Eleven hikers were discovered dead and another 12 were missing after an Indonesian volcano erupted, with rescuers hurrying to transport injured and charred survivors down the mountain on foot.
Rescuers labored through the night to locate scores of hikers stranded on Mount Marapi on the Indonesian island of Sumatra after it erupted with an ash tower 3,000 meters (9,340 feet) taller than the volcano itself on Sunday.
According to a local rescue official, the hikers were discovered near Marapi’s crater after the 2,891-metre volcano poured ash on adjacent settlements.
According to the official, 12 people were missing, three were found alive, and 49 people had safely descended from the crater, some with burns and fractures.
“They are being carried down manually, rescuers are taking turns bringing them down. We can’t do an air search with a helicopter because the eruption is ongoing,” said local rescue agency chief Abdul Malik, who added about 120 rescuers were involved in the search.
The three other people who had been found alive were yet to be taken down the mountain, along with the 11 dead.
Those three survivors were found near the crater and “their condition was weak, and some had burns,” Malik said.
A video shared with AFP shows a rescue worker with a flashlight mounted to his head piggybacking a hiker who moans in pain and screams “God is greatest” as she is carried to safety in the dark.
One of the rescued hikers, Zhafirah Zahrim Febrina, is shown in a video message from the volcano pleading for aid from her mother.
Her face was burned and her hair was tangled with thick grey ash, and the 19-year-old student appeared stunned.
“Mom, help Ife. This is Ife’s situation right now,” she said, referring to her nickname.
She is now in a nearby hospital with her father and uncle after being trapped on the mountain on a hiking trip with 18 school friends.
“She is going through a tremendous trauma,” said her mother Rani Radelani, 39.
“She is affected psychologically because she saw her burns, and she also had to endure the pain all night.”
‘Tremendous Trauma’
Local rescue agency spokesperson Jodi Haryawan said the rescue efforts had been broken up by sporadic eruptions but the search was still going despite the risks.
“Once it was safer they continued the search. So the search was not halted,” he told AFP.
Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency, told AFP some of the rescued hikers had suffered burns.
“Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater,” he said.
At least eight people suffered burns, one had burns and a fracture and another had a head wound, according to a list of those found from Basarnas, a national search and rescue agency, seen by AFP.
According to Ahmad Rifandi, an officer at the Mount Marapi monitoring station, ash rain was observed following the eruption and had reached Bukittinggi, West Sumatra’s third-largest city with a population of more than 100,000.
Following the eruption, a plume of smoke and ash obscured the sun and blanketed neighboring cars, scooters, and ambulances.
Marapi is on the second of four levels of alert in Indonesia, and authorities have established a three-kilometer exclusion zone surrounding its crater.
The Indonesian archipelago is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where continental plates collide, resulting in intense volcanic and seismic activity.
The Southeast Asian country has nearly 130 active volcanoes.
As the search goes on for the missing 12 hikers, Febrina’s family was relieved she was one of the lucky ones.
Good news arrived in the form of a livestream on video app TikTok by a member of the rescue services, in which Radelani saw her visibly shaken daughter.
“It felt incredible, praise God she has been found,” Radelani said.
“If she asks me to allow her to climb a mountain, I’ll say no.”