01 October 2017
JAKARTA, NETRALNEWS.COM – Director of Forest and Land Fire Control, Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK) Raffles B Panjaitan said the rainfall forecasts in several regions in Indonesia did not reduce the efforts to prevent and suppress forest and land fires (karhutla) by the KLHK Karhutla Control Brigade, Manggala Agni.
Raffles said that all the heads of Manggala Agni’s operational areas were ordered to continue monitoring, and direct checking (groundcheck) on hotspot monitoring results. Groundcheck is the first step in preventing fires at the location of hotspots. Through groundcheck, it can be determined whether the location is really on fire or not.
“If a fire is found, the groundcheck team will immediately report to the headquarters of operational areas to immediately follow up the fire suppression efforts, so the fire can be contained,” Raffles said, as quoted from the page of PPID KLHK, Sunday (10/1/2017).
Raffles said, other prevention efforts carried out is counseling to prevent people from opening land by burning.
Until September 30, 2017, NOAA Satellite monitoring recorded number of hotspots at 2,320 points in all parts of Indonesia. In the same period in 2016, the number of hotspots were 3,773 points, so there is a decrease of 31.27 percent.
TERRA-AQUA (NASA) satellite monitoring shows a lower number of hotspots at12 points, with 1,705 locations as of September 30. This number decreased by 51.09 percent compared to 2016’s figure of 3,486 locations.