BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) —
Brasilia, Brazil’s modernist capital, has woken up over the past two days to find its iconic buildings shrouded in smoky air. The central part of the country is just the latest region to be hit by smoke from fires in the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado savanna, the Pantanal wetlands and the state of Sao Paulo.
The smog crisis prompted President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to visit Brazil’s national fire monitoring center in Brasilia on Sunday afternoon. “No lightning-related fires were detected. This means that people are starting fires in the Amazon, the Pantanal and especially in the state of Sao Paulo,” he said. His government vowed to step up firefighting and investigations to identify the culprits.
Fire alarms so far this month have totaled nearly 3,500 in the southeastern state of Sao Paulo — the highest monthly total since data began in 1998. More than half of those fires occurred on Aug. 23, raising suspicions of a coordinated attack. Smog prompted 48 cities to declare red alerts. The good news was that a cold front brought plummeting temperatures and rain on Monday, putting out all the fires, the state government said.
In Brasilia, the air quality index reached a very unhealthy level on Sunday night, according to Brasilia’s environmental institute. This is the first time the state agency has issued a smog alert since it was created in 2007. Public events were canceled and the airport in the nearby city of Goiania was closed for several hours.
Amazon cities like Manaus, Porto Velho and Rio Branco have been choking on smoke for weeks, but have received less official and media attention, partly because it is an annual phenomenon.
“It was the smoke and soot from the Amazon and the Cerrado that entered the corridors of the presidential palace that woke up the federal government,” Altino Machado, a Rio Branco journalist who has covered the environment for four decades, told The Associated Press.
In the state of Sao Paulo, two workers at an industrial plant died Friday while trying to fight a fire. A total of 59,000 hectares (146,000 acres) of sugarcane plantations were also destroyed, a producers’ association said. In the Amazon, a firefighter from the federal brigade also died Monday while working in the indigenous territory of Capoto Jarina.
The smog that blanketed the states of Sao Paulo and Brasilia originated partly in the Amazon, Pantanal and Cerrado, said Karla Longo, a researcher who monitors smoke at the National Institute for Space Research, a federal agency. Longo said changes in climatic conditions were the main reason smoke reached those regions.
During the driest months of August and September, when wildfires and deforestation peak, the smog typically spreads up to 5 million square kilometers (1.9 million square miles), from east to west and then south after reaching the Andes Cordillera. Earlier this month, it reached Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state.
However, the arrival of a cold front caused the smog to move toward the state of Sao Paulo, where a record number of fires were already raging, and then spread to the Brasilia region, Longo said.
The researcher also said that the number of forest fires in Brazil this year is not out of the norm. However, she noted that the areas burned are larger than average. From January to July, an area the size of Italy burned — 64 percent larger than the same period last year, according to official data. Fires are traditionally used as a final procedure for deforestation and for managing pastures.
Nearly half of Brazil’s carbon emissions come from deforestation. The country is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for nearly 3% of global emissions, according to Climate Watch, an online platform managed by the World Resources Institute.
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AP journalist David Biller in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
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