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Tag: 2 tahun lumpur Lapindo

  • Update: Kasus Lumpur Lapindo (status 20 Agustus 2008)

    Korban Lumpur Lapindo yang ditetapkan oleh Presiden ke dalam peta area terdampak sejak tanggal 22 Maret 2007 saat ini sebagian besar menunggu komitmen sisa pembayaran 80 persen. Jumlah mereka kurang lebih 14.000 ribu kepala keluarga. Namun diantara 14.000 kepala keluarga itu ada yang belum menerima uang muka 20 persen. Dengan perincian sebanyak 113 kepala keluarga dari Desa Renokenongo (minus pengungsi di Pasar Baru Porong) belum menerima uang muka 20 persen, ada pemilik 190 aset yang ada di Desa Kedung Bendo juga belum menerima uang muka 20 persen. Di Perumtas ada 45 kepala keluarga juga belum menerima uang muka 20 persen. Dan puluhan lainnya dari Desa Siring, Gempolsari, Ketapang, juga belum menerima uang muka 20 persen.

    Bagi mereka yang menutut pembayaran uang muka 20 persen belum memiliki sistem organisasi rakyat yang memadai. Sehingga pola pengurusannya menggunakan jalur para makelar. Sementara yang telah mendapatkan uang muka 20 persen mengorganisir diri ke dalam Gabungan Korban Lumpur Lapindo (GKLL). Namun pada Bulan Mei 2008, para petinggi GKLL membuat nota kesepahaman sendiri dengan PT Minarak Lapindo Jaya. Kesepahaman itu adalah mengubah skema pembayaran 80 persen dari bentuk tunai (cash) ke bentuk cash and resettelement.

    Kesepakatan ini dilakukan oleh petinggi GKLL dengan latar belakang, PT Minarak Lapindo Jaya menyatakan bahwa tanah warga yang tidak bersertifikat tidak bisa di akte jual belikan. Alasannya, bertentangan Undang Undang Pokok Agraria dan Peraturan Pemerintah tentang pendaftaran dan pencatatan tanah.

    Akibatnya, sebagian anggota GKLL memisahkan diri membentuk Geppres (Gerakan Pendukung Peraturan Presiden No 14 tahun 2007). Warga yang tergabung dalam Geppres menuntut pembayaran uang muka 80 persen dalam bentuk tunai, dan menolak skema cash and resettlement. Adapun dasar hukum yang dipegang oleh mereka adalah risalah kesepakatan bersama antara Menteri Sosial (selaku Wakil Ketua Dewan Pengarah BPLS), Kepala BPLS, Ketua DPRD Sidoarjo, Badan Pertanahan Nasional, PT Minarak Lapindo Jaya, dan perwakilan warga dari empat desa (Kedung Bendo, Siring, Jatirejo, dan Renokenongo) yang menyatakan bahwa warga yang memiliki bukti kepemilikan tanahnya berupa letter c, pethok d, dan sk googol tetap dapat di akte jual belikan. Nota kesepakatan ini dibuat tanggal 2 Mei 2007.

    Lalu pada tanggal 24 Mei 2008, Badan Pertanahan Nasional membuat pedoman kepada Badan Pertanahan Nasional Kabupaten Sidoarjo dalam hal penyelesaian mekansime pelepasan tanah warga kepada negara dan penerbitan Sertifikat Hak Guna Usaha kepada PT Lapindo Brantas. Didalamnya diatur mekanisme akte jual beli, termasuk mekanisme proses akte jual beli terhadap tanah warga yang bukti kepemilikannya letter c, pethok d dan sk googol.

    Walaupun telah ada dua aturan di atas, BPLS tetap saja belum melakukan penegakkan hukum. Sehingga warga yang sekarang menuggu sisa pembayaran 80 persen untuk mendapatkan pembayaran secara tunai baik terhadap tanah dan rumahnya masih terkatung katung. Padahal pada Bulan Agustus  ini banyak sekali warga yang habis masa kontrak rumahnya. Sehingga menimbulkan kerentanan kehidupan warga berikut keluarganya.

    Sementara bagi kelompok korban Lumpur lainnya yang berasal dari Desa Besuki, Pajarakan, dan Kedung Cangkring, pada Bulan Juli 2008 lalu ditetapkan oleh Pemerintah sebagai kawasan peta area terdampak luapan Lumpur Lapindo. Aturan ini tertuang dalam Perpres No 48 tahun 2008. Berbeda dengan keberadaan Perpres No. 14 tahun 2007 yang telah diperbaharui itu, tiga desa ini mekanisme pembelian tanah dan rumah warga menggunakan Anggaran Belanja dan Pendapatan Negara.

    Namun, aturan ini juga menimbulkan masalah baru. Sebab dalam kawasan peta terdampak, wilayah besuki bagian timur tidak masuk ke dalam peta area terdampak. Padahal kawasan itu hanya dipisahkan oleh bekas jalan tol Gempol- Surabaya. Selain itu, muncul masalah lain. Walau pembayarannya secara bertahap (dibayarkan dua kali) dimana 20 persen sebagai uang muka, dan sisanya 80 persen. Namun mekanisme jual beli  asset warga oleh pemerintah belum memiliki patokan harga. Warga menghendaki patokan harganya sesuai dengan peta yang dibuat oleh pemerintah pada tanggal 22 Maret 2007, yang dibayar oleh PT Lapindo Brantas. Patokan harganya adalah untuk tanah sawah di hargai 120. 000 per meter persegi,  tanah kering 1.000.000 juta per meter persegi, dan bangunan 1.500.000 per meter persegi.

    Masalah ketiga yang muncul dari aturan ini adalah, sisa pembayaran 80 persen dari wilayah ini dikaitkan dengan pembayaran 80 persen warga desa yang dibayar oleh PT Lapindo Brantas. Padahal antara warga desa (Kedung Bendo, Jatirejo, Siring, Renokenongo, Gempolsari, Ketapang, Risen) yang masuk dalam peta area 22 Maret 2007 dibayar oleh PT Lapindo Brantas, sedangkan warga Besuki, Pajarakan, dan Kedung Cangkring dibayar oleh APBN. Jadi sangat tidak logis jika Perpres No 48 tahun 2008 menyatakan bahwa sisa pembayaran 80 persen desa Besuki, Pajarakan, dan Kedung Cangkring akan dibayarkan setelah pembayaran 80 persen yang dilakukan oleh PT Minarak lapindo Jaya lunas semuanya.

    Padahal kita ketahui bersama bahwa sisa pembayaran 80 persen yang dilakukan oleh pihak Lapindo menimbulkan masalah yang begitu rumit sebagaimana yang terlihat dalam paparan diatas. Jangankan 80 persen. 20 persen saja hamper seribu berkas asset warga belum mendapatkan uang muka 20 persen (termasuk yang ada dalam pengungsi Pasar Baru Porong).

    Wilayah lain yang menghadapi problem dampak Lumpur lapindo adalah Desa Siring bagian barat, Jatirejo bagian barat, Gedang, Mindi, Glagah Arum, Plumbon, Gempolsari, Ketapang bagian barat, dan Pamotan. Sebagian besar wilayah desa desa diatas mengalami kerusakan sangat parah, terutama Desa Siring bagian barat, Jatirejo bagian barat, dan Mindi. Diketiga desa ini muncul  buble-buble gas yang mencapai 94 titik. Semburan gas ini disertai dengan air, lumpur, dan bau gas yang sangat menyengat. Semburan ini sangat rawan terbakar. Sumber mata ait telah rusak, tanah mengalami penurunan ke bawah. Sehingga dinding rumah rumah warga banyak yang retak, dan miring.

    Kesembilan desa diatas ditetapkan oleh pemerintah sebagai daerah luar peta area terdampak. Sehingga tidak ada bentuk penyelesaian dan tanggungjawab apapun yang diperbuat oleh pemerintah maupun warga. Berulangkali aksi telah dilakukan oleh warga untuk meminta pertanggungjawaban pemerintah. Belasan kali surat telah di kirim ke BPLS, Bupati, Gubernur, Menteri, dan DPR. Namun hingga kini tidak ada solusi atas kerusakan diwilayah sembilan desa ini.

    Paguyuban warga sembilan desa menuntut kepada pemerintah agar wilayahnya dimasukkan ke dalam peta area terdampak. Lalu mendapatkan jaminan keamanan, keselamatan, dan jaminan social dari pihak pemerintah. Dan tuntutan yang ketiga adalah melakukan jual beli asset warga dengan menggunakan mekanisme Perpres No 14 tahun 2007, termasuk harga harganya.

    Hingga kini, tak ada respon apapun dari pihak pemerintah atas tuntutan ini. Padahal telah ada 2 orang warga Desa Jatirejo bagian barat yang telah meninggal akibat kandungan gas di pernafasannya. Demikian juga 2 orang warga Siring bagian barat mengalami nasib yang sama. Belasan lainnya juga di rawat dirumah sakit akibat gas di saluran ISPA-nya. Atas kejadian ini, Gubenur Jawa Timur hanya membuat surat rekomendasi kepada Menteri Pekerjaan Umum selaku Ketua Dewan Pengarah BPLS. Surat itu berisi; pemberian uang kontrak rumah, uang jatah hidup, biaya pindah rumah, dan rumah dengan tipe sangat sederhana. Namun rekomendasi ini ditolak oleh warga. Warga meminta sebagaimana dalam tuntutan diatas.

  • Jakarta puts own interests first in tale of two disasters

    On May 27 last year, 6,650 people died and 450,000 homes were damaged or destroyed when an earthquake struck near the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta.

    Two days later, mud started gushing from the ground 280km to the east after a mishap near the town of Sidoharjo at an exploratory drilling well. More than 11,000 homes and two dozen businesses have since been buried under 20m-deep mud flows that are still spewing at a rate of 130,000 cubic m a day. Rail, road and gas links to a large section of east Java have been severely disrupted, sending reconstruction costs and estimated economic losses soaring to billions of dollars, more than that of the earthquake.

    A year on, the Indonesian government’s contrasting responses to these two separate disasters demonstrate the significance of decisive political leadership and the continuing power of well- connected businesspeople.

    Only 1 per cent of people who lost their homes in Yogyakarta lack temporary shelter or a permanent new home. More than 90 per cent of markets, schools and health centres have been rebuilt and more than 80 per cent of damaged irrigation networks are functioning properly.

    “In the 10 years that I’ve been doing this, this (recovery) has gone the most smoothly,” says Peter Manfield, of the United Nations’ co-ordination office.

    Bill Marsden, recovery co-ordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross in Yogyakarta, says the reconstruction process could be finished next year, a year earlier than expected.

    “The crucial thing was the speed with which the government mobilised the money and the system that was used,” he says. “It wrong-footed everyone. No one thought it would be possible to disburse so much money so quickly. It has shown what can be done with the right political will.”

    The local government in Bantul, the worst-affected district, received its 2007 reconstruction funds in April; regular central government budget allocations are unlikely to be disbursed for another month.

    President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had good reason to act so efficiently. “Yogyakarta is the heartland of the nation,” says a diplomat. “The president could not afford to neglect millions of people on his doorstep.”

    The situation in Sidoharjo could not be more different. Lapindo Brantas, the company doing the drilling that police say triggered the mudflow, is owned by the family of Aburizal Bakrie. Mr Bakrie is the senior welfare minister and a prominent member of Golkar, which as the largest party in parliament provides key support to Mr Yudhoyono. This has cast a dark shadow across the whole relief operation.

    “If Bakrie hadn’t been involved, the situation would not have been like it is now,” says Anton Soedjarwo, director of Dian Desa, a relief organisation. “The response would have been more pragmatic.” Mr Bakrie has denied that Lapindo employees’ negligence caused the disaster but he has agreed to buy all the victims’ destroyed property and pay some of the clean-up cost.

    Lapindo has been ordered to pay for much of the clean-up but no one in the government is willing to say that the company was responsible for causing the mudflow. Political analysts and government officials say the dilemma facing Mr Yudhoyono is that he does not want to alienate a crucial supporter but he cannot afford to let Mr Bakrie off the hook.

    “The result is that he has been indecisive and the people on the ground are suffering the consequences,” says an official involved in disaster management. “When elite interests are involved, they always seem to take priority over tackling the core of the problem.”

    Virtually all affected residents have received money for rent and monthly allowances from Lapindo. But only a few dozen have begun to receive compensation promised by Lapindo.

    Khairul Huda, a university lecturer who has helped co-ordinate the response in one village, says the frustration over the slow disbursement of money has grown to a point where demonstrations have become regular.

    “The problem is the political will of the government and Lapindo. It’s just not there,” he says. “We don’t know whether there’s an elite conspiracy or not. We just know we’re not getting our money.”

    Despite the scale of the destruction, Mr Yudhoyono has yet officially to declare the mudflow a disaster. Central government aid has been limited and non-governmental organisations have established only token presences. There has also been little progress in the prosecution of those responsible for the drilling mishap. It took the police nine months to complete their investigation but the case has yet to go to trial. Conspicuously, only individual employees and contractors, not the company, are being probed as suspects.

     John Aglionby 

    © Financial Times

  • Lapindo Blamed for Mudflow in East Java

    A two-year-old mud volcano in East Java that has submerged six villages, displaced 12,000 families and inundated hundreds of hectares of land, was caused by drilling negligence rather than natural causes, according to new research by British and US academics.

    The research, seen by the Financial Times, provide the most conclusive findings to date that Lapindo Brantas, the oil and gas company drilling an exploratory well 150m from the eruption site, triggered the mudflow on May 29 2006. The mud is still flowing at more than 100,000 cubic metres a day – enough to fill 53 Olympic swimming pools.

    Lapindo, which has seen the report, acknowledges it made significant mistakes less than a day before the eruption, but says these had no bearing on the subsequent mudflow. It says the incident was a natural disaster caused by tectonic activity unsealing a geological fault close to the drill site.

    The political fallout for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at legislative and presidential elections could be significant if prosecutors proceed to court and Lapindo is found liable.

    The government agreed to share the multi-billion dollar clean-up costs with Lapindo, which is owned by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, the chief welfare minister.

    Geologists Richard Davies of Britain’s Durham University and Michael Manga of the University of California at Berkeley in the US said they were “98 percent certain” that Lapindo was responsible. “In geology you can rarely be 100 per cent certain about anything,” Dr Davies said. “There are so many unlikely coincidences – Lapindo was either the unluckiest drilling company anywhere in the world ever, or they caused the disaster.”

    The academics concluded that the disaster began with the drilling crew’s failure to detect for 90 minutes a “massive” influx of water and gas, known as a kick, into the 2,834m-deep drilling hole the day before the eruption. They say that by the time the hole had been closed to contain the kick, the pressure in the hole had risen so much that it exceeded the maximum allowable pressure and the sides fractured.

    Lapindo acknowledges that its personnel failed to detect the kick promptly, but says that the pressure in the bore never exceeded the maximum allowable.

    The company points to a 5.9-magnitude earthquake 250km to the south-west on May 27 as evidence of tectonic activity occurring at the time, suggesting that it opened the Watukosek fault, on which the drill site was located.

    “We’re trying to look for answers for what happened,” said Bambang Istadi, Lapindo’s former exploration manager and now the Bakrie Group’s senior vice-president for technical services.

    Dr Manga said there was no evidence of an escalation of tectonic activity over the previous year, that bigger earthquakes nearer the eruption site had not caused mud eruptions and that the fault would have been more likely to close than open, based on the way the Earth’s plates moved to cause the Yogyakarta earthquake.

    Separately, an unpublished analysis carried out for the Indonesian police and seen by the FT points to potentially crucial errors in Lapindo’s pressure calculations.

    Harry Eddyarso, who has 25 years of worldwide drilling experience, was commissioned by the Indonesian police to analyse the data submitted by the companies involved in the drilling.

    “I’m 100 per cent certain Lapindo is to blame,” he said. “They made one mistake after another.” The police have publicly accused Lapindo of responsibility for the mud slide but prosecutors have declined to proceed to court, citing reports from scientists who have attributed the mud flow to natural causes.

    Last year the Bakrie Group bought the 32 percent stake in Lapindo owned by Medco Energi, Indonesia’s largest private energy company, in exchange for Medco withdrawing arbitration proceedings against Lapindo.

    The government said last week it was focusing on cleaning up the mess and helping the victims.

    John Anglionby 

    © Financial Times

  • Warga Pengontrak Tetap Menuntut

    Warga Pengontrak Tetap Menuntut

    Dua tahun sudah semburan Lumpur Lapindo merusak sendi-sendi kehidupan rakyat di Porong, Tanggulangin dan Jabon, Kabupaten Sidoarjo, dan hingga sekarang masih banyak ketidakadilan yang belum terselesaikan dalam kasus ini. Salah satunya adalah mereka yang dulu statusnya adalah pengontrak sebelum lumpur menenggelamkan rumah dan tempat usaha mereka.

    Anton dulu tinggal di Perumahan Tanggulangin Anggun Sejahtera I (TAS I) blok L-9/6. Dalam perbincangan dengan tim media, beliau menyatakan bahwa sesungguhnya apa yang diminta oleh pengontrak itu tidak muluk-muluk. “Ini tidak seperti apa yang dikatakan oleh Yusuf Martak pada waktu itu, bahwasannya warga pengontrak itu menuntut minta rumah. Itu yang sesungguhnya, ucapannya Yusuf Marta itu tidak betul sama sekali. Karena warga pengontrak itu menuntut Jadup yang disamakan dengan warga yang lain” tegas Anton.

    Menurutnya tuntutan pengontrak hanyalah meminta uang kontrak dan jatah hidup yang diberikan kepada mereka sama dengan korban lain, dimana sekitar 315 KK hanya mendapatkan uang kontrak senilai 2,5 juta dan jatah hidup tidak dapat sama sekali. Padahal menurut perjanjian dengan pihak Lapindo ada kesepakatan untuk memberikan kepada semua korban lumpur, uang kontrak sebesar 5 juta dan jatah hidup 300 ribu/jiwa/bulan selama 6 bulan, serta uang boyongan 500 ribu rupiah.

    Selain itu, karena dulunya warga pengontrak ini menggantungkan hidupnya dari usaha kecil di tengah-tengah lingkungan perumahan, dan itu semua ikut hilang ketika lumpur menenggelamkan rumah mereka, para pengontrak juga menuntut ganti rugi UKM. Setali tiga uang, tuntutan ini juga tidak dipenuhi Lapindo, padahal Lapindo sudah pernah menjanjikan untuk memberi ganti rugi UKM kepada mereka yang usahanya hancur akibat semburan lumpur.

    “Untuk ganti rugi UKM memang sudah ada yang dapat bervariasi antara 5 juta hingga 7 juta, tapi kebanyakan dari kami belum menerima itu” demikian sambung bapak berusia 50 tahun ini. Dari pihak pemerintah sendiri mulai dari DPRD, Bupati hingga departemen sosial hanya selalu berjanji untuk membawa aspirasi warga ini, nyatanya hingga lebih dari 1,5 tahun harapan mereka belum juga terwujud. ““Semua mengatakan selalu dan selalu akan diperjuangkan tapi sampai sekarang realisasinya tidak ada”,” kata Anton.

    Kegagalan pemerintah dalam memberikan perlindungan sosial kepada warga pengontrak ini jelas memberikan dampak langsung. Mereka kehilangan mata pencaharian, dan kalaupun berusaha membangun dari awal lagi, tidak ada modal yang mencukupi untuk melanjutkan usaha mereka.

    ““Keadaan warga pengontrak sudah terlalu minus dan susah karena selama ini mereka tidak bisa bekerja, selama ini mata pencaharian mereka ya disana (di perumahan TAS I yang tenggelam), setelah adanya lumpur mereka tidak dapat bekerja, secara ekonomi keadaan mereka sudah kolaps,”” demikian lanjut bapak yang telah dikaruniai 3 anak ini.

    Namun segala kesusahan ini tidak membuat perjuangan warga melemah, Anton dan warga lainnya akan tetap menuntut hak-hak mereka yang selama ini dipungkiri baik oleh lapindo maupun oleh pemerintah. “Selama jadup dan kontrak kami belum dibayar, kami tetap akan menuntut!,”” demikian pungkas Anton dengan tegas.[re]

  • Mud volcano ‘on brink of collapse’

    The world’s largest mud volcano that has been erupting continuously since 2006 is beginning to show signs of “catastrophic collapse”, according to geologists who have been monitoring it and the surrounding area.

    The volcano – named Lusi – has already devastated homes and businesses in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia, displacing around 10,000 people and killing 14.

    Now scientists say that the land near the central vent could sag by up to 146 metres in the next decade. In March, the scientists observed drops of up to 3 metres in one night. Most of the subsidence in the area around the volcano is more gradual, at around 0.1cm per day.

    “It is starting to show signs that the central part is undergoing a more catastrophic collapse,” said Prof Richard Davies, a geologist at Durham University.

    “The fact that the whole area is collapsing means there are probably new faults forming. These faults are new pathways for fluids to seep up to the surface. We’ve never really seen a mud volcano develop so quickly.”

    The team have monitored the subsidence using fixed GPS stations which are able to record very accurate ground movements by communicating with satellites. They reported their results in the journal Environmental Geology.

    Last year, the Indonesian authorities began a desperate plan to drop 2,000 concrete balls into Lusi’s central vent in an effort to stem the flow. Davies watched the operation, which went on for 2 months.

    “What happened was they dropped them and never saw them again,” he said. “It just gobbled them up.”

    Since it began spewing noxious mud and gasses on May 29 2006, Lusi has blanketed an area of around 7 cubic kilometres, covering 10,426 houses, 35 schools, 65 mosques and one orphanage. The advancing mud is now contained behind human-engineered dykes.

    The central collapse may be good news because it will make room for more mud at the surface and so take the pressure off the dykes. But subsidence around the submerged zone will have more impact on the local community.

    A bridge that developed cracks has already had to be dismantled, railway tracks have been moved out of line and in November 2006, 13 people were killed in a gas blast caused by an underground pipe rupturing.

    Davies does not believe there is any way to stop Lusi now. “I think now the system has become so big … the plumbing system is so complex you couldn’t hope to stop it.”

    James Randerson

    Sumber: The Guardian

  • Lusi sinking into its own caldera

    Two years after it first erupted, Lusi is back in the news again, this time because the area around the vent is starting to show signs of subsidence. The world’s fastest-growing mud volcano is collapsing by up to three metres overnight, suggests new research.

    As the second anniversary (May 29) of the eruption on the Indonesian island of Java approaches, scientists have found that the volcano – named Lusi – could subside to depths of more than 140 metres with consequences for the surrounding environment.

    The sudden overnight three metre collapses could be the beginning of a caldera – a large basin-shaped volcanic depression – according to the research team, from Durham University UK, and the Institute of Technology Bandung, in Indonesia.

    Their findings, based on Global Positioning System (GPS) and satellite measurements, are due to be published in the journal Environmental Geology.

    The fact that subsidence is occuring is actually no surprise; it’s a natural consequence of the eruption itself. Lusi was the result of the breaching of a subsurface aquifer – a porous, water-bearing rock horizon, which was being squeezed by the weight of all the overlying rocks. Because the cap rocks were impermeable mudstones, the water couldn’t move anywhere in response to this squeezing, meaning that the water within the aquifer was being held under extremely high pressure.

    As soon as the breach occurred, all that pressure had an outlet, causing high pressure water to burst upwards, mixing with the overlying mudstones on the way to create the lovely ooze that is currently engulfing Sidoarjo province. For those who remember Super Soakers, they work along a similar principle – you increase the water pressure by pumping air into a sealed water reservoir, resulting in a much stronger water jet when you finally pull the trigger and create a ‘breach’.

    Obviously this is going to lead to a decrease in water pressure within the aquifer; since this pressure was resisting the weight of the overlying rock – now augmented by the weight of the mud that has erupted onto the surface – a decrease will lead to compression of the aquifer, and subsidence, in the area where the eruption is occuring.

    The Environmental Geology paper by Abidin et al. observes exactly this. The GPS data presented was collected between June 2006 and September 2007, and indicates fast subsidence of 2-4 centimetres a day in the first four or five months after the eruption, and slower (and apparently slowing) subsidence of 0.1-0.3 cm a day thereafter. Even after it slowed down, that’s getting on for a metre of displacement every year, which is very fast by geological standards.

    The paper also refers to more recent measurements where large vertical displacements – 10s of cm or even metres – appear to have occurred literally overnight, which might indicate that some of the subsidence is now being taken up by extensional faulting around the vent.

    The formation of such a caldera may restrict the lateral extent of the mud flow, by creating a natural hole for it to fill (although human intervention though the building of dams is also a control here).

    Radar interferometry, which compares altimetry data collected after the eruption to altimetry collected before to highlight changes in topography, has also been used to examine elevation changes over a wider area, and confirms that subsidence has occurred up to 10 km from the central vent. Interestingly, it also shows that a sizeable area to the northeast has been uplifted since the eruption:

    The boundary between the uplifted region and the subsiding vent follows the trend of a fault which runs through the area, indicating that it has been active since Lusi first erupted. This is very interesting, because it is this fault – the Watukosek Fault – that has been cited in the argument that Lusi was a natural response to an earthquake, rather than shoddy drilling practices.

    Does this new data support that interpretation, and let PT Lapindo Brantas (or whatever they’re called now) off the hook? No, actually – the deformation associated with motion on this fault only begins after July 2006, two or three months after the eruption first started, so it in fact fairly conclusively proves that it was not involved in the initial breakthrough. Somehow, though, I doubt this will be the final word on this particular subject.

    Chris Rowan

    Sumber: Science Blogs