Malaysia lifts the Serian haze emergency as the index falls from 519 to the 200s

Malaysia ended the haze emergency in Serian, Sarawak, on Monday, 7 September, three days after it was declared. The Prime Minister's Office said Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Ibrahim gave his consent after advice from Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Sarawak Premier Abang Johari Openg, and after agencies reported that the Air Pollutant Index in the district had dropped below the hazardous band.

Hazardous, in the Malaysian scale, starts above 300. An emergency can be declared when the index reaches 500. Serian hit 519 on Friday, 4 September, in one official account and 521 in another PMO-linked figure. By Monday morning the same station was reading in the low 200s. Reuters put the Monday figure at 222. The Department of Environment's portal showed 211 at one check and 222 at another. All of those numbers sit in the very unhealthy band, not the emergency band.

That distinction is the whole legal change. The emergency order is off. The smoke is not gone.

What remains on the board

The PMO statement was plain. Haze in Sarawak has not fully subsided. Serian and Samarahan still logged very unhealthy readings. At 8 a.m. Monday, Samarahan was the only Sarawak site in that band on one APIMS snapshot, at 226. A later Business Today tally at 6 a.m. put Samarahan at 214 and listed 40 areas nationwide as unhealthy, 24 as moderate and two as good.

Sarawak still carried the heaviest load. Ten of its stations were unhealthy in the early list, among them Sarikei, Kuching and Serian IPD at 191, Sri Aman at 188, Mukah at 184, Samalaju at 182, Sibu at 178, Bintulu at 175, ILP Miri at 170 and Limbang at 151. On the peninsula, Shah Alam stood at 166, Nilai at 166, Batu Muda in Kuala Lumpur at 164, Seremban at 164 and Putrajaya at 163.

Parents in several states already had a school instruction. Education Minister Fadhlina Sidek said families could keep children home during the haze. Hundreds of Sarawak schools had been closed under the earlier emergency window. Those closures were tied to the index, not to the royal order itself, so the lift does not automatically put every classroom back on a normal timetable.

Where the smoke comes from

The haze is not a local factory story. It is smoke from peat and forest fires on the Indonesian side of Borneo, in Kalimantan, drifting west into Sarawak. Indonesia recorded thousands of August hotspots. Pontianak on the Indonesian side earlier logged an index above 1,000. West Kalimantan sent more than a million pupils to remote classes at the end of August.

Malaysia's emergency tool is blunt. It is a royal proclamation, used here as a public-health lock on a single division. Serian sits south of Kuching. When the index crossed 500, the King signed. When it fell under 300, he signed again. The PMO said federal and state agencies will keep watching and asked residents to limit outdoor time and follow local instructions.

The practical test is the next dry-season spike. An index of 222 is still high enough to keep people with asthma indoors. It is not high enough, under current rules, to keep an emergency in force. That is why the order ended on a Monday when the air was still dirty.