REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, PEKANBARU -- The NOAA staellite finds more hotspots in Sumatra island from 176 hotspots to be 225 as of Thursday Sept 11, data from Riau's Disaster Mitigation Agency received by Antara here on Friday said.
According to the data, the hotspots were found in several provinces in Sumatra island namely in Riau North Sumatra, Jambi and South Sumatra.
Hotspots are often being the cause of forest fire in Sumatra island. Apart from natural phenomenon, the existence of hotspots and forest fire in Indonesia are often due deliberate land burning by the local people who want to open new plantation.
Earlier this year forest fire in Riau province had caused thick haze covering the province and its neighboring areas including Singapore and Malaysia.
Forest and land fires occurring in the Riau Province between February and April 2014 caused economic losses worth more than Rp20 trillion, as per data furnished by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB).
"It should be kept in mind that once the fires break out, it will be difficult to extinguish them and can cause huge losses," BNPB Chief Sutopo Purwo Nugroho recently stated here.
The haze disaster triggered by the fires disrupted around 30 percent of the economic activities and caused monetary losses in Riau.
The BNPB had spent around Rp164 billion, or one-third of its budget, to deal with the fires nationally.
The fires also caused environmental damages as more than 21.9 thousand hectares of forest and plantation areas were gutted by the fires.
The haze also affected the health of several residents in Riau and the neighboring provinces, such as in West and North Sumatra.
The largest loss caused by forest and land fires in Indonesia was in 1997, when fires wiped out millions of hectares of forest and plantation areas and caused losses worth US$2.45 billion.
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