"For months, millions of people have been living under a stifling blanket of toxic haze, fueled by a punishing drought brought on by the El Niño weather pattern."
"Staring out at the charred cemetery about 100 feet behind his house in Indonesian Borneo, Trovimus Akoi told of the sleepless Sunday night he spent battling an inferno far too close to home.
He first spotted the wildfire about half a mile away while feeding his chickens. Within hours, the fire tore across the parched terrain at terrifying speed. As the blaze closed in on his community, he and his neighbors armed themselves with hoses, buckets and hand pumps and started a desperate fight to save their homes. With the canals and ponds completely dried up by a drought, they dug 10-foot-deep holes into the earth in search of groundwater.
“The flames were about 10 meters (30 feet) high, and all we could see was red,” Mr. Akoi told me when I visited him last week, pointing to the goose bumps rising on his arms. “The smoke was so thick and wind was so strong. Our lungs hurt, our eyes burned, but we had to keep going.”"
Muktita Suhartono reports for the New York Times with visuals by Ulet Ifansasti September 24, 2026.
