With their belongings piled on to motorcycles and pickup trucks, thousands of Indonesian families returned home yesterday after fleeing deadly volcanic eruptions from Mount Merapi.
Scientists warned, however, that the nation’s most active volcano remained a severe threat, as more bodies were found buried in the mountains of ash blasted out from Mount Merapi since late last month, bringing the death toll to 259.
“The eruption process is still ongoing, but the intensity has reduced significantly. The status is still alert,” volcanologist Subandrio said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
More than 30,000 people have left emergency shelters since the government at the weekend reduced a 20km exclusion zone around the volcano by as much as half in some districts.
Search teams pulled another 17 bodies from the ash that seared swathes of the central Javan countryside in a series of eruptions from Merapi starting on Oct. 26.
Whole families crammed on to motorcycles for the journey home, with feelings of relief at the chance to leave the overcrowded camps mixed with trepidation about the state of their properties, crops and livestock in the villages.
In the newly designated safe village of Sukoharjo on the southern slopes of the mountain, 57-year-old Sukirah was already replanting her paddy field a day after returning home.
“I’m happy to come back home. At least I can start to live normally, but I couldn’t sleep last night. The eruption still haunts me. I’m traumatized by what happened. Every time I see the mountain spewing ash, I feel terrible like I want to run away,” she said
Indonesian Disaster -Management Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said 367,548 people were still living in shelters yesterday, about 30,000 fewer than on Sunday.
“We expect more to go home today,” he added.
The death toll rose as teams reached deeper into the danger zone and found the dead strewn in the grey ash where they had been caught in blistering jets of gas and rock known as pyroclastic flows.
Most of the 259 dead died when the volcano, a sacred landmark in Javanese tradition whose name translates as “Mountain of Fire,” exploded on Nov. 5 in its biggest eruption in more than a century.
Merapi spewed clouds of gas and ash as high as 4km on Sunday, but Subandrio said this was “small compared to the 14km in previous days.”
“It’s safe for people to go home as long as they stay outside the danger zone,” he added.
The government has maintained the 20km danger zone for Sleman district, on the southern slopes of the mountain, as “there’s still a probability of heat clouds going in that direction,” he said.
The airport at Yogyakarta, the capital of Central Java Province, has been closed for almost a week because of the threat of ash to passing aircraft, affecting dozens of domestic and international flights.
Aviation officials said they were to make a decision later yesterday about whether to maintain the closure.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate