Jakarta – Dense haze, from forest and brush fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, forced the temporary closure of its most important airport yesterday, officials said.
Poor visibility of less than 700 metres at Medan city's Polonia airport forced the suspension of all flights for four hours early in the day, an airport official said.
"The airport was temporarily shut down from 9 am and it was just re-opened at around 1 pm," Mr Maas Siregar, an official with Polonia's meteorology and geophysics unit, told AFP. "We resumed activity here after the visibility level reached 1,500 meters," Mr Siregar added.
The state Antara news agency said at least five domestic flights, scheduled to land at Polonia in the morning, were delayed by the closure. A Mandala airline flight had to be re-routed to Penang International Airport in neighbouring Malaysia, Antara said, adding that the smoke had caused fear and anger among hundreds of would-be passengers at Polonia.
Illegal land clearing by slash-and-burn methods in Sumatra's jungle-clad province of Riau is believed to be the cause of the haze, Mr Riyadi Usman, an environment official from Pekanbaru, told AFP on Monday.
Mr Usman – who heads the environmental damage department of the Regional Environmental Impact Management Office – said the smoky haze had covered most of Riau province on Sumatra over the past three mornings. "Our measuring equipment shows that the air over Pekanbaru in the past two or three days has reached the "unhealthy' level in the mornings," Mr Usman said.
He said that his office, local forestry officials and the provincial authorities were all co-ordinating efforts to prevent a repeat of the thick haze that blanketed the region – extending as far as Malaysia and Singapore – in 1997 and to a lesser extent in early 1998. The choking haze of 1997 remained for several months, causing extensive health and traffic problems in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.
Meanwhile, the Riau provincial administration, angered by the continuing forest fires, is demanding that Jakarta revoke for good the permits of errant companies responsible for the fires.