April 23, 2026 | 10:03 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - When he hung dozens of water hoses in the warehouse last year, Elly Prianto already suspected that a major fire would, sooner or later, arrive. Sure enough, the peatlands surrounding his village in Sidomulyo hamlet, Limbung village, Kubu Raya Regency, West Kalimantan, began to burn in early February 2026.
“By April, around 200 hectares of land in our village had been burned,” said Elly, Head of the Fire Care Community (MPA) of Limbung village, on Thursday, April 16, 2026.
Seeing fires emerge over the past few months around Limbung village, the 39-year-old man grew anxious that this year’s forest and land fires would be worse than the disaster of 2014-2015. In those two years, according to the MapBiomas Indonesia Fire platform, a total of 394 hectares of land in Limbung were indicated to have burned.
The fires over the past three months have spread not because Elly failed to act quickly to prevent flames from devouring the peat. Fires, he said, occur almost every year. The peat-wetting efforts carried out by the Limbung MPA only reduce the risk. But a new problem emerged recently when peat-watering operations were halted due to a lack of operational funds.
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