Bush fires in Indonesia which have caused the blanket of smog over vast parts of Southeast Asia have increased in the past week despite efforts by international teams of firefighters, officials said yesterday. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said fires were burning in or have already devastated 750,000 hectares (1.88 million acres) of land, up from 500,000600,000 hectares last week.
"It's an ecological nightmare," said WWF's Indonesia representative, Mr Agus Purnomo. "It's a combination of a man-made and a natural disaster."
Indonesia's forestry ministry, which has asked 176 plantation companies to explain the reason for fires in areas under their control, said only 18 had replied by yesterday , the deadline.
The smog, which has covered Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, parts of the Philippines and Thailand, spread to the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, yesterday as wind patterns changed and new areas on the main island of Java caught fire because of an extended drought, officials said.
But the head of the Indonesian meteorology service gave some hope, saying changing winds would soon chase away much of the smog. "There has been a change in wind pattern noticed in the past three days and this will soon take the smoke away from our neighbours," Sri Diharto said.
Winds over Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, another major source of smoke, will send smog towards the Strait of Karimata and the South China Sea, he added.
Officials have said only intense rains can douse the flames on the hundreds of thousands of hectares of bushland and underlying peat and lignite coal. The efforts of over 10,000 firefighters from Malaysia and Indonesia, backed by experts from France, are laudable but not enough, they said.
Scattered rain has been reported in northern Sumatra, west Kalimantan and Sulawesi. But one Indonesian official said the annual monsoon rains were likely to be delayed until late October or early November in parts of the archipelago south of the equator because of the El Nino weather pattern. This is a warming of Pacific Ocean waters off South America.