By DPA
Jakarta : The Indonesian Armed Police ordered villagers on the slopes of Mount Kelud in East Java to flee their homes Thursday as one of Indonesia’s deadliest volcanoes was threatening to erupt, officials and local media reports said.
Officials in the nearby district of Kediri ordered the evacuation after tremors from within the 1,731-metre volcano began dramatically increasing Thursday morning.
“Yes, we have been ordered today to evacuate people living in the danger zones. The evacuation is now still underway for residents living in danger zone areas,” said Dedi, an official from the government’s emergency response team in Kediri, about 600 km south-east of Jakarta.
Dedi quoted scientists as saying that between 6 am (2300 GMT) and 12 pm Thursday, as many as 570 tremors were recorded inside the volcano, a sharp increase compared to the 16 recorded during the same period Wednesday.
Detik.com online news portal reported that dozens of armed police riding motorcycles went door-to-door in villages within a 10-km radius of the volcano, forcing residents to immediately flee to temporary emergency shelters.
Scientists had placed Mount Kelud on a highest alert level on Oct 16 after dramatic increases in temperature and activity in its crater, and ordered 116,000 people living within the 10-km danger zone from the crater to flee to temporary makeshift shelters. Most of them defied the order.
In the last few days, thousands of people who had heeded the evacuation order returned to their homes on the volcano’s slopes, complaining it was not convenient to stay away for two weeks and defying warnings from local officials and scientists that the risk of a major eruption remained high.
Experts from the nearby monitoring post said the water temperature in the volcano’s 15-metre deep crater remained high and reached 39.5 degrees Celsius Thursday, a pattern similar to before its last major eruption in 1990, when 34 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.
Volcanologists explained that the crater’s temperature was one of many indicators used to predict an eruption and others, such as tremors and deformation of the volcano, were also increasing.
In 1919, Mount Kelud experienced a powerful eruption that destroyed dozens of villages and killed at least 5,160 people.
Indonesia has the world’s highest density of volcanoes, with 500 located in the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire,” where seismic and volcanic activity is common. Of the 500 volcanoes, 128 are active.