Clouds of searing heat belched out of an Indonesian volcano early on Wednesday as scientists anxiously waited for a feared eruption that has forced thousands of villagers from their homes.
Despite apparently reduced activity at Mount Merapi, which produced major clouds of gas and ash on Monday, experts warned that the volcano remained highly dangerous.
”Presently the eruption process of Merapi is still continuing,” said Triyani from the vulcanology office in nearby Yogyakarta.
A thin stream of smoke curled from the peak into clear blue skies after the four heat clouds shot out from midnight to 6am (5pm to 11pm GMT on Tuesday), reaching up to 3,5km down the mountain’s slopes.
Scientists warn that the larger and more deadly heat clouds are typically preceded by smaller ones such as those of the past few days.
More than 22 000 residents evacuated from the immediate danger zone waited in camps or returned to their homes tracked by authorities, official data showed.
At the Harjobinangun camp in Sleman district — one of the areas in the zone — an official from the disaster control post Suryadi said that about 131 people had arrived in the camp on Tuesday.
”It has something to do with the heat clouds the previous day,” he told Agence France-Presse. ”Because of the eruption of the heat clouds on Monday, we did not even have to beg them to come down. They came down on their own.”
But on Wednesday morning, the camp was virtually empty.
”It’s just as usual. They all attend to their own chores at home” during the day, he said.
Many residents have been returning to their homes during the day to collect grass and feed their milk cows, a major income earner in the area.
Scientists said on Tuesday that the new lava dome forming at the peak of Merapi — which means Mountain of Fire — contained about 2,3-million cubic metres of lava with an additional 150 000 cubic metres being added daily.
The main fear is that the dome, which is leaning southward, may collapse and shoot out blazing lava as well as more deadly heat clouds, rather than explode, as has historically occurred at the 2 914m volcano rising from the fertile Kedu plain in Central Java.
The clouds, known by locals as ”shaggy goats”, consist of volcanic gases, ash and dust, and reach temperatures up to 500°C.
During Merapi’s last eruption in 1994, about 66 people were killed, most by these incinerating clouds. Indonesia’s second most active volcano had its deadliest eruption in 1930, when 1 369 people were killed by lava and heat clouds.
Indonesia’s president toured the slopes of the smouldering volcano on Tuesday, urging evacuees to be patient as they wait to return to their homes.
As well as being seared by Monday’s heat clouds, Merapi’s slopes have also been blazed by lava trails since authorities raised an alert to its top level on Saturday, forcing the mandatory evacuation of residents here. – AFP
