A volcano on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali erupted twice on Monday.
Mount Agung’s first eruption, which occurred at around 6:19 a.m., lasted three minutes and 47 seconds.
The second eruption blasted thick ash 6,500-feet (2000 meters) into the air, with lava bleeding down the slopes of the volcano at around 9 p.m. The eruption lasted nearly a whole seven minutes.
Lava flowed up to 1.2 miles (two kilometers) from the crater, said the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) according to the ABC.
The agency said they didn’t raise an evacuation alert for the exclusion zone which is only 2.5 miles (four kilometers) from the crater. But 700 people living within 3.7 miles (six kilometers) of the crater escaped to an evacuation center anyway, the ABC reported.
The expelled ash in the sky didn’t enter into any flight paths, with flights and the airport unaffected by the volcanic activity.
Devy Kamil Syahbana, an official of the Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center (PVMBG), said that the eruption was “strombolian,” which is the mildest type of volcanic eruption, The Jakarta Post reported.
Flights were canceled when Mount Agung in northeast Bali erupted on June 28—the international airport and nearby airports closed for about 12 hours, Express reported.
The airport closed at 3 a.m. on June 29 and reopened later the same day at 2.30 p.m. said Israwadi, corporate secretary of Indonesia’s state-owned airport operator Angkasa Pura I, The Straits Times reported.
The last time Agung staged a major eruption was in 1963, when more than 1,000 people died and several villages on its slopes were razed. The volcano is located 45 miles (70 kilometers) away from Kuta, a popular tourist destination in Bali.
The airport on Bali reopened on Friday after ash had forced a brief closure and the cancellation of more than 300 flights.
Mount Agung is a part of the “Ring of Fire“—a string of volcanoes and earthquakes-prone areas. 90% of earthquakes occur within this ring and 75% of all active volcanoes on the Earth are located here. Although it is called a ring, it is more accurately a horseshoe.
Reuters contributed to this article.
Video Credit: Bali Mobile Police Brigade via Storyful.
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