Wildfire extinguished at Toraja stone burial sites; damage assessment underway
A wildfire that reached traditional stone burial sites in North Toraja, South Sulawesi, has been fully extinguished, Indonesia's disaster agency BNPB said. Authorities are assessing the sites' condition, while police investigate how the fire started.
Seven hectares burned
The fire began on October 24 and took roughly 16 hours to extinguish, Berton SP Panjaitan told an online press conference in Jakarta on October 28. Panjaitan is acting head of the Disaster Data, Information, and Communication Center at Indonesia's National Agency for Disaster Countermeasures, or BNPB.
About seven hectares burned across Rangri and Ratte, two villages locally called lembang, he said. The burned area included traditional Torajan stone graves, whose condition local authorities were still assessing.
Reaching the fire proved difficult. Roads did not allow fire vehicles to reach the site, Tempo.co reported, so crews from the North Toraja fire department, Manggala Agni and other units carried portable firefighting equipment and water pumps by hand up the cliff area.
The Toraja highlands are internationally known for funerary traditions that include carving ancestral tombs, crypts and burial chambers into large stone cliffs.
Cause under investigation, restoration measures planned
By October 26, North Toraja police had opened an investigation following a report from representatives of the families who own the graves, according to Tempo.co. A witness reported seeing an unidentified person start the fire and then flee.
North Toraja Resort Police chief Superintendent Yoseph Adi Rahmat Sudrajat cautioned that investigators had not determined whether the fire was intentional. Witnesses at the scene still needed to be questioned, he said.
Culture Minister Fadli Zon said on October 27 that his ministry would send a team to document the damage and prepare measures for recovery and restoration, detikTravel reported. He also said that deliberately setting a fire would constitute a criminal act.
Crews remain deployed in other fire-prone regions
Panjaitan also outlined BNPB's broader wildfire response. The agency remains on high alert, with emergency personnel positioned in fire-prone forests and peatlands in Sumatra and Kalimantan to identify and contain new hotspots.
"We continue to keep personnel and equipment on standby across districts and cities where fires have been detected," he said.
BNPB's deployment records list 16,387 ground personnel in Central Kalimantan and 14,458 in West Kalimantan. Another 12,287 are deployed in South Sumatra and 7,927 in South Kalimantan.
Firefighting equipment also remains in place, coordinated by regional disaster agencies known as BPBDs, regional administrations and joint task forces operating at the district and city levels.