Volunteer firefighters on Borneo are risking their lives to extinguish underground peat fires. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
The sky grows heavy in Borneo, though not with rain. The air, amber-hued and treacle-thick, is smudged under a blanket of smog that has spilled across international borders – to Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur. Down on the ground, smoke steams from the soil.
"It hits your nose straight away, your eyes burn – that's more or less what it's like," says Fahrin Ramadhianto, a 35-year-old volunteer firefighter. He has spent more than a month enveloped in this haze, breathing toxic millennia-old microparticles of carbon as he toils against a seemingly inextinguishable fire front. Using hand tools, carts and portable fire pumps, he and thousands of other volunteer firefighters – many of them indigenous Dayak or Banjar people – are up against an inferno that has carbonised some 200,000 hectares of forest and farmland across Indonesian Borneo since early July.
Underground and out of sight, giant subterranean peat fires continue to smoulder, choking the air with poisonous fumes.
"Once a fire becomes uncontrolled, it harms many people. Not just humans, but also animals and plants," says Dwi Sujatmoko. "If underground fire spreads and can no longer be controlled, the losses are enormous."
Indonesia is in the throes of a wildfire catastrophe. Amid a so-called "Super El Niño" that has supercharged local drought conditions, thousands of active fire hotspots are spreading and multiplying across the country, fuelling a transnational haze crisis that is the region's worst in more than a decade.
But what makes Borneo's fires particularly worrying is the fact that they are burning through one of the world's largest tropical peatland ecosystems. This 4.5-million-hectare swathe of forest and swamp, under normal conditions, serves as a valuable reservoir for ancient carbon. When these peatlands catch fire, they risk releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane into the atmosphere – a "pulse" of greenhouse gas emissions that has earned them the sobriquet of "carbon bomb".
"Peatlands are incredibly effective carbon stores because their waterlogged conditions slow decomposition, allowing carbon to accumulate underground for thousands of years," explains Dr Nisa Novita, a peatland researcher at Indonesian conservation NGO Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara (YKAN). "But this also means they can become a 'carbon bomb' when they are drained or burned, because that carbon can be rapidly released into the atmosphere."
In Kalimantan, peat deposits exceeding 20 metres in depth have been found. Such deep peat can harbour more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare – roughly equivalent to the annual CO₂ emissions of 4,800 cars. And when it burns, says Dr Nisa, that fossilised carbon can be released into the atmosphere "very rapidly".
Thousands of people across South East Asia are now feeling the effects of those emissions in their eyes, chests and throats. Across Indonesia as well as Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, air pollution indices have soared to "unhealthy" extremes - almost 75 times the World Health Organization's recommended level, in some cases – and hospital admissions have surged.
Between July and August, Indonesia's Health Ministry recorded over 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires. More than 12,000 of them were children under the age of five.
"Everybody who's living within that pollution cloud is breathing in the products of those smouldering peat fires," says Susan Page, a professor at the University of Leicester's school of geology and the environment, who's been researching peatlands in Asia for three decades. "They're breathing in carbon monoxide, which is toxic, and they're breathing in the very finely divided particulate matter... [which] can pass through the alveoli in the lungs into the bloodstream and cause further problems elsewhere in the body, including issues with the heart."
Nowhere are these health impacts being felt more acutely than at the coalface of the disaster: the fire front. Here, volunteer firefighters have been risking their lives and lungs to extinguish burning peatlands which are notoriously difficult to put out. Two volunteers in Central Kalimantan have died in recent days, reportedly after their health deteriorated from putting out fires. Cloaked in toxic haze that can burn years off a person's lifespan, volunteers have been digging ponds, canals and borewells through bone-dry peat in a desperate attempt to keep their hoses tapped. Some have been driving pipes into the earth, making ad hoc irrigation systems to combat subterranean fires. Others have been sleeping within a stone's throw of the frontline so they can battle the blazes through the night.