New | 19,000 flee as eruptions of Indonesia’s Sinabung volcano intensify

A rumbling volcano in western Indonesia that has been spewing lava and clouds of gas high into the sky let out a new, powerful burst on Tuesday, prompting warnings for airplanes and triggering panic among villagers, officials said.

More than 19,000 people have been displaced by Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra province, which has been erupting for months and which shot lava and searing gas into the air nine times overnight, the nation’s disaster mitigation agency spokesman, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, said on Tuesday.

The volcano started spitting clouds of gas and lava as high as 7,000 metres in the air late on Monday, but no casualties were reported.

Villagers have been evacuated from areas within a danger zone 5 kilometres around the crater to temporary shelters. Authorities had raised the alert status for Sinabung to the highest level in November.

Gray ash covered villages, farms and trees as far as 70 kilometres southeast of the mountain.

“Mount Sinabung remains on the highest alert level and we have warned there should be no human activity within a five-kilometre radius of the crater,” Nugroho said.