This Indonesian horror movie is for real
Posted: Monday, March 31, 2008 1:31 PM
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
SIDOARJO, East Java, Indonesia – Misi struck me as being pretty cheerful for a man who'd lost his home and livelihood to a torrent of mud.
"That's where I lived over there, next to the town hall," he told me during a recent visit earlier this year, pointing to the roof of a building that protruded, barely, from a lake of sludge. He said the furniture factory in which he and around 300 others worked was also under the mud.
Just a few rooftops were the only evidence of Misi's once thriving village. We were standing on a tall earthen embankment, part of system of levees designed to contain a three square miles of stinking mud that's been spewing from the earth for 22 months, and shows no sign of stopping.
Misi (who, like many Indonesians, only has one name) has become something of an expert on what locals call the mud volcano, offering guided tours on the back of his motorcycle and selling disaster videos to the tourists who come to view the ghoulish spectacle.
His videos are replete with eerie music, which reminded me of some b-grade horror movie, except this gurgling monster is for real – it's consumed eleven villages under a billion cubic feet of mud since a fissure deep beneath the earth was breached in May 2006.
A politically connected energy company, drilling for natural gas, has been blamed, though the company claims a powerful earthquake triggered the volcano.
More than fifteen thousand people have been forced from their homes, and the mud has severed a major highway to Indonesia's second city, Surabaya, just a few miles away. Villages close to the shaky levees have been abandoned, and we witnessed residents stripping their homes of everything from doors to roof tiles. A railway line sits precariously below one embankment. Twelve people died when the mud caused a gas pipeline to explode.
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| Ian Williams / NBC News |
| Remains of a village near Sidoargjo in East Java, Indonesia inundated by mud, while the mud volcano continues to steam in the background. |
The mud volcano has so far defeated every effort to plug it. Experts from around the world have flown in – and out. Even Javanese mystics have been deployed, but have been no more successful in their efforts to tackle what are presumed to be the most of evil of spirits.
One desperate – and ultimately doomed – effort involved dropping hundreds of large concrete balls into the volcano's mouth. Meanwhile, an attempt to divert the flow of mud into a nearby river was abandoned after protests from villages living by the river, who thought, with reason, that they'd be the next to be inundated.
Some experts believe it's unstoppable.
"You have an unlimited amount of mud going into this area," said Andang Bachtiar, the former head of the Indonesian Association of Geologists, explaining that underground mud is being sucked up to the surface. Recent seismic activity has made matters even worse, and the onset of the rainy season in Java is weakening the levees, threatening dozens of other villages.
Indonesia is possibly the most disaster-prone country in the world. Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, they get them all. But the mud volcano is unique even by Indonesia's standards – a Javanese nightmare that just won't stop.
