Some 270,000 passengers have been left stranded across Indonesia after a volcanic eruption grounded more than 2,000 flights and forced airports to suspend operations for a second day.
Anak Krakatau, located 150km (90mi) from Jakarta, began erupting late on Friday, producing lava fountains and sending volcanic ash into the capital and the Lampung province. It stayed seismically active throughout the weekend.
Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International and three other airports have extended closures till 18:00 local time on Monday after volcanic ash was detected in airspaces near them.
Schools in the region moved classes online while some shipping operations were also disrupted.
Snaking queues formed at the departure halls in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Monday as stranded passengers sought refunds and tried to get updates on when they would be able to fly.
Finna, who was supposed to fly home to Jakarta from Malang, a city in East Java, on Sunday morning, described the frezny at the airport as flights got repeatedly rescheduled.
“It was very crowded because passengers from the morning flights had piled up, while those scheduled for later departures still didn’t know what would happen,” the 46-year-old told BBC Indonesian.
“We were all glued to the flight information screens.”
Not wanting to deal with the uncertainty, Finna eventually spent the night on two intercity trains before arriving in Jakarta at 03:00 on Monday.
“Everyone seems to be racking their brains [figuring alternative transportation options]”, said Jo Shaw, who was visiting Indonesia with members of her conservation charity Save the Rhino International.
Shaw’s team had axed their plans to camp out at Java’s Ujung Kulon National Park after authorities raised its alert level for the Anak Krakatau volcano.
“Being stranded in an airport hotel is a relatively minor inconvenience to be resolved in a few days hopefully,” Shaw said, adding that she was more concerned about the teams working on the ground with the rhinos under such environmental conditions.
A newly wed Malaysian couple who had just spent a week in Bali said they were told that the next flight back to Kuala Lumpur wouldn’t be until 11 September.
“What are we going to do here for another five days? We only prepared enough money for our honeymoon and [were supposed] to go home yesterday,” Amir Hamzah told Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama.
“We thought we would just sleep at the airport for a few hours and then take the morning flight home [on Monday]. We never thought we would end up being stuck here for days,” the 29-year-old said.
On Monday, Indonesia’s Geological Agency warned that “the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remains high”.
Volcanic ash reached as high as 6,000m on the Java side of the volcano and 15,000m on the Sumatra side and in some parts of Java’s westernmost province Banten, the meteorological agency BMKG said.
Anak Krakatau sits on the Sunda Strait about midway between the islands of Java and Sumatra.
The most recent eruption occurred at 20:23 on Sunday, according to the agency.
“We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said in relation to the temporary closures of the affected airports.
Dudy said on Sunday that authorities across the airports have been conducting tests every 30 minutes “to anticipate whether the ash spread is widening or subsiding”.
ReutersAuthorities have warned against approaching or engaging in activities within a 3km radius from the active crater, while ships passing through the Sunda Strait have also been prohibited from entering an exclusion zone of 3km radius from it.
Authorities have also confirmed there is no tsunami warning linked to the recent activity of the volcano.
Anak Krakatau, which means Child of Krakatoa, has been sporadically active since it emerged from the sea at the beginning of last century in the caldera formed after the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa.
The volcano collapsed in December 2018 triggering a huge tsunami which killed over 400 people, and displaced and injured thousands more on the nearby coastlines of Sumatra and Java.
Scientists found that some of the chunks of rock that slid from the volcano when it collapsed were about 70-90m high.
The Pacific Ring of Fire refers to a string of volcanoes, earthquake sites and tectonic plates around the Pacific. It spreads across 40,000km (25,000 miles) from the southern tip of South America all the way to New Zealand.
Roughly 90% of all earthquakes occur along the area and the ring is dotted with 75% of all active volcanoes on Earth, that’s 452 individual active volcanoes.
With reporting by Farida Susanty in Jakarta and Koh Ewe in Singapore
