Indonesia rescuers find last missing hiker on volcano, death toll rises to 23
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Mount Marapi on the island of Sumatra spewed an ash tower 3,000m into the sky on Dec 3 as 75 people hiked in the area.
PHOTO: VIA REUTERS
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AGAM, Indonesia - The last hiker missing after a volcano eruption in Indonesia was found dead on Dec 6, rescuers said, raising the death toll to 23 three days after the disaster.
Mount Marapi on the island of Sumatra spewed an ash tower 3,000m – taller than the volcano itself – into the sky on Dec 3 as 75 people hiked in the area.
Hundreds of rescuers worked tirelessly to find the missing hikers, some of whom had to be carried down the mountain in body bags in an arduous search effort hampered by more eruptions and bad weather that sometimes forced workers to take shelter.
“The joint search and rescue team has found one victim of the Mount Marapi eruption, who is now in the process of being evacuated,” Mr Abdul Malik, head of the Padang Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters on Dec 6.
Basarnas, the national search and rescue agency, earlier identified the final hiker as a woman.
The news came after Mr Suharyono, the West Sumatra police chief who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told reporters late on Dec 5 that the last hiker was feared dead.
“Twenty-three people are suspected to have died. We all prayed they all could be rescued, but there was nothing we could do, God and nature had made a decision,” he said.
Marapi, which means Mountain of Fire, was still billowing a column of smoke into the sky on Dec 6 morning before another eruption just after midday.
Officials monitoring the volcano detected at least five more eruptions on Dec 5 as the search went on.
‘Some jumped’
Fifty-two people were rescued, and some of the survivors described their panic after the eruption started.
“I was zig-zagging, going down around 30m to 40m” to a trekking post, 22-year-old Ridho told AFP from a bed in a nearby hospital.
“The eruption sounded loud, I took a look behind me and then immediately ran away as everyone did. Some jumped and fell. I took cover behind the rocks, there were no trees there.”
Mr Suharyono said on the evening of Dec 5 that two of the 75 hikers were police officers. One survived and the other one, he suspected, had died.
“They both just wanted to see the volcano; they were off duty,” he said.
“One of them survived and had a broken arm, he is being treated by doctors. For the other one, we suspected he died. Let’s wait for confirmation.”
The head of Indonesia’s volcanology agency, Mr Hendra Gunawan, said Marapi has been at the second level of a four-tier alert system since 2011, and a 3km exclusion zone had been imposed around its crater.
He appeared to blame hikers after the eruption for going too close to the crater, saying the agency recommended no activity in that area.
The official number of hikers given by officials was sourced to an online registration system, but officials warned there could have been more on illegal routes.
“Maybe there were hikers who were not registered, and sometimes illegal hikers did not want to pay, they just climbed,” said Mr Suharyono.
Indonesia experiences frequent seismic and volcanic activity due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide. Marapi is the most active volcano on Sumatra island and one of the archipelago’s nearly 130 active volcanoes. AFP
