By Marc Herman
Madyo was at the campground that morning when he heard a whoosh that reminded him of a jet plane passing overhead. He walked to a clearing to take a look. It was overcast, and the peak was obscured. Suddenly, out of the clouds appeared a fireball of rocks and ash hundreds of feet high.
“Turun! Turun! Turun!” he yelled. “Descend!” in Indonesian. The crowd of onlookers in Kali Adem was 100 yards farther down the hill already, and people heard him and turned to flee.
Madyo ran across the hill with the cloud chasing him. “It looked like it wanted to eat us,” he told me. To his relief, he saw the crowd of people breaking apart, fleeing to motorbikes parked below, kicking over their engines, and hurling themselves away down the hill in a shriek of acceleration.
Madyo looked ahead. A man from a local nature club in his early thirties, Warjono, was also fleeing. Madyo knew him: Warjono often came to Kali Adem to deliver food and other supplies for the camp staff. He was moving more slowly than Madyo, but he looked OK. Madyo passed him, running.
Thirty meters farther along, he came upon another man, Sudarwanto, twenty-two. To his horror, he saw that the young man was heading the wrong way.
“Mas,” Madyo yelled at him — the Indonesian word for a young man. “Kamu naik apa?” (“How are you planning to get out of here?”)
“It’s no problem,” Sudarwanto answered, according to Madyo. Sudarwanto did not strike Madyo as scared at all.
Madyo left him there and kept running for the ridge.
He reached the road. A house was there. Inside were more people — his little brother, Ponimin, who was with his wife and young daughter, praying. Madyo could not help them. It was too late. He kept running. The cloud slammed into Kali Adem.
When the smoke cleared, the campground was gone, its meadow burned away, its buildings crushed under tons of hot ash and boulders. Two men — Warjono and Sudarwanto, the ones Madyo had passed on the hill — were unaccounted for. Rescuers had only one hope: the emergency bunker.
For a day, the debris field was too hot to approach. The first rescuer to step onto it leapt back: the soles of his shoes had melted. (One of the distorted shoes ended up on the mantle at Pak Panut’s observatory.) The tires on the emergency vehicles started smoking. A probe stuck nine centimeters into the ash registered 513°C. Rescuers called for a backhoe with metal treads.
Madyo had been in the bunker many times before out of curiosity. It had two steel doors. The outer door, built thick to withstand the mountain’s forces, weighed hundreds of pounds, he told me. When it was new, one strong person could close it only with great effort. After the bunker was constructed, rain had rusted the door’s hinges, making it even harder to move.
The backhoe dug down fifteen feet through a white hillock of volcanic rocks and ash. Its basket reached the bunker with a tap, and hearts sank: the shelter’s outer door hung open. It had never been closed. It appeared to have opened in, not out, a mistake in the design or the original installation. The roar of superheated ash, which should have slammed it shut safely against its frame, had instead blasted it open with a force impossible to push back against — even if the metal door had remained cool enough to touch.
The machine hollowed out a space in which to send in rescuers. Then they saw that the inner door had collapsed too. The bunker’s interior was filled almost completely with ash: the hot cloud had penetrated it, converting a refuge into a furnace. Hope that the two men had made it inside now turned to regret that anyone had ever built the flawed shelter.
Warjono, the older man, was on the floor covered in ash, dead. Sudarwanto was found in an open water cistern at the far end of the bunker. He appeared to have hurled himself into the water, a last attempt at survival. A forensic photo taken at the moment of his disentombment shows the confident young man appearing to rest calmly on his side in the fetal position. His skin is healthy, his hair not visibly singed. He is gray from ash but otherwise preserved, like an Egyptian king. He had suffocated.
I visited the bunker the first week of July, just over two weeks after the cloud had fallen. The site was still covered with the cooled remnants of the murderous cloud. Only a line of police crime-scene tape made the spot identifiable on the vast beach of ash covering the meadow. It was a steep fall down the ash to reach the half-exposed entry to the bunker. The cement had held the heat. Inside it felt like a sauna and, still stuffed with ash after days of digging by the search-and-rescue teams, was no bigger than a crawlspace. I couldn’t move the door, even when I slammed against it with my shoulder.
Read The Wizard and the Volcano online
