JAKARTA, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Indonesia has reopened its main Jakarta airport and four other airports that had been closed due to volcanic ash from a series of eruptions at Mount Anak Krakatau, transport minister Dudy Purwagandhi said in a statement on Tuesday.
Ash from Anak Krakatau, which sits halfway between Java and Sumatra islands, has blanketed Jakarta and some surrounding areas since its initial eruption late on Friday. That led to the closure of eight airports for safety reasons, with more than 340,000 travellers impacted.
Dudy said the Soekarno-Hatta Airport, Jakarta’s main airport, resumed operations on Tuesday after wind blew the ash away from its surrounding areas. Four other airports, including a smaller one in Jakarta and in the neighbouring city of Bandung, also reopened.
Another airport had reopened on Monday, and two remain closed.
Dudy said authorities still need to check on the airworthiness of the 178 planes that were at Soekarno-Hatta through the closure.
“Perhaps it’ll take some little extra time to prepare the planes,” he said.
Around 341,000 people have been affected by the delay, diversion, or cancellation of 2,961 flights across the closed airports, Chief Infrastructure Minister Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono said on Monday.
Anak Krakatau is one of about 130 active volcanoes in Indonesia, which straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a highly seismically active zone where different plates on the Earth’s crust meet to create a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Anak Krakatau, which means child of Krakatau, began emerging a century ago from the area previously occupied by Krakatau, then known as Krakatoa. The older volcano destroyed itself in mass eruptions in 1883, which killed more than 36,000 people after triggering a series of tsunamis.
(Reporting by Stanley Widianto; Editing by Christopher Cushing and John Mair)
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