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Eruptions continued for a second straight day at Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung.
The volcano has been inactive for over 400 years, and the sudden eruptions of the past two days have shot enough ash into the that local plane traffic has been diverted and some 30,000 people have had to be evacuated from their homes on the slope of the volcano. Residents have had to done masks to keep out the ash as they pack their belonging and head to churches and mosques that have become evacuation centers.
Two people have died, one from respiratory problems and one from heart failure, but they have yet to be directly attributed to the volcano.
Supplies are being sent to the scene, including food, medicine, and over 17,000 respiratory masks.
Indonesia has a history of volcanic eruptions, due to the island nation falling along the ring of fire. The ring of fire is a series of fault lines around the Pacific ocean with some volcanoes in the Americas and in the eastern hemisphere.
A pair of blasts in the 1800’s were particularly devastating. Indonesia’s Mount Tambora killed an estimated 88,000 people in 1815, while Krakatoa in 1883 killed 36,000 in its eruption and the subsequent tsunami.
Alain Bernard, a professor at the University of Brussels, said that such a large scale eruption was unlikely. He said that sort of eruption is a “rare event and unlikely to appear during the following days. It takes normally weeks or months.”
Despite this, observers are still unsure about the eruption pattern of the long dormant peak. They have only begun monitoring it in the past few days as a result of the current activity.
An evacuation order was issued for a four mile radius around the volcano. It spewed ash for over 6 hours on Monday. Officials said the eruption was visible from ten miles away.
