Indonesia’s Mt. Lewotobi Laki-Laki erupts again, spewing giant ash plumes miles away
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JAKARTA, Indonesia — Mt. Lewotobi Laki-Laki, one of Indonesia’s most active volcanoes, erupted for a second consecutive day, sending a column of volcanic material and ash as much as 11 miles into the sky early Saturday and blanketing villages with debris.
No casualties were immediately reported.
An eruption Friday evening had sent clouds of ash up to six miles high and lighted up the night sky with glowing lava and bolts of lightning. The two eruptions happened in a span of less than five hours.
Indonesia’s Geology Agency recorded an avalanche of searing gas clouds mixed with rocks and lava traveling three miles down the slopes of the mountain. Drone observations showed deep movement of magma, setting off tremors that registered on seismic monitors.
Volcanic material, including hot thumb-sized gravel, was thrown as far as five miles from the crater, covering nearby villages and towns with thick volcanic residue, the agency said. It asked residents to be vigilant about heavy rainfall that could trigger lava flows in rivers originating from the volcano.
Saturday’s eruption was one of Indonesia’s largest since 2010, when Mt. Merapi, the country’s most volatile volcano, erupted on the densely populated island of Java. That eruption killed more than 350 people and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate.
It also came less than a month after a major eruption on July 7 forced the delay or cancellation of dozens of flights at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport and covered roads and rice fields with thick, gray mud and rocks.
Lewotobi Laki-Laki, a 5,197-foot volcano on the remote island of Flores, has been at the highest alert level since it erupted June 18, and an exclusion zone has been doubled to a 4.3-mile radius as eruptions became more frequent.
The Indonesian government has permanently relocated thousands of residents after a series of eruptions there killed nine people and destroyed thousands of homes in November.
Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 280 million people with frequent seismic activity. It has 120 active volcanoes and sits along the Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped series of seismic fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin that includes California.
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