More than 170,000 passengers have had their flights disrupted after a powerful eruption at Mount Anak Krakatau forced the closure of eight Indonesian airports, including two serving the capital Jakarta, Indonesia‘s transport minister said.
The transport ministry said 1,558 flights had been delayed at the eight affected airports, with 963 of those to or from Jakarta’s main airport, Soekarno-Hatta.
More than a dozen flights to and from Bali’s main airport were affected on Sunday, according to Indonesia’s state news agency, Antara.
“Following the increase in volcanic activity at Mount Anak Krakatau, a number of flights at I Gusti Ngurah Rai Bali Airport have been cancelled and/or had their schedules adjusted,” Gede Eka Sandi Asmadi, head of the airport’s communication and legal division, said in a statement.
Most of the cancelled flights were on routes between Bali and Jakarta, operated by Garuda Indonesia, Indonesia AirAsia, TransNusa, Citilink and Pelita Air. Despite the disruption, overall airport operations and services remained normal, Mr Asmadi said.
Anak Krakatau sits halfway between the islands of Java and Sumatra, in the Sunda Strait roughly 150km from Jakarta. Ash from the volcano has blanketed the capital and surrounding areas since it erupted late on Friday, prompting the airport closures on safety grounds.
Soekarno-Hatta will remain closed until 6pm local time (1100 GMT), its operators said on Instagram on Monday. Transport minister Dudy Purwagandhi said the seven other airports, including those serving Jakarta’s neighbouring provinces of Lampung and West Java, would remain closed until at least 8.59am.
“We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” he said in a statement on Monday.
The closures have left passengers stranded and confused at both ends of the region’s busiest air route, with some only finding out their flights had been grounded after reaching the gate.
“I was given my boarding pass. I have already passed immigration. I was already at my gate, then they told us our flight was cancelled and we were asked to go out again,” Muhammad Akbar, a 55-year-old Tanzanian businessman who was due to fly from Jakarta to Bangkok, told CNA. “I understand there is a volcanic eruption but we need solutions.”
“We were still thinking, a two-hour flight should be fine for me, suddenly this thing happened,” Catrine Carina, 31, who is seven months pregnant and was flying from Singapore’s Changi Airport to Indonesia to give birth, told the agency.
She and her husband were among at least 19 Singapore Airlines flights cancelled because of the eruption, and now face uncertainty over whether she will need a new fit-to-fly medical certificate for her rescheduled flight.
The volcano monitoring agency’s website showed the most recent eruption had occurred on Sunday at 8.23pm. The agency warned on Monday that “the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remains high.”
Ash from the eruptions has reached as high as 20,000 feet, or 6,000 metres, on the Java side of the volcano, and 50,000 feet, or 15,000 metres, on the Sumatra side and parts of Banten province in Java, meteorological agency BMKG said on its website.
On Sunday the disaster agency called for people to wear masks while travelling outdoors to avoid breathing in the ash. Schools in Jakarta moved classes online on Monday, the city government said in a statement, without specifying how long the measure would remain in place. Schools in Lampung will also use remote learning to reduce health risks for students, state news agency Antara reported.
Some shipping in the Sunda Strait has also been disrupted, with port authorities telling vessels to increase vigilance and barring ships from a 3km exclusion zone around the volcano.
Lana Saria, the head of Indonesia’s geology agency, warned people against approaching Anak Krakatau, saying material ejected from the volcano could endanger anyone within the exclusion zone. She said the most recent series of eruptions did not have the potential to trigger a tsunami.
Anak Krakatau, whose name means “child of Krakatau”, began emerging from the sea a century ago in the area previously occupied by Krakatau, then known as Krakatoa. That older volcano destroyed itself in mass eruptions in 1883, killing more than 36,000 people in a series of tsunamis. A 2018 tsunami triggered by a partial collapse of Anak Krakatau killed 429 people and displaced thousands more.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire“, where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are frequent.
