Indonesia’s Deadly Volcano Erupts Again

MAGUWOHARJO, Indonesia — A powerful overnight eruption of Mount Merapi created chaos for Indonesia’s disaster response effort on Friday after an explosion of hot gases and debris killed scores of people and sent more than 160,000 villagers fleeing to underprepared evacuation camps.

At least 64 people were killed by the latest eruption, which was by far the largest since the volcano on central Java Island started spewing ash and gas on Oct. 26. The latest eruption brings the total death toll to 109, said Andi Arief, the disaster adviser to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

The eruption sent a pyroclastic flow of superheated gases and debris racing down Merapi’s slopes. Tens of thousands rushed to abandon camps previously considered safe as ash and hot debris rained down as far as the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta.

Most of those killed were villagers engulfed by a rush of hot gases that hit the hamlets of Argomulyo and Bronggang about 12 kilometers, or 7.5 miles, from the volcano’s rim, blasting homes, people and animals, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the disaster preparedness chief of the National Disaster Management Agency.

“They lived in a bend in the Gendol River. So when the pyroclastic flow launched down the river, it hit the bend and crashed into the villages,” Mr. Nugroho said.

“They’d been told to evacuate, there were a lot of soldiers up there to get them out but a lot of people had gone up using small roads so got up there undetected,” he said.

Heavy white ash covered the runways at the airport in nearby Yogyakarta, forcing it to close Friday, The Associated Press reported. It was not clear when it would reopen.

The latest, unexpected eruption prompted authorities to extend the evacuation radius around Mount Merapi to 20 kilometers, or 12.5 miles, from 15 kilometers. An earlier eruption the day before had caused it to be extended from an initial 10 kilometers.

Despite chaos as authorities abandoned previous havens, Mr. Nugroho said it was the right approach to keep evacuees so close to the erupting volcano.

“It wasn’t a mistake, but Merapi’s character has been hard to predict,” he said. “If from the start we’d said to evacuate 20 kilometers, or 25 kilometers, there would have been major consequences. It would have triggered panic in the community.”

With tens of thousands evacuating camps, and tens of thousands more abandoning villages, police, troops and aid workers struggled to deal with crowds at new collection points further away from the smoldering mountain.

At the Maguwoharjo Stadium on Yogyakarta’s outer fringe, nearly 30,000 people arrived covered in dust to take shelter in squalid spaces underneath concrete awnings. Outside, the sky was obscured by swirling gray-brown ash.

Sutarjo, a neighbourhood chief from the village of Wukirsari — which was designated safe before the eruption early Thursday — said villagers and evacuees from up the mountain who were sheltering in the neighborhood fled in terror as the mountain boomed and hot debris rained from the sky.

“It was a real panic. I was responsible for 142 people and it was tough finding vehicles to deal with this,” Mr. Sutarjo said, adding that he was unable to get help from police or soldiers and was forced to run for a kilometer, or about half a mile, to find vehicles to carry the evacuees.

“The government from the start said it they only needed 10 kilometers” to evacuate, he said. “But they were wrong.”

“Thank God, we’re all safe,” he said, adding that he planned to take a group of village men back through the evacuation zone at night to tend to livestock left behind.

Relief workers at the stadium said the surprising strength of the eruption meant that the growing camp was disorganized.

“It’s still chaos,” said Endang Pujiastuti, a member of the local disaster-management committee, as soldiers unloaded boxes of water and instant food and Red Cross volunteers recorded arrivals.

“We’d already set this up as a place and decided where people from different district should go, but we weren’t ready for this to happen so fast,” she said.

The scale of the latest eruption prompted President Yudhoyono to transfer responsibility for the response from local agencies to the national disaster agency, as well as ordering the addition of more police and soldiers.

“We don’t want decision making in a crises like this to be long and drawn out,” he said.

The government would also compensate evacuated villagers for lost livestock so they would not be tempted to return to their farms, Mr. Yudhoyono said.

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