Just days before US President Barack Obama’s long-awaited visit to Indonesia, international carriers canceled flights to the capital over concern about a volcano spewing ash hundreds of kilometers away. Malaysia was preparing to airlift hundreds of citizens out of the country.
The notoriously volatile Mount Merapi unleashed nearly 50 million cubic meters of gas, rocks and ash on Friday — its most powerful eruption in a century.
About 138 people have died on its slopes in the past two weeks and authorities were still struggling yesterday to deal with those injured in the latest blast.
Obama is scheduled to touch down in Jakarta tomorrow as part of a 10-day Asian tour. Since taking office, he has already twice postponed visits to Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where he spent four years as a child.
Paul Belmont, a US embassy spokesman, said there has been no talk yet of canceling.
“But certainly, if the situation evolves into something like what we saw in Europe not long ago [when the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokul forced closed airports for a week] it’s something we’d have to take seriously,” Belmont said yesterday.
Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa and most other international carriers on Saturday announced they had temporarily halted flights to the capital, 450km west of Merapi. A handful — -including Singapore Airlines and the budget-carrier AirAsia — were back in the air yesterday.
“The volcanic ash presence in the airways surrounding Jakarta could cause severe damage to our aircraft and engines which could impair safety,” said Azharuddin Osman, director of operations for Malaysia Airlines.
The Royal Malaysian Air Force said it was sending three C-130 transport planes to the city of Solo, 30km from the volcano, to pick up 664 citizens, many of them university students.
The first batch was expected to return home yesterday evening, the rest early today.
Merapi’s latest round of eruptions began Oct. 26, followed by more than a dozen other powerful blasts and thousands of tremors.
The volcano continued to rumble and groan over the weekend, at times spitting ash up to 8km in the air, dusting windshields, rooftops and leaves on trees hundreds of kilometers away.
Indonesian officials were scrambling to deal with the aftermath of Friday’s inferno, which left bodies of villagers frozen in their last moments, covered in a thick charcoal-like ash. Several photos taken by disaster management officials showed corpses welded together, as mothers and fathers clutched their children.
The blast killed more 90 people and injured 200, said Sigit Priohutomo, a senior official at Sardjito hospital, where some patients were admitted with burns covering up to 95 percent of their bodies.
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