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Residents in the Indonesian city of Palangkaraya are facing severe health threats as prolonged wildfires engulf surrounding forests, filling the skies with thick, orange smoke and toxic particles. Families are sealing their windows with plastic, locking children in bedrooms, and relying on oxygen tanks and air purifiers to cope with the hazardous air quality.
Life Inside a Single Room
In Palangkaraya, a city of about 300,000 residents, Apri Dona Yusmelita spends her days sitting on the floor with her five-month-old son, encouraging him to use a nebuliser to deliver medicine to his tiny lungs. Her baby has been sick for most of his life due to the constant exposure to pollution.
According to Yusmelita, her infant suffers from a phlegmy cough that frequently causes him to vomit, stalling his weight gain. Since the fires began in July, the 27-year-old mother has kept her children confined to a bedroom equipped with an air purifier, even moving their television inside to keep them occupied. Rotating power outages and smoky air seeping into the rest of the house make daily life increasingly difficult.
Over the past four months, the family has spent roughly half their time inside that single room. Annual fires in Indonesia are often started intentionally using slash-and-burn methods to clear land for crops like palm oil, but this year has been exceptionally severe with nearly two million hectares of forest and peatland burned, exacerbated by drier conditions brought by a strong El Niño.
The Rise of Volunteer Safe Houses
With authorities struggling to manage the catastrophe, local volunteers have stepped in to monitor air pollution and establish smoke-free safe houses equipped with air purifiers, oxygen tanks, and nebulisers. Roro Ardya Garini, co-founder of the local Indigenous organisation the Ranu Welum Foundation, stated that these shelters cater primarily to vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly, providing a place where people can come simply to breathe.
There are currently 14 such haze shelters operating in donated rooms across public buildings and churches, featuring airtight concrete walls and minimal ventilation. However, Garini noted that the shelters cannot replace hospitals, recalling an instance when an infant arrived with acute oxygen deprivation and had to be rushed to an emergency room.
At another volunteer-run shelter operated by JPIC Kalimantan, 26-year-old Sabrina Alfiana supervised her four-year-old son as he inhaled mist from a nebuliser. Alfiana explained that sealing her home is ineffective because the smoke still penetrates through window cracks, leaving her family smelling smoke even inside their bedroom.
Regional Impact and Extreme Readings
The toxic haze has drifted beyond Indonesia, affecting millions of people across Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Timor-Leste, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The regional crisis has prompted school closures, tens of thousands of hospitalisations for respiratory issues, and a surge in demand for oxygen tanks and air purifiers, while the Indonesian government has deployed firefighters and vowed to pursue companies accused of arson.
In Palangkaraya, volunteer Melodyna Adhesiva measures air quality levels to post on social media for the public, tracking PM2.5 particles that can enter the bloodstream and damage lungs. While the World Health Organization recommends a 24-hour average of 15 micrograms per cubic metre, readings in Palangkaraya regularly reach 300, and Adhesiva reported that her team’s worst reading last month exceeded 3,000.
Adhesiva stated that some of their monitoring devices are no longer effective against the extreme pollution levels. She noted that one of their monitors maxes out at 999, making it useless for outdoor measurements and limiting its use strictly to indoor checks.
