The haze is coming back again this year with a vengeance. Just within a span of 12 hours from 1 am to 1 pm today, the 1-hour PM2.5 reading has shot up from a low of 6 to 198 !! The haze had already been making its presence felt for the last few nights as I could smell burning wood in the early hours of the morning.
When Asia was in the midst of the Asia Financial crisis in the late nineties, no one had a clue as to how bad the situation was. I remembered playing golf in 1997 and at the tee off point, I could see little bits of ash floating down on us. Given the financial meltdown then, no one had the bandwidth to pay much attention to air quality.
A few years ago in 2013, the haze got so bad that the PM2.5 reading exceeded 400!!! Even the interiors of the shopping malls looked blurry and acrid smoke was choking shoppers. They even had to seal off the main entrances with thick plastic sheets to try to prevent the smog from entering the mall.
Indonesia is the main culprit but yet their politicians leave much to be desired, periodically shooting off stupid remarks while the rest of South East Asia suffocates. Deforestation is the main reason for the haze as more and more peatlands were drained over the years. Peat, a mixture of partially decomposing vegetation in a water-saturated environment, becomes highly combustible when dry, like charcoal. Once ignited, the burning is almost impossible to stop as it spreads underground and releases toxic CO2 gases for months. President Jokowi had started to mobilize troops last year to create canals to wet the peatlands again, in an effort to stop the haze. He honestly stated that this problem might take more than 3 years to resolve.
Time to take out the air filters and ionizers from the storerooms again. Shops will run out of stock soon and face mask prices will rise. Big sigh…
Leave a Reply