JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities scrambled to deal with two deadly disasters on Tuesday after a tsunami and volcanic eruptions struck in separate regions of the vast archipelago.
In the first, rescue workers and fishermen searched for survivors in waters west of Sumatra Island after a powerful earthquake and a resulting tsunami late Monday killed at least 113 people and left hundreds missing, officials said. Thousands more were homeless. About 800 miles to the east, on the island of Java, thousands of villagers were fleeing multiple eruptions of Indonesia’s most volatile volcano, Mount Merapi, after it began spewing clouds of hot ash in the early evening Tuesday. Twenty-five people have died, and at least 15 people were injured.
Much of Indonesia lies in the seismically active Pacific “ring of fire,” a series of fault lines stretching from the Western Hemisphere through Japan and Southeast Asia. Experts said that the quake was not big enough to have disturbed the volcano, and that the two events were most likely not related.
The tsunami, set off by a 7.7-magnitude undersea quake, slammed into the southern part of the remote Mentawai Islands, wreaking havoc in villages and, the authorities believe, sweeping scores out to sea. The islands are a popular destination for foreign surfers, particularly Australians. The surge reached as high as 10 feet and advanced as far as 2,000 feet inland, officials at the Health Ministry’s crisis center said.
The earthquake occurred along the same fault that produced a 9.1-magnitude quake on Dec. 26, 2004, spawning a tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean. The hardest-hit area was in Aceh Province in northern Sumatra.
Monday’s quake was along a shorter section of the fault, about 500 miles southeast of the 2004 rupture, that last had a major quake in 1833, said Leonardo Seeber, a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, N.Y.
David Walsh, an oceanographer at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, said that the center issued a “local tsunami watch” seven minutes after the earthquake occurred, but that a “destructive widespread threat” did not exist. The warning was canceled several hours later.
Mr. Walsh said the watch bulletin was conveyed to the Indonesian government, which issued its own watch but canceled it even earlier than the center did. He said a bulletin would not have spared people on the islands because they were within about 60 miles of the quake’s epicenter and the tsunami would have hit within minutes.
At one surf resort, a wall of water smashed wooden bungalows and left a tour boat in flames on the beach, said Rini Arif, a booking agent in Padang, on Sumatra. “Everyone survived because when the quake struck they ran into our cafe, which is three stories high,” she said. “When they saw the burning boat, they all gathered upstairs.”
The scale of the destruction did not become clear until Tuesday, as rescuers and local officials crossed a Sumatran strait to reach the islands. Much of the search is at sea.
Nine Australians who were aboard a tourist boat and thought to be missing earlier are now safe, according to a representative for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Priyadi Kardono, the spokesman for the National Disaster Management Agency, said high waves and rough waters had meant outside authorities had still not reached some remote areas in the Mentawais.
“The data can still change because there are still a number of districts where we haven’t been able to get reports, where we’re still having communication problems,” he said.
At Mount Merapi, the authorities had anticipated an eruption for days, preparing refuges and medical and disaster response teams as the mountain rumbled.
On Tuesday, the pressure building up beneath a lava dome finally produced four explosions starting around 5 p.m. that sent smoke and debris high into the sky, Mr. Kardono said.
All the people in the threatened area on the mountain’s slopes have been evacuated, Mr. Kardono said.
“I just have to follow orders to take shelter here for safety, even though I’d rather like to stay at home,” said Ponco Sumarto, 65, who arrived at one of the camps with her two grandchildren.
Dr. Adi Mulyanto, at the Panti Nugroho Hospital in Sleman, said at least six people had been badly burned by hot air bursting from the volcano, with three suffering burns over 80 percent of their bodies, Reuters reported.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/world/asia/27indo.html?src=mv
