[ad_1]
Thousands of residents in Indonesia’s East Java province were on high alert on Monday after the island’s tallest volcano erupted violently, prompting authorities to impose an 8-kilometer no-go zone and enforce evacuations of entire villages.
Basarnas spokesman Tholib Vatelehan told Reuters that the provincial search and rescue agency had deployed teams to the worst-hit areas near Mount Semeru to assess damage and that low rainfall could provide some relief.
“Yesterday, there was a lot of rain, which caused the material on the summit to come down. But today, so far, it hasn’t rained, so it’s relatively safe,” he said.
No injuries were reported, and air travel was not immediately disrupted.
The 3,676-meter-high volcano erupted at 2:46 pm local time (0746 GMT) on Sunday. Video taken by local residents showed Mount Semeru spewing a huge cloud of gray ash over its crater before engulfing the mountain and surrounding rice fields, roads and bridges and blackening the sky. A video shared by the Environment Ministry on Twitter showed lava, rocks and hot gas pouring from the mountainside in a pyroclastic flow.
Authorities said nearly 2,500 people were forced to evacuate as people fled the eruption on motorcycles.
On Sunday, Indonesia’s Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation Agency raised Mount Semeru’s alert level to its highest level. The agency also warned residents not to come within 8 kilometers (5 miles) of the summit or within 500 meters of a river due to the risk of lava flows.
Semeru erupted last year, killing more than 50 people and displacing thousands.
The eruption, about 640 kilometers (400 miles) east of the capital Jakarta, followed a series of earthquakes in western Java, including one last month that killed more than 300 people.
Indonesia, an archipelago of 270 million people along the volcanic belt around the Pacific Rim, is one of the most disaster-prone countries on Earth.
With 142 volcanoes, Indonesia is the world’s most populous country living near volcanoes, with 8.6 million people living within 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of them.
[ad_2]
Source link