Kuala Lumpur : Malaysian authorities today ordered school closures in Kuala Lumpur and neighbouring states as worsening haze from Indonesian forest and agricultural fires enveloped the capital in a smoky grey shroud.
Air quality in Malaysia and Singapore has steadily deteriorated over the past two weeks due to the smog from nearby regions of Indonesia, which declared a state of emergency in a particularly hard-hit province.
Malaysia’s education ministry ordered schools closed in Kuala Lumpur, three adjacent states and the nearby administrative capital of Putrajaya, where air pollution indices were in the upper range of “unhealthy” and nearing “very unhealthy”.
More than half of the country’s 52 monitoring stations registered “unhealthy” air. Smog-belching fires are an annual problem during the dry season in Indonesia, where vast tracts of land are cleared on the huge islands of Sumatra and Borneo using illegal slash-and-burn methods. Indonesia has declared a state of emergency.
