Over 11,000 people in Indonesia have been ordered to leave the inhabited area close to the Ruang volcano after multiple eruptions in the last two days, as worries of a tsunami caused by the volcano’s collapse intensified on Thursday, according to Al Jazeera.
The volcanology agency had to raise the alert level to four, the highest on the scale, after Mount Ruang, in the North Sulawesi Province, erupted four times the following day, starting at 9:45 p.m. on Tuesday.
Additionally, the EPA expanded the four-kilometer exclusion zone to six kilometers around the crater.
Originally, more than 800 residents of Ruang were evacuated to Tagulandang Island, which is more than 100 kilometers north of Manado.
On Thursday morning, however, authorities declared that additional people would have to be evacuated to Manado owing to a spreading zone.
According to the Kompas newspaper, Abdul Muhari, the director of the disaster agency’s catastrophe data, communications, and information center, “at least 11,615 residents who are in the risk area must evacuate to a safe place.”
