Jakarta, Nov 4 (DPA) Mount Merapi on Indonesia’s Java island erupted again Thursday morning, shooting columns of dark smoke up to 4,000 metres into the air and sending molten lava far down its slopes, officials said.
There were no reports of new casualties.
The head of the Centre for Vulcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation, Surono, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said the pre-dawn eruption was more powerful than the volcano’s first eruption Oct 26, which killed 42 people.
Transport ministry spokesman Bambang Ervan said ‘no flight ban from and to nearby Yogyakarta had been issued’, but the ministry had issued a warning to airlines to avoid certain routes over Java island.
Many evacuees returned to their homes on the slopes to feed their livestock, or check on their farms in recent days, media reports said.
‘The thunder-like sound from Merapi continued uninterrupted for some time,’ the state-run Antara news agency quoted Gunawan, an evacuee in Muntilan district about 15 km from the volcano, as saying. ‘Volcanic ash covered roads and many trees were uprooted by a falling ash.’
Experts Wednesday expanded the evacuation zone around Merapi from 10 to 15 km after the volcano spewed clouds of hot ash and lava in a violent eruption. Vulcanologists at a number of monitoring posts were ordered to leave and move to safer places.
The National Disaster Management Agency raised the death toll from Merapi’s previous eruptions that began Oct 26 to 42 in its latest update. More than 70,000 were forced to flee their homes.
The 2,968-metre peak is about 500 km southeast of Jakarta. Its deadliest eruption on record occurred in 1930 when 1,370 people were killed. At least 66 people were killed in a 1994 eruption, and two people were killed in 2006.
Vulcanologists warned that several other volcanoes across Indonesia were showing increased activity.
Indonesia has the highest density of volcanoes in the world with about 500 in the 5,000-km-long archipelago nation. Nearly 130 are active, and 68 are listed as dangerous.
