El Nino Peat Fire Razes Nearly 300 Homes in Bangka Belitung
A forest fire driven by El Nino razed nearly 300 homes on Indonesia's Sumatra island and forced hundreds of people to evacuate, an official said on Tuesday. The Guardian
Residents in Bangka Belitung province first saw the fire approaching their village on Saturday. They tried to hold it back with portable water pumps, but the effort failed.
South Bangka regency head Riza Herdavid said a smouldering peat fire, a slow-burning fire in thick and carbon-rich soil, spread to the settlement after the wind shifted. The fire moved from forest and degraded land into houses.
Nearly 1,000 people fled the village, according to the local disaster agency. The village was built on former peatland in a protected area that was converted into a housing complex last year.
President Prabowo Subianto ordered the government on Monday to mobilise maximum efforts to extinguish wildfires. Cabinet secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya said Indonesia had deployed more than 60,000 personnel to fight wildfires. Some fires have been raging for three months. Thick smoke in a Borneo province grounded water-bombing aircraft, according to Indonesia's disaster agency.
This year's fires have caused tens of thousands of cases of respiratory illness. Air pollution spikes have also been recorded in Singapore and Malaysia.
Earlier counts for the same incident differed on damage and displacement. Reuters reported on October 12, 2026 that wildfires spread into residential areas in Bangka Belitung, destroying over 300 houses, and put the evacuation at 500 people. A separate republication put the number completely destroyed at 305 houses, according to the agency. The later official account uses nearly 300 homes and nearly 1,000 evacuees.
Indonesia's national disaster agency, BNPB, has tracked a sequence of smaller karhutla, the Indonesian term for forest and land fires, around Bangka Belitung in the weeks before the settlement fire. Its October 3, 2026 situation update reported a fire was extinguished at 17:35 WIB, local western Indonesia time, despite strong winds, with an estimated 10 hectares burned. BNPB Its October 5, 2026 update reported fires in Beluluk Village and Mangkol Village, Pangkalan Baru Subdistrict, with 1.5 hectares burned. Its September 5, 2026 karhutla update reported fires affecting about 8.5 hectares across Air Putih Village, Sungai Daeng, Air Belo Village and Tanjung. The agency's disaster database lists a forest and land fire in Jelutung 2 Village, Simpang Rimba District, South Bangka, Bangka Belitung Islands, dated 2026-10-10.
The broader context here is about where fire, land use and enforcement meet. A settlement built last year on former peatland inside a protected area concentrates exposure. Peat smoulders like charcoal, surviving initial suppression, then moves with wind. Portable pumps cannot compensate once that transition occurs. The result was rapid residential loss and mass evacuation from a site that was administratively reclassified for housing.
Looking at what this means for Jakarta, the mobilization scale points to political risk as much as operational need. Sixty thousand personnel across multiple provinces is a national-level commitment. Grounded aircraft in Borneo show its limits. Smoke does not respect provincial or national boundaries, and respiratory caseloads plus readings in Singapore and Malaysia give neighbouring governments a direct stake in Indonesia's fire season. The question for officials now is containment before the next wind shift, then accounting for how protected peatland became housing.
