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Death toll from Indonesian volcano climbs to 56

05 November 2010 01:40 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A deadly surge of blistering gases cascaded down the slopes of Indonesia’s most volatile volcano Friday, torching houses in one mountainside village and triggering a chaotic midnight evacuation. At least 12 people were killed in the inferno and 50 others injured, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com website.
Men with ash-covered faces streamed down Mount Merapi on motorcycles and women and crying children packed into trucks, as officials announced over loudspeakers that they were again expanding the volcano’s "danger zone."
Even staff at the mountain’s main monitoring post were told to move farther from the glowing crater.
Mount Merapi, which means "Fire Mountain," has killed 56 people since bursting back to life on Oct. 26.
Though scientists earlier expressed hope dozens of big explosions in the last week would ease pressure building up behind a magma dome high up in the crater, eruptions Friday appeared to be intensifying.
"We have no idea what to expect now," said Surono, a state expert on volcanos, adding that he has never seen the needle on Merapi’s seismograph working with such intensity.
Towering clouds of ash shot from the crater with a thunder-like roar on Thursday morning, sending soot 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) into the air and dusting towns up to 150 miles (250 kilometers) away.
Just before midnight, Merapi unleashed a deadly surge of searing ash, gases and rock fragments. Known to experts as pyroclastic flows, such clouds race down the slopes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour).
Though more than 75,000 people living along Merapi’s fertile slopes have been evacuated to crowded emergency shelters, many by force, others are reluctant to leave their precious livestock and homes.
It is not clear how many people were in the village of Bronggang, nine miles (15 kilometers) from the crater, when the heat cloud hit.
Waluyo Raharjo, a search and rescue official, was on the scene as at least 12 bodies were pulled from burned homes. Soldiers helped load the corpses into vehicles, delivering them to a hospital morgue.
A 3-year-old girl was killed in the inferno, said Pangardi, a forensic expert at Sardjito hospital, where the wounded were being treated.
Priyo Sigit Utomo, a paramedic, told MetroTV another 50 people had been brought in with injuries, most of them with severe burns.
It was not immediately clear if all were from the village.
Activity at the mountain has at times briefly forced airports in Yogyakarta and nearby Solo to close and the Transportation Ministry reiterated Thursday that flight paths near the mountain had been shut down for safety reasons. Heavy ash and volcanic debris has been known to affect visibility and clog engines.
Officials insisted, however, that a Qantas jetliner forced to make an emergency landing after one of its four engines failed over Batam, an island 800 miles (1,400 kilometers) to the west, was unrelated.
"There was no connection with Mount Merapi," said Bambang Ervan, a spokesman for the Transportation Ministry. "It was too far from the volcano â€” the sky over Singapore and Sumatra island is free of dust."
Merapi has erupted many times in the last century, often with deadly results. In 1994, 60 people were killed, while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were torched, leaving up to 1,300 dead.
Subandrio, a state volcanologist, said Mount Merapi’s "danger zone" was widened by three miles (five kilometers) early Friday. With that order, people living in villages and emergency camps within 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the crater have to move.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanos because it sits along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the Pacific Ocean.
The volcano’s initial blast occurred less than 24 hours after a towering tsunami slammed into the remote Mentawai islands on the western end of the country, sweeping entire villages to sea and killing at least 428 people.
There, too, thousands of people were displaced, many living in government camps.