Dozens of schools remained closed today for a second consecutive day in Indonesia due to forest fires, being fought by more than 48,000 firefighters, authorities announced.
The Southeast Asian country is experiencing the start of a long and intense dry season, worsened by the El Niño climate phenomenon. In eastern Java island, a fire in the Bromo Tengger Semeru national park, a major tourist attraction closed to visitors since Saturday, had already destroyed nearly 900 hectares by this morning.
“We are doing our best and mobilizing every possible resource (…) to extinguish and water the area,” local disaster management official Satriyo Nurseno told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
In West Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo that Indonesia shares with Malaysia and Brunei, authorities ordered school closures in Pontianak due to smoke that has enveloped the city. Public records show that Pontianak has tens of thousands of students in public schools.
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Children will study remotely while air quality remains poor, said local city officials, without specifying the exact number of schools affected. The national disaster management agency (BNPB) said more than 48,000 personnel have been deployed to fight the fires across six provinces.
According to the BMKG weather agency, Indonesia is expected to face a particularly difficult dry season this year, marked by a high risk of drought and fires, partly due to El Niño. With this natural phenomenon, which returns every two to seven years, surface waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean warm, causing substantial changes for months in global wind, pressure and precipitation patterns.
More than 107,000 hectares of forest have burned across Indonesia since the start of the year.
