Had Extinguished Due To Rain, Another Fire Occurred In Ketampang, West Kalimantan

Illustration of rain fires (ANTARA)

KETAPANG - A forest and land fire (karhutla) has hit again in Ketapang Regency, West Kalimantan, to be precise in Pesaguan Village and New Hope in Matan Hilir Subdistrict. The fire began to occur on Tuesday. "The forest and land fires in Ketapang have occurred again. Until now, the BPBD ground patrol team and the Ketapang TNI/Polri joint team are still extinguishing," said Head of the West Kalimantan BPBD Disaster Information Task Force, Daniel, Tuesday, August 29. Daniel revealed that the forest and land fires in Ketapang were caused by hot weather that had hit again in recent days. Previously, forest and land fires in West Kalimantan had been extinguished due to heavy rain. "Even though it was raining, we urge and ask to keep the environment and gardens from burning," said Daniel. He explained, typical peatland fires occurred in the ground that made it difficult to extinguish. The fire was not completely extinguished, because it was easily re-emerged by dry weather with strong winds. "Let's jointly prevent and anticipate the triggering of land fires so that smoke fog does not occur in Ketapang," he said. Based on BMKG data, in Ketapang Regency there were 190 hotspots last week. Meanwhile, BPBD is also still calculating and data on the area of the burning land. In addition to ground operations, the blackout of forest fires was also carried out through air operations. MI-8 RA-24663 helicopters were deployed to carry out water bombing. At least 100,000 liters of water have been watered to the forest and land fires.

On the other hand, the control of forest and land fires also relies on weather modification technology (TMC). TMC Sorti 2 was carried out in Ketapang sky along with other southern parts of West Kalimantan, namely Kubu Raya, North Kayong, Melawi and Sintang. This TMC, using the Cassa 212 A-2104 aircraft with 800 kilograms of material. This is done to trigger artificial rain to facilitate the extinguishing of the fire.