Indonesia's forest infernos on Tuesday reached a national park overlooking the tourist island of Bali and it appealed for international aid to end the fires blamed for a poisonous smog choking southeast Asia.
Hundreds of hectares (acres) of the Mount Rinjani national park on the island of Lombok, across a narrow strait from Bali, were on fire, forestry chief H.E. Suherdie said, according to the official Antara news agency.
Fires are now blazing across much of the Indonesian archipelago, including the islands of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi and the Indonesian half of New Guinea.
On the main island of Java, which includes the capital, Jakarta, reports said Mount Tumpeng, Mount Merbabu and Mount Malabar were ablaze with two other nearby mountains under threat.
Five people have died in Indonesia from respiratory ilnesses blamed on the smog and a jet crashed on a mountainside enshrouded in the pollution last week killing all 234 people on board.
With experts saying the firefighters were making little headway, the government appealed to the world Tuesday for firefighting equipment after failing to conjure up artificial rain.
``The constraint we are facing is the limited fire-fighting equipment that we have,'' armed forces spokesman Brigadier General Abdul Wahab Mokodongan told Antara. ``What we need now is not additional personnel but aid in the form of firefighting equipment.''
He said the armed forces had moved cloud-seeding and water-bombing aircraft to Sumatra and Batam island to help clear smog over neighboring Malaysia and Singapore, where some politicians are criticizing Indonesia's response to the mounting environmental disaster.
However, a senior environmental official, Nabiel Makarim said ``the problem is there are no clouds to be seeded.''
More than 1,000 Malaysian firemen are in Indonesia helping battle the blazes. Other international assistance has been given to the affected countries by France and Japan.
On Tuesday, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer announced a 1.0 million Australian dollar (U.S.$720,000) contribution to help Indonesia combat health problems caused by the fires.
In a statement from the U.N. General Assembly, Downer said he had also instructed aid agency AusAID to look into whether Australia could help with aerial water bombing of the fires.
The assistance package will include emergency medical and health supplies along with ``two emergency response technical teams with expertise in fire management and health.''
The United States has also offered help, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said in Kuala Lumpur.
``This morning I received a phone call from U.S. Defense Secretary Bill Cohen giving assurance that the U.S. will supply water tanks for this exercise,'' Ibrahim was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency.
Japan, France, and Canada have all offered various forms of assistance.
A French team is currently in Malaysia to teach local firemen how to fight fires using helicopters while Japanese experts on respiration and air pollution arrived this week bringing in firefighting equipment to be donated to Malaysia.
The fires, blamed on land clearing efforts and worsened by drought brought on by the El Nino weather phenomenon, have affected up to 800,000 hectares (two million acres), producing gray smog that has blanketed Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and parts of the Philippines and Thailand.
Tens of thousands of people in several countries have sought treatment for skin and respiratory problems.
Kuala Lumpur's Subang airport was closed for nearly two hours Tuesday because of poor visibility caused by rain and thick haze, officials said.
About 1,400 foreigners have been evacuated by companies from the smog-stricken Indonesian island of Sumatra to Singapore since weekend, reports said.
Winds have largely spared Jakarta from the smog, but Health Minister Sujudi said Tuesday that air quality levels in the worst haze-hit areas were reaching ``danger'' levels.
Jakarta has has banned fires for land clearing and threatened to levy heavy fines on violators. It gave 176 companies, mostly plantations, until Wednesday to prove they were not guilty.