©Eddy Billard via Unsplash
A group of 20 hikers went missing on Friday morning when the Dukono volcano in the province of North Moluccas on the Indonesian island of Halmahera suddenly erupted.
For a while there was no trace of the group of hikers. Rescue workers went in search of the tourists and found them badly hurt. Three of them appeared to have lost their lives. All others, meanwhile, could be retrieved alive.
"There are three dead, two foreigners and a resident of the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia," Erlichson Pasaribu, chief of police of North Halmahera province in the Moluccas, told Kompas TV station. They are said to be two people from Singapore and one Indonesian. The bodies of the victims have yet to be recovered.
The eruption was accompanied by a "rumble" and a thick plume of smoke that extended to about 10 kilometers above the summit of Mount Dukono, a volcano in the North Moluccas province. This was reported by Lana Saria, head of the National Bureau of Geology. "The ash is drifting northward, so residential areas and the city of Tobelo should be wary of (...) volcanic ash rain," she stated in a press release.
It is notable that the group of 20 hikers went hiking around this volcano because since April 17, the area within a 4-kilometer radius of the volcano has been officially closed to visitors after scientists observed an increase in volcanic activity. However, it is unclear how far the hikers were from the crater when disaster struck.
©Eddy Billard via Unsplash - illustration image