The remains of a house all but swallowed by disgorged earth that erupted during exploratory drilling for natural gas in Indonesia. Victims receive little government aid. (Mamat/Agence France-Presse)
Driven out by mud in Indonesia
By Seth Mydans Published
December 15, 2008
Her children insist, so every week or two Lilik Kamina takes them back to their abandoned village to look at the mud. "Hey, Mom, there's our house, there's the mango tree," she said they shout. But there is nothing to see, only an ocean of mud that has buried this village and a dozen more over the past two and a half years. The mud erupted here during exploratory drilling for natural gas, and it has grown to be one of the largest mud volcanoes ever to have affected a populated area.Unlike other disasters that torment Indonesia - earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis - this one continues with no end in sight, and experts say the flow could continue for many years or decades.
The steaming mud keeps bubbling up from under ground, spreading across the countryside, driving people from their homes, burying fields and factories and forcing the relocation of roads, bridges, a railroad line and a major gas pipeline.As the earth disgorges the mud and the lake grows, the land is sinking by as much as 13 meters, or 42 feet, a year and could subside to depths of more than 140 meters just one hour's drive from Indonesia's second largest city, Surabaya, according to Richard Davies, a geologist at Durham University in Britain who specializes in mud volcanoes.
Siti Maimunah, an environmental advocate, said people who live nearby have begun getting sick, with about 46,000 visiting clinics with respiratory problems since the mud eruption.Siti, who is national coordinator for the Mining Advocacy Network of Indonesia, said the gas that emerges with the mud is toxic and possibly carcinogenic. "We worry that in the next 5 to 10 years people will face a second disaster with health problems," she said. Various attempts to stem the flow have failed over the years. These have included a scheme to drop hundreds of giant concrete balls into the mouth of the eruption; they simply disappeared without effect.
A project to divert some of the mud into the nearby Porong River has raised fears that the buildup of silt on the riverbed could cause severe flooding, possibly in Surabaya itself. The continuing disaster has become an embarrassment to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who faces a new election next year, with groups of displaced people demonstrating in the distant capital, Jakarta. Lapindo Brantas, the energy company that was doing the drilling, is indirectly owned by the family of one of Indonesia's richest and most influential men, Aburizal Bakrie, who is a major financial backer of Yudhoyono and serves in his cabinet as coordinating minister for the people's welfare. The victims say compensation has been slow, with only a portion of promised funds delivered to them. Some 60,000 people have fled their homes and many, like Lilik, now live in nearby shelters and in a marketplace as refugees. This is a particularly forlorn class of displaced people who mostly fend for themselves because, as victims of what is being called a man-made disaster, they receive little assistance from the government or from international aid agencies."So we live without hope," said Ali Mursjid, 25, who was in college studying to be a teacher before the mud volcano made him a pauper. "Nobody is willing to help us."His village, Besuki, was only partly buried in mud, and it is a ghost town of empty houses and hard, cracked mud where children fly kites and shout to hear their voices echo.
This was a prosperous middle-class village, Mursjid said, where families like his hired laborers to work their fields. Now, he said, he and other residents had been reduced to begging."I felt so humiliated and embarrassed, " Mursjid said. "But I had to beg because none of us had any food to eat. We took turns begging and shared the money."The steaming mud erupted from the ground on May 29, 2006, as Lapindo, the energy company, was drilling near the industrial district of Sidoarjo. Its tunnel pierced a pressurized aquifer some 3,000 meters underground. Experts on mud volcanoes say it was the drilling and inadequate safeguards in the bore hole that triggered the eruption of water, gas and mud that continues to flow, at about 100,000 cubic meters, or 3.5 million cubic feet, a day. Lapindo insists that it was itself a victim, blaming vibrations from a major earthquake that struck two days earlier with an epicenter 300 kilometers, or 190 miles, away.After listening to new evidence about the eruption, a conference in October of 74 petroleum geologists in Cape Town concluded that the drilling was the causeThere is no question, the pressures in the well went way beyond what it could tolerate - and it triggered the mud volcano," said Susila Lusiaga, a drilling engineer who was part of the Indonesian investigation team, according to a report on the conference by Durham University.The debate over responsibility has severely limited the payments, said Elfian Effendi, executive director of Greenomics Indonesia, an environmental advocacy group.After paying out 20 percent of a promised compensation package, Lapindo agreed this month to begin monthly payments equal to $2,500 to 8,000 families it said were eligible. But as part of the Bakrie holdings, Lapindo has been severely affected by the current economic downturn, and some experts question whether the full amount will ever be paid.
Since the first eruption in May 2006, there have been more than 90 others, most of them small but some explosive, said Jim Schiller, a political scientist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who has published a study of the disaster.He described what he called the horror-movie progress of the mud, which continues to burst from the ground at unexpected times and places. "I've got pictures of them popping up in people's living rooms," he said.The village of Renokenongo was buried during the biggest of these eruptions, in November 2007, when the weight of sinking earth burst a major natural-gas pipeline, killing 13 workers and sending a fireball into the sky."It was so big and so tall that I couldn't believe it was just fire," said Sukono, 40, who owned land and livestock and rented out farm machinery but now is jobless. "I thought it was the end of the world. It was so bright I thought the sun was rising in the west."In the year since then, said Sukono, who has only one name, he and his family had struggled to accept the obliteration of their home and village.
Their past is buried in the mud, and their future seems empty."My sons are traumatized, " he said. "They say, 'Can't we live like we used to, like normal people?' My older boy asks, 'If things keep on like this, what will happen to my dreams?'"I answer that I am optimistic," he said. "As a parent I have to be optimistic. I tell him I will help him achieve his dreams. But for me, I don't know."Lilik, 30, who teaches kindergarten, said the visits to the levee by her former village calm her children, Icha Noviyanti, 11, and Fiqhi Izzudin, 5."People say its not a good idea to take the children there, but I think the opposite," she said. "I think it's very important for them to see their home and express their anger. They throw rocks at the mud and shout, 'Lapindo!"
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