Indonesia’s Mount Merapi volcano spewed avalanches of hot clouds in eruptions on Thursday night which forced around 250 residents to flee to temporary shelters and left ash covering nearby villages and towns. No casualties were reported.
The volcano on densely populated island of Java unleashed the clouds of hot ashes at least seven times just before and after midnight and fast-moving pyroclastic flows, a mixture of rock, lava and gas, traveled up 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) down its slopes, said National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Abdul Muhari in A declaration. The rumble sound could be heard several kilometers (miles) from distance.
he said 253 people were evacuated to temporary shelters in Glagaharjo and Umbulharjo villages in Yogyakarta special province and in The Klaten district in Central Java because of dangers on Merapi.
Ash from the eruption blanketed several nearby villages and towns and no casualties were reported, Muhari said.
Residents living on The fertile slopes of the Merapi were advised to stay 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) from the mouth of the crater and should to be aware of the danger posed by lava, the Indonesian Geology and Volcanology Research Agency said.
Mount Merapi is the most active of more over 120 active volcanoes in Indonesia and repeatedly broke out with lava and gas clouds recently. The Center for Volcanology and Mitigation of Geological Risks has not lifted the alert status of Merapi, which already was at second-highest of four levels since it started popping last November.
The 2,968-meter (9,737-foot) peak is near Yogyakarta, a ancient city of several hundred thousand people embedded in a grand subway area. the city East also a center of Javanese culture and a siege of current royal dynasties back centuries.
at Merapi last major eruption in 2010 killed 347 people and caused evacuation of 20,000 villagers.
Indonesia, an archipelago of 270 millions people are prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity car it lies along the “Ring of Fire”, a horseshoe series of seismic fault lines around the Pacific Ocean.
His last major eruption was in December, when Mount Semeru, the highest volcano on The island of Java, in eruption with fury and left 48 people dead and 36 missing in buried villages in layers of mud. Many of the injured were badly burned, and the eruption damaged 5,200 homes and buildings.
