Park officials wage uphill battle to control forest fires in Chiang Mai
National Park officials continued to fight what seemed like unending forest fires in the lower districts of Chiang Mai on Sunday, blaming local villagers for restarting fires due to their wrong belief that they were good for vegetation.
Park officials from the 16th protected area administration office, backed up by Kamov KA-32 helicopter, were still trying to halt fires in forests straddling Mae Wang, Hot and Mae Chaem districts.
The fires started nearly at the same time, in certain areas before, when the office announced it had managed to halt fires in the Ob Luang National Park in Hot district on February 27.
Kritsayam Kongsatree, chief of the 16th office, said that local villagers would not stop starting forest fires due to their old belief that wild edible vegetables and mushrooms would prosper after the blaze. In some cases, he said fires spread from farmlands when villagers burned their byproducts or weeds.
The air quality monitoring office, AIR4Thai, web page of the Pollution Control Department said the ongoing forest fires had worsened air quality in Chiang Mai with levels of PM2.5 ultra-fine pollutants higher than the safe threshold of 37.5 micrograms per cubic metre of air.
The web page said the measurements at all six air quality monitoring stations in Chiang Mai reported PM2.5 level higher than the green threshold of 37.5 ug/m3. It was measured at 45.5 ug/m3 at the Tambon Wat Sriphum station.
The provincial administration also reported that 134 hotspots were detected in 14 out 25 districts of Chiang Mai on Sunday morning and 36 hotspots were in Mae Chaem. Hot district had the second highest number of hotspots at 22.
The 16th protected area administration office said forest fires had continued for several days in Mae Chaem, damaging national forest reserves and the Mae Tho National Park.
Kritsayam said he had instructed his workers to make fire buffer zones around the spreading fires and then fight the cordoned zones to try to halt its spread.
Kritsayam said his office also had enlisted help from the Third Army Area to deploy paratroopers for monitoring forests to prevent villagers from lighting up more fires.
On Saturday, Move Forward Party leader Chaithawat Tulathon led his team to visit Mae Wang district of Chiang Mai to operate a drone that would observe raging forest fires in the Ob Khan National Park.
Chaithawat then used the video clips from his team’s drone to help firefighters plan fire buffer zones to try to halt the spread.
Chaithawat and his team then visited Wat Phra That Doi Sai in Ban Nong Sai village in Tambon Pasak of Mueang district in Lamphun province to join villagers in building fire buffer zones to contain the raging forest fires there.
