Indonesia: Six Hotspots Remain, Environment Ministry Accelerates Fire Extinguishing Process

NetralNews 4 Oct 17;

JAKARTA, NETRALNEWS.COM - Results of monitoring based on NOAA satellite on October 3 at 8 pm there were six hotspots in forest and land fires prone areas in Bangka Belitung, East Java, Central Kalimantan, South Kalimantan and South Sulawesi (10/03/2017). While based on TERRA AQUA (NASA) with 80 percent confidence level there are seven hotspots, namely in South Sumatera one point, Riau two points, South Sulawesi one point, and East Nusa Tenggara three points.

Director of Forest and Land Fire Control of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry Raffles B Panjaitan said that it makes the Forest and Land Fires Command Post Control Team immediately work to speed up the extinguishing process by moving as early as possible in the field, both from the levels of district, provincial, local government and patrol conducted by Manggala Agni Fire Brigade from Regional Operations.

"This command post collects information about the weather, the hotspot condition, the occurrence of forest and land fires that occurred in its working area for subsequent coordination and reporting in stages and then followed up as soon as possible", said Raffles B Panjaitan, as quoted from website of Ministry of Environment, Wednesday (10/04).

Until last night (10/03), according to monitoring by post from NOAA Satellite there were 2,328 points of hotspots throughout Indonesia. Meanwhile in the same period in 2016, the number of hotspots recorded as many as 3,707 spots. There is a decrease in the number of hotspots by 1,079 points or 31.67 percent.

Meanwhile, the TERRA-AQUA satellite (NASA) noted there are 1,717 hotspots. This number decreased by 1,782 points (50.90 percent), compared to 2016 in the same period, which was 3,497 points.