"According to a preliminary data collected, as many as 41 houses are submerged by cold lava such as those at Guling and Sindumartani village at Ngemplak district," Urip Bahagia, duty manager of Sleman Regional Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD), said here Sunday.
Bahagia said those house had severely been damaged by volcanic materials like sand, stones and even big sized boulders. "The houses were destroyed beyond repairs so that they can`t be used anymore, making tens of families need to be evacuated," he said.
In addition to the 41 buried under volcanic materials, there were also houses, which sustained light destruction that mitigation agency officers on the field were still collecting data on the impacts.
Cold lava onslaught from the slopes of Merapi on Saturday afternoon was triggered by torrential rains. Aside from smashing houses along its way downwards from the slopes, the cold lava had also destroyed some dams along the way.
The 2,968 meters (9,738 feet) Merapi erupted on October 26 until November 30, 2010 that had left 350 people dead and at least 350,000 others had been made displaced.
The volume of cold lava entrenched on the upper parts of the volcano is estimated at least 140 million cubic meters, whereas the capacity of the infrastructure to tame the volcano downstream is only for 20 million cubic meters, according to the Public Works Ministry.
The cold lava makes it downwards onslaught through 15 rivers (Putih, Blongkeng, Pabelan, Woro, Gendol, Boyong, Krasak, Batang, Senowo, Trising, Opak, Bebeng, Kuning, Apu dan Lamat) and from time to time have overflowed the rivers.
A total of 244 dams constructed to hold the smashing cold lava along the streams of the 15 rivers and most of the times can not function properly due to the huge capacity of the lava.(*)
(KR-VFT/R013)
Editor: Ruslan Burhani
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
