Marianne Kearney, Riau – Where there's smoke there is fire but in Riau province, central Sumatra, finding the source of the fire and who started it is not always easy.

While high technology satellite maps show the province had 137 hotspots on Friday, and show roughly where the bulk of the hotspots are located, they cannot pinpoint whether the fires are on plantation land, small farms or community-owned land.

And while environmental agencies and the Department of Forestry suspect fires are started by the plantation companies to clear new land, companies cannot be forced to fight the fires on their land if nobody can prove the fires are indeed on their land.

Because of the inaccuracy of the mapping system, which only indicates fire locations with a three kilometre degree of error, Riau's central Department of Forestry office and the environmental monitoring agency do not know exactly where these fires are burning or who caused them.

To pinpoint the fire locations requires a helicopter – which is a 10-hour flight away in Jakarta and may not arrive until Tuesday, almost a week after the first batch of fires were detected. The Head of the Department of Forestry, Mr Darminto, said he was still waiting for confirmation from Jakarta that a helicopter would be sent on Tuesday.

It is also unclear as to who should be fighting the fires. Mr Aries Suwandi, from the Department of Forestry says it is the responsibility of the regional environmental agency to advise whether there are enough fires to warrant sending out a team of fire investigators and fighters. However, if the fires are located on company land it is the responsibility of the Department of Estate Crops, which however has no means of checking where and whether a company is responsible for the fires.

Mr Fauzi, the head of the Department of Estate Crops, said: "From the aerial hot spots we're not sure if the fires are on company land or on small farmers' land." Instead they rely on the honesty of the companies to promise they will extinguish the fires. "We met 45 companies on Saturday and we're asking them to check if the fires are on their property," said Mr Fauzi.

However both an environmental organisation and senior official from the environmental monitoring agency say that the region has too little manpower and equipment to extinguish fires when dozens of fires are burning at once.

Even the head of the Riau's environmental monitoring agency, Mr Said Abdullah Rachman, admitted that both the Department of Forestry's specialist fire police nor the local police are equipped to fight the fires. He said: "The forestry police just have to ask for help from the people." The Department of Forestry's inventory of trained fire fighters lists 100 boy scouts and 100 school students.

But if the fire fighters are available, they are often failed by their equipment, say environmental groups as a fire response this morning proved. Mr Mohamad Iksahn, a security guard on a paper and pulp plantation two hours out of Pekanbaru says he was asked to fight a fire on the plantation but couldn't as they didn't have a vehicle to travel to the fire scene, and the one water truck available didn't work. He says he is still not sure if the fire was extinguished.