25,000 villagers flee rumbling Indonesian volcano
Up to 25,000 villagers have been evacuated from the slopes of a rumbling volcano on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island despite assurances by scientists today that the mountain was calming down.
The mass exodus from the slopes of Mount Talang reflects in part the nervousness of people living on Sumatra, which has been hit by almost daily earthquakes in recent weeks and was devastated by the December 26 tsunami.
Rumours spread by SMS text messages warning of more earthquakes, tsunami and volcanic eruptions have added to the sense of panic on the island. A 5.3 earthquake undersea earthquake rocked the city of Padang, close to Talang, this morning, causing further unease but no damage, seismologists said.
The 9,186ft mountain was spewing ash some 1,640ft into the air on Tuesday, but not as high as a day earlier, when the clouds reached 3,280ft, said Surono, from a government-run volcanology centre in Bandung, West Java province.
“However, we are still monitoring the mountain,” said Surono, who goes by a single name.
About 25,000 residents from five villages around the volcano have been evacuated to nearby Solok district, said district chief Djamawan Fauzi. Many are returning to their homes during the day to tend crops and look after their animals, another official said.
“The volcano has not yet spewed lava from the crater, but in order to anticipate such an incident, we have evacuated those living around the mountain to safer areas,” Fauzi said.
The villagers are staying in tents and public buildings like schools and mosques.
“We first heard the eruption at about 3.30 am (on Tuesday) followed by some thundering sounds,” said Amrizal Rangkayo, a 42-year-old man now living in a tent in Air Batumbo, a village around five miles from Talang. “That frightened us and therefore we fled our villages.”
Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was scheduled to visit the region in west Sumatra, some 560 miles north west of Jakarta, to try and calm the villagers, his spokesman said.
The mountain is among at least 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation. The country is part of the Pacific “Ring of Fire” - a series of volcanoes and fault lines stretching from the Western Hemisphere through Japan and south east Asia.
They regularly smoke and rumble, but panic on the scale generated by Talang’s eruption is rare.
