The Dukono tragedy is about gaps in safety, not reckless hikers

On the morning of May 8, Dukono, a volcano in Galela, North Halmahera, erupted. Twenty hikers were on its slopes when it did – nine of them Singaporean nationals, 11 Indonesian. Three did not make it down. The bodies of the two Singaporeans were found two days later, buried under volcanic ash and crushed by boulders, approximately 50m from the summit. International media covered the story widely. I am a resident who grew up at the foot of this mountain, and I read all of that coverage with a feeling I find difficult to put into words.

It was not grief that I read about. What dominated the comment sections across platforms, including Singapore-based media, was blame. The hikers were called reckless, irresponsible, even foolish. That easy narrative misses a great deal. This piece is my attempt to offer what the news did not.

Too many people have been pulled into a discourse shaped by viral content logic, one that produces the conclusion that the hikers made their own choice and deserved the consequences. I want to challenge that. There is a fuller story here, and it begins with how we, the people who live near Dukono, have always understood this mountain, and with the widening gap between Dukono’s exploding popularity and the safety information systems that never grew alongside it.

Dukono as the locals know it

Growing up, we watched Dukono erupt almost every day. It was ordinary. An eruption in the morning did not stop teenagers from planning a climb that same afternoon. The villagers knew the deer-hunting trails winding behind the mountain by heart. Passing near the crater rim was no different from walking the path behind one’s own house. Nobody taught us to fear Dukono, because nobody had ever shown us a reason to.

Dukono was a familiar landscape. Its worst eruptions produced ash fall, something people here had long lived with and never considered a serious threat. What we did not know, and what was never adequately communicated to us, is that Dukono carries geological risks that far exceed what the senses can detect.

This volcano has been in a state of continuous eruption since 1933. Since December 2024, Indonesia’s Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation has issued warnings against activity within a 4km radius of the crater. Since March 2026, the intensity of its eruptions had increased sharply. Not one piece of that information reached us in a form we could understand and act on.

The only ferocity of Dukono held in our collective memory exists in local folklore. People here believe that the frozen lava fields stretching along the north-eastern corridor of the mountain are the remnants of an eruption that buried their ancestors alive, hundreds of years ago. That story was passed down as memory, not as a warning. Nobody ever turned it into knowledge that could protect anyone.

Whatever limits existed around Dukono were not shaped by science-based regulation. They came from traditional knowledge passed quietly across generations. Do not build settlements near cold lava channels. Do not clear land all the way towards the summit. Do not overexploit the resources at the mountain’s base. These were values the community observed on their own, without needing formal prohibition from any authority. But that traditional knowledge was never translated into a language of risk that outsiders could understand, let alone foreign visitors who arrived knowing only what they had seen on a social media feed.

Mr Alex Djangu, a local mountain guide who was on Dukono that day with two German tourists, had flown a drone to inspect the crater conditions hours before the major eruption. The crater was already filled with volcanic material. That was not normal. Yet there was no security post, no forest warden, no functioning warning system to stop any group from continuing upward. Mr Djangu himself told CNN that at Dukono, there is no checkpoint controlling entry or exit routes. In conditions like that, individual vigilance, however high, cannot substitute for the systems that should have been in place.

They did not come to die

Dukono’s danger does not cancel out what makes this mountain so compelling. Its volcanic ash has made the surrounding land extraordinarily fertile, sustaining agriculture and plantations that provide livelihoods for many families. The crater itself holds a landscape that is almost singular on this earth. Around its rim stretches a desert formed over hundreds of years. In the distance, the Pacific Ocean extends as if without end. Along the climbing trails below, hornbills play in the rainforest canopy.

For those drawn to extreme adventure, the sights and sounds of Dukono settle into the bone – the low roar of its volcanic activity, the burst of ash, the glow of lava rising from below. This is the kind of experience serious adventurers travel the world to find. Not for content. For something far deeper than that.

Dukono’s charms were broadcast to the wider public by hikers who filled social media with photographs and footage. One of them was Mr Reza Selang, better known by the name Anak Esa, a content creator who documented the natural beauty of North Maluku through drone footage he shared without commercial motivation. He did it because he loved this place. Mr Reza was one of the guides accompanying the tourists who became victims on May 8. He descended the mountain alive, carrying a weight that will not lift easily.

Did this tragedy happen because of content creation? I think that is a gross oversimplification. Those visitors came to Dukono hoping to witness its beauty for themselves. They did not come to die. They came to live more fully. I understand why they went, because I grew up in the same place and know its pull. They went as thousands of hikers before them had gone, with an incomplete understanding of what they were truly facing. That incompleteness was not theirs alone to own.

The gap we need to talk about

While people are still grieving, assigning blame serves no one. The rescue teams acted with extraordinary courage in conditions that put their own lives at risk. Volunteers dug with bare hands through slippery black volcanic ash, in dense fog, with landslides threatening from above. The victims and their guides arrived at Dukono the way hikers have always arrived, trusting that the mountain could be visited, a trust that no existing system had ever actively contradicted.

What we need to talk about is the structural gap that made a tragedy like this possible, and that will almost certainly produce another one if nothing changes. Indonesia is a country threaded by the Pacific Ring of Fire. Its hundreds of volcanoes hold genuine potential as tourism destinations, including for the extreme adventure travel that is growing in demand worldwide. But the frameworks for managing visitor safety vary enormously across the archipelago.

At established destinations such as Rinjani or Semeru, management systems are fairly standardised. At places like Dukono, where popularity grew organically through social media without any corresponding growth in safety infrastructure, what exists is a void. No checkpoint. No warden. No mechanism that actively delivers warning information to anyone about to climb, let alone in a language a foreign visitor could understand.

The question is not whether people should be barred from reaching the most extraordinary places on this earth. The question is why information that could save lives never reached them before they took that first step. The hikers were doing what human beings have always done, reaching towards the edges of their world to feel something real. They deserved better information and better systems. The tragedy of May 8 ought to be the moment we stop blaming people who can no longer speak for themselves, and start asking serious questions about the systems that let them go without adequate protection.