RIAU — Alongside the road from Riau province’s capital Pekanbaru to Dumai — the town close to many hotspots that have resulted in the haze over Singapore — were sweeping palm oil plantations and pipes for energy giant Chevron’s oil production operations.

Thick, choking haze reduced visibility to about 100 metres during parts of the six-hour journey yesterday, but residents were clearly getting on with their daily lives, with workers going about their business as usual.

Traffic was heavy as passenger vehicles and heavy trucks loaded with logs or crude palm oil shared the two-lane road. The trucks were seen loading and unloading their cargo at various processing facilities along the way.

Midway along the journey, in the town of Duri, we were drawn to a house adjacent to a patch of charred shrubs smaller than a football field. There, Madam Mirasanti was cutting a watermelon while her two daughters were watching television.

The fire happened last Saturday and firefighters came to extinguish it, given the area’s proximity to oil production operations, said Mdm Mirasanti, 31.

Her daughters, aged five and 10, have experienced coughs and eye irritation in the past week. They did not see a doctor. The fan in the house is kept on 24 hours a day and the family sweeps their home to rid it of ash and dust 10 times a day, she said.

Her husband Gunawan, 30, a meatball seller, dons a mask when he goes to the market.

Mdm Mirasanti wishes for the haze to be gone but feels she cannot do anything about it.

The haze had turned a sickly shade of ochre when we arrived in Dumai. The port town recorded a Pollutant Standards Index reading of 493 yesterday, reported news site inilah.com.

Those donning masks, however, formed the minority. It is the young children and the elderly who are coming down with respiratory problems, explained tailor Muhammad Sulaiman, 42.

People are frustrated with the weather and have complained to their local Parliament leaders, he said. But he was optimistic about the government’s promise to bring rain through cloud-seeding.

Answers to some questions remained hard to come by. The sprawling plantations bore no indication of their ownership and their inhabitants revealed little.

What company owns this plantation, I asked a man living next to a plantation on peatland that was smouldering like steam rising from a hot spring. He said he did not know. The fire happened 20 days ago and he and his friends pitched in to douse it.

A few hundred metres further, even thicker plumes of smoke and ash rose from a palm oil plantation.

The shroud clouding our vision felt like a metaphor for the hunt for elusive answers in tackling the burning and the haze.