BNPB Prioritizes Land Operations Handling Forest And Land Fires Impact Of El Nino

JAKARTA - The National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) prioritizes land operations to deal with forest and land fires (karhutla) which are also the impact of the El Nino phenomenon in Indonesia.

Head of BNPB Lt. Gen. Suharyanto said Indonesia had a bad record of handling forest and land fires in 2015 and 2019, so it should not be repeated.

Mitigation is also devoted to farmers in six provinces according to Presidential Instruction Number 3 of 2020, namely South Sumatra, Riau, Jambi, West Kalimantan, South Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan.

"In dealing with forest and land fires, what is important is land operations. So these ground troops have been alerted again, considering that in the last three years the relative forest fires and land fires have been relatively small. Then also the equipment, which may have been old for three years, which is relatively not widely used, is now reactivated," said Suharyanto as quoted by ANTARA, Monday, July 31.

Suharyanto said, if the forest and land fires are getting bigger and cannot be overcome with land operations, then BNPB prepares the last step, namely with water bombing helicopters.

BNPB, in this case, has provided 31 units of water bombing helicopters on standby in six provinces focusing on handling forest and land fires, to reach areas that cannot be reached by land operations.

He stressed the water bombing heli operation was the last option if ground extinguishing operations were not possible, as air outage operations cost a lot of money.

"We are also to monitor the occurrence of forest and land fires integrating all applications owned by ministries/agencies, both from the TNI, Polri, local governments, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the Republic of Indonesia, BNPB, and BMKG," said Suharyanto.

Suharyanto emphasized that the task of extinguishing forest and land fires is not only a main task for BNPB, but it is a common task if forest and land fires and drought occur to spread outside the six priority provinces.