JAKARTA — Indonesia’s main airport and several other air travel hubs reopened early Tuesday after a volcanic eruption over the weekend forced them to suspend operations for two days, the Transport Ministry said.
The ministry wrote on Instagram that the airport serving the capital Jakarta and four others near the city or around the island of Java are now operating again, as the air safety crisis that left hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded subsides.
Mount Anak Krakatau, about 150 km from Jakarta, erupted late Friday, spewing a fountain of lava and a plume of volcanic ash. It stayed seismically active throughout the weekend.
Eight airports halted operations over the weekend after ash was detected in their airspace, disrupting nearly 3,000 flights and leaving more than 340,000 passengers stranded, the Transport Ministry reported on Monday.
Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International airport was the first to ground flights on Sunday morning and did not to resume operations until 00:30 (18:30 GMT) on Tuesday.
Snaking queues had formed at the departure halls in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Monday as stranded passengers sought refunds and tried to get updates on when they would be able to fly.
Early Tuesday, the ministry posted on Instagram that Jakarta’s main airport and four others are up and running again.
Earlier, the airport closures had been repeatedly extended.
Airlines now face the daunting task of getting all the stranded passengers onto planes and to their intended destinations after days of chaos at the airports.
The other four listed as reopening include Halim Perdanakusuma, a smaller Jakarta-area airport that caters to both civil and military flights, and Hussein Sastranegara in Bandung, the capital of West Java, the Transport Ministry said.
Another small airport in south Sumatra resumed operations on Monday morning. So two of the original eight are still closed.
More than 240 domestic and international flights were cancelled or delayed due to volcanic ash on Monday morning alone,Soekarno-Hatta airport said, adding that nearly 30,000 passengers were affected.
On Monday, Indonesia’s Geological Agency had warned that “the probability of further eruptions in the coming periods remains high”.
Volcanic ash reached as high as 6,000 meters on the Java side of the volcano and 15,000m on the Sumatra side and in some parts of Java’s westernmost province Banten, the meteorological agency BMKG said.
Anak Krakatau sits on the Sunda Strait about midway between the islands of Java and Sumatra.
Source: Saudi Gazette