About 3,000 residents gathered in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra province, to perform a special Islamic prayer for rain, known as “salat istisqa,” while thick smoke shrouded roads, buildings and public facilities and forced motorists to drive with their headlights on during the day. That’s the scene in a province where the fires keep burning, the air keeps thickening, and ordinary people are left praying in the courtyard of the governor’s office while the machinery of land-clearing and emergency response grinds on around them.
Who Pays for the Fires
The latest satellite data from the Environment Ministry showed South Sumatra recorded the highest number of hot spots nationwide with 1,429, followed by West Kalimantan with 1,226 and Central Kalimantan with 811. Forestry Ministry data indicated that nearly 940 square kilometers (363 square miles) were burned in July alone, including over 20 square kilometers (8 square miles) in South Sumatra province. Those numbers aren’t abstract. They’re the scale of a disaster that lands on residents first, through choking haze, reduced visibility and the daily grind of breathing through smoke.
Emergency services have been battling fires driven by an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. The smoke crossed into Malaysia and Brunei. The apparatus calls it weather, but the damage is social and immediate: land and air transportation get disrupted, public health takes the hit, and whole cities sit under a dirty ceiling of haze.
What People Did While the State Managed
In Palembang, residents didn’t wait for a miracle from the top. They gathered shoulder to shoulder for prayer in the governor’s office courtyard, a mass public act of desperation and solidarity under conditions the authorities themselves described as severe. The prayer gathering initiative came as the province faced prolonged dry weather that has heightened the risk of forest and peatland fires.
South Sumatra Gov. Herman Deru said before the prayer, “We have done everything we can and worked closely with all relevant parties.” He added, “As people of faith, we are also praying to God to send rain so that life can return to normal.” He also said the public prayer would complement ongoing firefighting and drought-mitigation measures and serve as a moment for residents to unite in confronting the environmental challenges facing the province. The language is polished. The reality is smoke in the streets and people trying to keep their lives together while the province burns.
The Machinery Behind the Haze
Indonesia is actively intensifying weather-modification operations to help firefighters combat wildfires by inducing rainfall through the dispersal of salt particles into suitable clouds, with 30 aircraft for cloud-seeding and water-bombing operations over Kalimantan, and another 22 helicopters covering Sumatra. That’s the state’s answer: aircraft, salt particles, and emergency management from above, all aimed at controlling a crisis that keeps returning with the dry season.
Indonesian police have arrested 72 people suspected of starting some of the forest and peatland fires, while four companies are under investigation for allegedly using fire to clear land at low cost. Plantation owners and traditional farmers often start fires to clear land for farming, triggering hazardous haze that reduces visibility, disrupts land and air transportation and threatens public health. The same system that turns land into profit also turns the air into a hazard.
Fires are a regular problem during the dry season in Indonesia, and the haze they generate has periodically drawn diplomatic complaints from neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. The complaints travel across borders. The smoke does too.