in the last few weeks, of which 1,270 hectares is in the Kutai National Park.

The ensuing smog has forced several flights from and to the province's two main airports, Sepinggan Airport in Balikpapan and Temindung Airport in Samarinda, to be delayed over the past few days.

Temindung Airport was closed for several hours yesterday morning because visibility was reduced to only 1,500 meters, far below the normal visibility of 6,000 meters.

The delayed aircraft were those plying the Samarinda-Merak, Samarinda-Data Dawai, and Samarinda-Tarakan routes. Flights resumed at 9.45 a.m. after the haze cleared, Antara said.

"We are worried that the 1997 forest fires might recur," Temindung Airport manager Ratno said.

Yesterday, satellite imaging by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recorded 40 hot spots in the province, 18 of which were thought to have caused the haze, the news agency said.

The Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedal) here suspects the recent fires, many in plantation and logging concessions were man-made.

Last year, forest and brush fires, mainly on Kalimantan and Sumatra islands and blamed on slash-and-burn farmers and plantation companies, spread choking smog over huge tracts of Southeast Asia for weeks from mid-1997, triggering health alarms in neighboring countries.

The worst of the smog came from burning peat land, made drier by the drought induced by the El Nino phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean which affects global weather patterns. (aan)