Indonesia holiday travel hit as haze shuts airports

Palembang (Indonesia), Oct 23: Airports on Indonesia's Sumatra island were shut or operating reduced services today after rains failed to clear smoke from forest fires that cut visibility to just 200 metres, officials said.

The haze has piled on extra misery for travellers during a peak Muslim holiday period this week when Indonesians go back to their home towns and villages for Eid al-Fitr festivities marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Sultan Thaha airport in Sumatra's Jambi province, where flights have been cancelled since last week, remained closed today. The airport handles around 13 flights a day.

''There has been no decision whether it will open tomorrow,'' said airport spokesman Olan Simanjuntak.

''It's getting worse, it was raining last night but it has not improved the situation,'' he added.

If rains are not sustained they can actually cause more smoke on burning land, particularly peat lands where fires are notoriously difficult to douse.

The fires have been raging for weeks, spreading smoke across much of Southeast Asia and triggering fears of a repeat of the environmental disaster in 1997-98 when dry conditions linked to the El Nino weather pattern caused a choking haze that cost the region billions of dollars in economic losses.

Authorities briefly closed another airport in Sumatra today due to poor visibility.

The airport in the southern Sumatra city of Palembang has been overflowing with travellers after flights to Jambi were diverted there.

''The haze forced us to close the airport again,'' Slamet Ditikno, an official at the control tower of Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin airport, told Reuters.

Flights resumed in the morning after visibility improved from 200 metres (650 ft) to more than 1,000 metres, another airport official said, adding that five flights had been delayed.

Russian Fire-Fighting Planes

Indonesia's disaster agency has leased two Russian amphibious fire-fighting planes to help in the battle, the Jakarta Post reported today.

Indonesia's neighbours have grown increasingly frustrated over the fires, most of which are deliberately lit by farmers or by timber and palm oil plantation owners.

But environment ministers from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei failed to agree on a detailed plan of attack when they met in Sumatra on Oct 13.

The holiday travel chaos was not confined to haze-shrouded Sumatra.

In heavily populated Java island, traffic jams stretching more than 10 km were reported at the weekend on the Indramayu-Cirebon section of the road network on the northern coast. Police reported a string of deadly car accidents.

The number of vehicles heading out of the greater Jakarta area was nearly eight million, 54 per cent up on last year, Kompas newspaper reported, citing Transport Ministry data.

Reuters