Air pollution in a town in Sarawak state on Borneo Island breached Malaysia’s emergency-level threshold on Friday amid worsening haze linked to forest and land fires in neighboring Indonesia.
The Air Pollutant Index in Serian, a small agricultural town of just under 90,000 near the border of Indonesia's Kalimantan province, surged to 521 on Friday, according to Malaysia's environment department. Sarawak's much-larger capital, Kuching, also showed a hazardous reading of 311.
