Jakarta Globe 28 Mar 14;
Jakarta. The haze has returned to Indonesia’s troubled Riau province as the region’s forests once again burned.
“There are [forests] burning again,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman of National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB), told the state-run Antara News Agency on Friday. “The fires were set by individuals and groups, on the land and the forest. The dry season, combined with the peatland, makes it so easy to burn [the forests].”
The number of hotspots detected in Riau dropped to zero earlier this month before spiking to 68 on Wednesday, the BNPB said. By Friday that number had skyrocketed to 777 hotspots detected across the province, with the largest concentrations in the districts of Bengkalis and Pelalawan.
In Hulu Pulau Village, in Bengkalis, the brushfires nearly reached a housing complex as residents struggled to keep the flames at bay. The fires already tore through some 1,000 hectares of plantation land owned by local farmers, destroying crops, by Friday, according to reports in the Indonesian news portal Tempo.co.
“It’s enough having our plantation, which is our source of income, charred,” Harianto, a local farmer, told Tempo. “But don’t let our village burn too.”
Air quality dropped to dangerous levels in Duri, Bengkalis, Siak and Rokan Hilir — the site of the heaviest fires earlier this year. In Rokan Hilir, still the heaviest-hit district in Riau, air quality dropped to a hazardous 344 on the Pollutant Standards Index.
“The air quality in some regions has been declining,” Sutopo remarked.
The BNPB has asked the Indonesian Military (TNI) to bolster patrols at night to prevent any additional burning by residents. Provinces in Sumatra and Kalimantan routinely suffer from annual forest fires as the local dry season hits its peak. The fires, many of which are set by small-scale farmers, are the result of traditional slash-and-burn land clearing techniques.
Police, eager to head off another diplomatic mess like last year’s transnational haze debacle, have been conducting sweeps of the area, arresting those accused of setting the blaze. Another 60 cases had resulted in arrests by Thursday, Riau Police chief Brig. Gen. Condro Kirono told Antara.
In total 102 people had been arrested over this year’s forest fires. A single company, National Sago Prima — a subsidiary of Sampoerna Agro — has been implicated in the fires.
