A days-long fire at a landfill in Indonesia’s most populous province has been declared an emergency by local authorities as thick and putrid smoke from the blaze chokes nearby residents, officials said yesterday.
The fire at the Sarimukti landfill in Indonesia’s West Java Province — which serves the city of Bandung, home to 2.5 million people — started on Tuesday.
At least 67 people who live near the landfill have been diagnosed with mild respiratory infections and two were hospitalized due to the effects of the toxic fire, a local health clinic said.
Amin Bunyamin, the principal of a junior-high school 6km from the fire said that students were told to stay at home because of the fumes.
“The smoke was rather thick and disrupted the study activity as well as threatened the students’ safety and health,” Bunyamin said.
“We are worried for their health because the fumes from the burning trash are different. The smoke is choking,” he added.
At least 30 fire trucks have battled to contain the fire at the 25 hectare site with no success, as authorities blamed high temperatures and strong winds for keeping it ablaze.
It forced the local government to declare a 21-day state of emergency in the area, West Java regent Hengky Kurniawan said on Thursday.
Sprawling Indonesian cities on its most populated island Java lack modern waste management infrastructure to process hoards of solid trash produced each day.
Kurniawan on Thursday blamed the fire on discarded cigarette butts and called on residents not to throw them away, “especially in this drought season.”
Authorities were not well-equipped to douse the fire, so water bombs would be dropped from helicopters sent by the country’s national disaster management agency yesterday, he said.
The local official announced a temporary location for garbage collection would be set up but called on residents to manage their waste independently.
West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil said on Thursday that the country’s geophysics agency was attempting weather modification in the area.
“Hopefully we will have rain” to douse the inferno, Kamil said.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS