More than six airports were forced to close on Wednesday as ash from a remote Indonesian volcano traveled as far as Malaysia, officials said. Authorities also hastened to evacuate thousands of people out of fear of a tsunami.
On Tuesday, Mount Ruang erupted three times, sending ash and lava more than three miles (five kilometers) skyward and causing authorities to order 12,000 residents to evacuate.
Because there was a warning that pieces of the volcano could fall into the sea and trigger a tsunami, a warship and a rescue ship were sent to assist in moving hundreds of people from nearby Tagulandang island north to Siau island.
Rosalin Salindeho, a 95-year-old resident of Tagulandang in Indonesia’s outermost region of North Sulawesi province, spoke of her fears when Ruang erupted after arriving in Siau.
“The mountain exploded. Wow, it was horrible. There were rains of rocks. Twice. The second one was really heavy, even the houses far away were also hit,” she said.
On Wednesday morning, the nation’s meteorological service (BMKG) released a map demonstrating that volcanic ash has spread to eastern Malaysia on Borneo island, which it shares with Brunei and Indonesia.
According to a notification from the state-run air traffic control provider AirNav Indonesia, the spread of volcanic ash forced the closure of seven airports, the largest of which is in the provincial capital Manado and the city of Gorontalo.
The head of the Mount Ruang monitoring site, Julius Ramopolii, said that on Wednesday morning, the volcano was still spewing smoke and ash above the crater.
“The volcano is visibly seen, the plume of smoke is visible, grey and thick, and reached 500-700 metres (2,300 feet) above the crater,” he said in a statement.
He urged residents to stay outside of a seven-kilometer exclusion zone and stated that the alert level, which is part of a four-tiered system, was still at its highest.
Recent experience informed the anxieties about tsunamis.
In 2018, a significant eruption caused large portions of Mount Anak Krakatoa to fall into the ocean, causing a tsunami that claimed thousands of lives and left over 400 injured. The crater is located between the Java and Sumatra islands.
Indonesia is a huge archipelago nation that is situated on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” which causes regular earthquake and volcanic activity.
