TANGERANG, Indonesia, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Indonesia has reopened its main airport in Jakarta and four others 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. It 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 the vicinity.
Four other airports, including a smaller one in Jakarta and another in the neighbouring city of Bandung, also reopened on Tuesday.
Another airport had already reopened on Monday, while two remain closed.
Alvin Pratama Putra, 31, who arrived at the Soekarno-Hatta on Sunday to travel to South Korea for work, said his cancelled flight had now been rescheduled to Thursday.
“What can you do? It’s the nature. It’s dangerous for the plane if you force it,” he said, adding that he had been sleeping on a bench at the airport.
Dudy said authorities still needed to check on the airworthiness of the 178 planes that were at Soekarno-Hatta during 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 all the shuttered airports, Chief Infrastructure Minister Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono said on Monday.
Anak Krakatau erupted again three times on Tuesday morning, the volcano monitoring agency said. The severity of these eruptions was not immediately known. Anak Krakatau remains at level 3 in the four-tiered alert system.
The volcano 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 and Yuddy Cahya Budiman; Editing by Christopher Cushing and John Mair)
