Mount Sinabung eruption: Authorities have warned of possible lava flows and other eruptions.
Medan, Indonesia:
Mount Sinabung in Indonesia erupted on Monday, spewing a massive column of ash and smoke 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) into the air and plunging local communities into darkness with a thick layer of debris.
The volcano on the island of Sumatra has been raging since 2010 and had a fatal eruption in 2016.
Activity had resumed in recent days, including a pair of small breakouts over the weekend.
There were no reports of injuries or deaths from Monday morning’s explosion, but authorities warned of possible lava flows and other eruptions.
“It is an alert for all of us to avoid the red zone areas near Sinabung,” said Armen Putera, a local official at the Indonesian Volcanology and Geological Risk Mitigation Center.
However, the crater’s state of alert remained at its second highest level.
Pray for Indonesia. Mount Sinabung volcano. #Indonesiapic.twitter.com/vpTc0TRMjs
– sudhansu.f (@isudhans) Aug 10, 2020
No one lives inside a previously announced no-go zone around the volcano.
Small neighboring communities were covered with a thick layer of ash as at least one village went from day to night in minutes.
“It was like magic – when the ashes came, they went from very light to dark as night,” said Rencana Sitepu, the village chief of Namanteran, adding that some of the cultures in the community had been destroyed by fallout.
“The village went dark for about 20 minutes.”
The coronavirus pandemic complicated matters as frightened residents violated safety regulations.
“Residents were gathering after the eruption without using masks because they were all panicking,” said the head of the local disaster agency Natanael Perangin-angin.
Sinabung came back to life in 2010 for the first time in 400 years. After another period of inactivity it broke out again in 2013 and has been very active ever since.
In 2016, seven people died in one of the eruptions, while another in 2014 killed 16.
At the end of 2018, a volcano in the strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra erupted, causing an underwater landslide and tsunami that killed more than 400 people.
Indonesia is home to approximately 130 active volcanoes due to its position on the “Ring of Fire”, a belt of tectonic plate boundaries surrounding the Pacific Ocean where frequent seismic activity occurs.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
