IT’S the biggest environmental disaster in our region and Australia cannot avoid being affected by its enormous reach.

A sickening haze that has spread across southeast Asia is being described as a “crime against humanity” and has NASA warning of a disaster of its kind never before seen.

For more than two months, raging forest fires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra have released vast plumes of smoke that has spread across neighbouring countries including Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.

The toxic yellow cloud is disrupting transport, schools and business and caused hundreds of thousands of people to fall ill.

At least 230 principal fires and hundreds of hot spots being battled by a 22,000-strong army of fire fighters, including Australian specialists.

But the blazes, some fuelled by ancient peat deposits, are defying them all and the most realistic hope is that monsoonal rains will douse them. But that won’t happen until next month at the earliest.

Australian Gaye Thavisin, who has lived in Kaimantan for 13 years, said putting out a blaze in Indonesia was not like battling an Aussie bushfire.

“These fires burn long, low and underground and need to be utterly soaked and flooded to be put out,” she told news.com.au.

While many locals hope monsoon rains will eventually drown them, Ms Thavisin said there was also a chance the weather could also remain dry until February.

“It’s unbelievably bad ... we’ve been without sunshine now for two and a half months,” she said. During this time Ms Thavisin has been unable to operate her small cruise business because it was only possible to see for about 50 to 200m.

“We’re looking at bankruptcy now because we continue to pay our staff,” she said. “Others have just sacked people.”

While Ms Thavisin is lucky to able to stay inside and work from an airconditioned office, many locals were not so lucky.

“They live in houses that are open, they are living, working and playing in this dense smog that I think has been at dangerous levels since August,” she said.

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And despite the difficult conditions, people continue to start fires, with Ms Thavisin saying she had spotted three new fires in her area in the past few days. She said starting fires had been accepted practice for claiming “empty land”.

“The way that they claim land is to clear it and the way they clear it, is by fire,” she said.

This has been worsened by a growing palm oil industry in the country that provides incentives for farmers to clear their land and plant the lucrative crop.

Fires in Indonesia have been a near annual occurrence since the 1980s, but this is different. They have been made worse by a prolonged dry season and a ‘Godzilla’ El Nino weather pattern whose devastating effects are only now starting to be seen.

The massive weather event is expected to have terrible consequences for Australia this summer, including predictions of a devastating fire season here, too. El Niños typically reduce rainfall, cause droughts and increase temperatures.

In 1997, Sumatra suffered from what was then considered the worst fires on record, in a disaster that cost an estimated $12 billion. The current outbreak is already considered bigger and NASA says frightening weather predictions have put it on track to become the worst of its kind ever.

“Conditions in Singapore and southeastern Sumatra are tracking close to 1997, with some stations having visibility less than 1 kilometre on average for a week. In Kalimantan, there have been reports of visibility less than 50 metres,” said Robert Field, a Columbia University scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“If the forecasts for a longer dry season hold, this suggests 2015 will rank among the most severe events on record”

More than 40 million people have been exposed to the toxic haze, particularly those living on the main Indonesia islands of Sumatra and Borneo. And more than 500,000 Indonesians have sought medical help for respiratory illnesses linked to the haze.

Just 300km away — the distance between Sydney and Canberra — the people of Singapore have been keeping their children inside as much as possible for the past two months.

They have abandoned outdoor fitness routines such as jogging and have become used to never seeing the sun through the immovable haze, which is so thick, cars parked on the street can’t be even seen by residents in high-rise towers above.

“This is an extraordinary crime against humanity,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho of Indonesia’s disaster agency said. “This is due to human acts because 99 per cent of forest fires were started deliberately.”

The crisis has become so bad that the mass prayers have been held for rain in Indonesia, and other countries including Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have sent help.

Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia, also is familiar with the dense, deadly drift from Sumatra, which is now stretching to the Philippines.

The smoke from the 1997 fires hung in the atmosphere from Papua-New Guinea, across the northern fringe of Australia, to the east coast of Africa and north across southern India and Vietnam and Cambodia.

The 2015 version is expected to blight even more countries, more heavily.

It is unlikely to hit major Australian centres but we have been affected by flow-on effects, such as cancelled airline flights, abandoned sporting events and the worsening conditions of global warming.

The fires are believed to have been started by companies and individual farmers deliberately lighting them to illegally clear land on the cheap. Prosecutions have already begun.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo cut short his trip to the United States on Monday to return home to deal with the crisis.

“There have been many complaints from members of the public related to the social and health effects of the haze,” Joko was quoted as saying by the state Antara news agency late. “So I decided to cancel my trip to the West Coast.”

Eleven warships and two passenger ships will be sent to affected areas to serve as temporary shelters and transport to residents, especially children, to safer locations, National Disaster Management Agency spokesman Sutopo Nugroho said.

The fires from slash-and-burn farming — a method to quickly and cheaply clear land for new plantations — has so far destroyed 1.7 million hectares in Kalimantan and neighbouring Sumatra.

Authorities in Kalimantan have blamed limited resources and tinder-dry conditions they say have made it extremely difficult to control the fires. The head of the provincial nature conservancy agency Nandang Prihadi told AFP that people “must be patient”.

National Disaster Management Agency spokesman Sutopo Nugroho said authorities had set up temporary shelters equipped with air purifiers for vulnerable citizens, but many residents had chosen to stay at home.

“They said the shelters are far away and they had to work and wanted to be with their relatives and neighbours,” he said.

The government has deployed around 30 aircraft and 22,000 troops to fight the fires.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER IN THE MAKING

“Fires in Indonesia are not like most other fires. They are extremely difficult to extinguish,” NASA says. And they’re dirty.

The estimated greenhouse gas emissions from the 1997 fires were higher than average daily emissions from the entire US economy, on at least 26 days, according to the World Resources Institute.

And this season alone, the fires have released greenhouse gases equivalent to about 600 million tons or roughly the annual carbon emission output of Germany, according to NASA scientists.

That’s because more than half of these fires are believed to be burning in peatland areas, which store some of the highest quantities of carbon on Earth.

Peat fires may emit up to 10 times more methane than fires occurring on other types of land.

“Taken together, the impact of peat fires on global warning may be more than 200 times greater than fires on other lands,” the institute states.

Endangered orang-utans are also falling victim to the haze crisis, which has left them sick, malnourished and severely traumatised as fires rage through Indonesia’s forests, reducing their habitat to a charred wasteland.

Rescuers at a centre for the great apes on Borneo island are considering an unprecedented mass evacuation of the hundreds in their care, and have deployed teams on hazardous missions to search for stricken animals in the wild.

“This year’s disaster is definitely the worst since 1997,” Kurniawan said, referring to the worst-recorded haze crisis in history.

“We’ve never been forced to evacuate orang-utans or draw up an emergency contingency plan, but these fires are beyond crazy.”

Kurniawan and his staff at the beleaguered centre are frustrated that so little progress has been made in nearly two decades of annual haze outbreaks.

“Why haven’t we learned anything?” he said. “Why does this keep happening?”

— With AFP