Indonesia volcano grounds 270,000 passengers as ash forces airport closures

A volcano 150 kilometers southwest of Jakarta erupted late Friday, and by Monday morning, a quarter-million people were stuck. Anak Krakatau—the name means Child of Krakatoa—sent lava fountains into the air and pushed volcanic ash so high that it reached 6,000 meters on the Java side and 15,000 meters toward Sumatra. The ash drifted into the capital and across Lampung province, forcing authorities to close four major airports, including Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International, the country's largest hub. More than 2,000 flights were grounded. By Monday afternoon, the closures were set to extend through 6 p.m. local time, with no certainty they would lift even then.

At Soekarno-Hatta on Monday, the departure halls filled with long lines of stranded passengers. Some were trying to get refunds. Others simply wanted to know when they might leave. A Malaysian couple, newly married, had spent a week in Bali and expected to fly home to Kuala Lumpur on Sunday. Instead, they were told the next available flight wouldn't depart until September 11—five days away. Amir Hamzah, 29, told Malaysia's national news agency that he and his wife had budgeted only for their honeymoon. They had planned to sleep a few hours at the airport and catch the morning flight. Now they faced nearly a week of unexpected expenses in a country they had no plans to stay in. Suhardi, a 58-year-old traveling from Jakarta to Lampung for work, took a different view. He told Reuters he had no choice but to accept what nature had delivered. He was simply waiting for the airline's next update.

The volcano remained seismically active throughout the weekend. The most recent eruption occurred at 8:23 p.m. on Sunday. Indonesia's Geological Agency warned on Monday that the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remained high. Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said authorities could not predict when the closures would end because of the dynamic weather conditions. At each of the affected airports, staff were conducting ash tests every 30 minutes, trying to determine whether the spread was widening or beginning to subside. Schools in the region had moved classes online. Some shipping operations through the Sunda Strait, where the volcano sits roughly midway between Java and Sumatra, were also disrupted.

Authorities established a 3-kilometer exclusion zone around the active crater and prohibited ships from entering a similar radius in the strait. There was no tsunami warning. The volcano sits in a region of extraordinary geological activity. Anak Krakatau emerged from the sea at the start of the 20th century, growing in the caldera left behind by Mount Krakatoa's catastrophic 1883 eruption. In December 2018, part of Anak Krakatau collapsed, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 400 people and displaced and injured thousands more on the coasts of Java and Sumatra. Scientists later measured some of the rock chunks that had slid from the volcano at 70 to 90 meters high. The volcano sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000-kilometer arc of volcanoes and tectonic activity that stretches from South America to New Zealand and contains 75 percent of the world's active volcanoes—452 in total. Roughly 90 percent of all earthquakes occur along this zone.

For now, the stranded passengers waited. The ash hung in the air. The volcano continued to rumble. Authorities tested the airspace every half hour, watching for any sign that it might be safe to fly again.