In the shadow of Indonesia’s active volcanoes, life goes on

Local communities have turned their smoky neighbours into moneymaking opportunities, some even offering ‘lava tours’ in four-wheel-drive vehicles

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Students practise volcano evacuation drills in Bebandem village, Bali, Indonesia, last August. Photo: Putu Sayoga

Published: 9:15am, 5 Jul 2020Updated: 9:47am, 5 Jul 2020

These island dwellers know what it is to exist under constant threat. In Indonesia, hundreds of thousands of people live in the looming shadow of volcanoes that could erupt at any time.

There are no fewer than 130 active volcanoes across the Southeast Asian archipelago – more than in any other country on Earth – and despite having endured the most deadly eruptions since Vesuvius levelled Pompeii, in AD79, many communities in Indonesia live nearby the sources of their possible destruction: for farmers, post-eruption soil is the most fertile.

Most recently, Bali’s Mount Agung erupted in November 2017, displacing more than 140,000 people in its most powerful display since 1963. “Suddenly, day became night and repeatedly you could hear booming sounds while blazing lava was bursting out from the top of the mountain,” reported a resident living 80km away.

At Mount Ijen, in East Java, local sulphur miners work with modest tools, and they do so inside the crater itself. Fifty-five-year-old Ahmad has been mining sulphur here for 40 years. It is hard, manual labour for a product valued at just 1,500 rupiah (80 HK cents) a kilo. When I ask Ahmad if he ever thought of finding another job, he says there were few other options locally for him as a junior school graduate. If he had wanted a different job, he explains, he would have had to have left the village, which he did not want to do.

A miner hauls sulphur out of the crater of Mount Ijen, East Java. Photo: Putu Sayoga

In August 1883, the eruption of Krakatoa was one of the most violent in modern history, killing more than 36,000 people and affecting the climate, causing global temperatures to drop by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius.