The Year the Sky Turned Yellow
12/1/97
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Headline: The Year the Sky Turned Yellow
Source: Asiaweek
Date: 12/1/97
Authors: Todd Crowell and Peter Morgan
ASIAWEEK 1997
Twelve Months of Turning Points
The Year the Sky Turned Yellow
HE WAS NAMED EL Nio, the little boy, but he might as well have been called
El Desperado for all of the damage that he did to Southeast Asia this year.
The footprints of the "little boy" were all over a broad path of the
devastation that cut across Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, the
Philippines and parts of Thailand. And the millions of people trapped for
weeks in the pall of smoke from burning forest fires -- how does one
evacuate an entire state as big as Sarawak? -- felt a growing sense of
desperation.
Of course, the little boy had a lot of help from other bad boys. Left to
his own devices, El Nio would have done just his usual mischief, altering
ocean temperatures and messing around with the hemisphere's weather
patterns, sending typhoons in unusual directions, dumping too much rain
here and too little there. That could have been damaging enough, of course,
but it would have passed quickly from memory. Then 1997 would simply have
been remembered as a year when the weather turned freaky.
No, people had a hand in making this The Year of the Great Haze. That is
why many have labeled it not just a natural disaster but Asia's worst
man-made environmental catastrophe. At its peak in September, the
suffocating smoke from a hundred forest fires cloaked about a million
square kilometers and afflicted 70 million people. It lasted four months.
Claude Martin, director general for the World Wide Fund for Nature, summed
it up: "The sky in Southeast Asia has turned yellow and people are dying."
At first, an embarrassed Indonesian government blamed farmers using
traditional slash-and-burn methods for clearing jungles for crops.
Belatedly it acknowledged that the biggest fires were lit by corporations
intent on cheaply and efficiently reducing the rain forest so they could
plant more oil palm, pulpwood and rice. Even that would probably not have
been more than an irritant, briefly raising regional pollution levels until
the monsoon came to douse the flames. Only this year the rains didn't come,
and the fires burned on and on and on.
Before long, people were watching the air pollution index rise with the
same awful feeling that was to return as they saw the stock market indices
fall. A reading of 500 is deemed potentially lethal. In Kuching, capital of
the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, the index reached 839. The government
declared a state of emergency and closed the schools. Hospitals filled with
people with respiratory ailments. Those with the means fled the territory
seeking cleaner climates. But the state's 2 million people remained stuck,
coping as best they could.
Of course, most of the suffering was in Indonesia, especially in Sumatra,
Sulawesi and Kalimantan. Small towns like Jambi in Sumatra joined the
world's datelines as journalists, usually equipped with respirators,
descended to put a human face on the environmental disaster. Spurred to
action by international outrage, Jakarta sent 8,400 firefighters to battle
blazes that were usually were left to burn themselves out. The environment
minister released the names of 176 companies, including 43 Malaysian firms,
suspected of the large-scale burning but made no arrests.
The world responded to the grim images of children wearing gas masks.
Malaysia sent 1,200 firefighters; Japan brought in infra-red imaging
equipment to pinpoint fires; Singapore dispatched two teams of technical
experts and a C130 water bomber. Britain and Australia gave money, and the
U.S. provided two water bombers. Helpful perhaps, but as an Australian
firefighter put it: "This is just mucking about, isn't it? There are guys
starting fires on one side of the road even as we're putting them out on
the other."
By November the damage was done. Southwesterly winds cleared the air over
the burn zones, but also pushed the smoky haze south to Darwin, Australia,
and as far west as Sri Lanka. At least 17 died as a direct result of
breathing dangerous levels of the noxious gases, and more than 50,000
people said they suffered respiratory problems. World Health Organization
officials warned of a dramatic rise in haze-related deaths in the future,
particularly among the young and old. Up to 500 people may have starved in
drought-hit remote parts of Irian Jaya, a toll that may have been worsened
when smoke grounded food flights.
The World Wide Fund for Nature believes that the fires shortened the
survival odds for several endangered species, such as the Sumatran tiger
and orangutan by shrinking their natural habitats. The economic costs to
lost production and tourism have been astronomical. One example: the ten
days in which Kuching was largely shut down probably cost the city about
$30 million. The 234 killed as a Garuda jetliner crashed trying to land at
Medan in poor visibility may have been haze victims also.
By official count, the fires consumed at least 300,000 ha. of forests
(unofficial estimates are five times higher). They released millions of
cubic meters of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while simultaneously
subtracting from the earth's inventory of trees that absorb and transform
carbon dioxide back into beneficial gases. It was to control man-made
emissions that nations gathered at year's end in Kyoto, Japan, for a global
warming conference. Reducing that threat could make the shenanigans of El
Nio look like child's play.