Anak Krakatau ash leaves 150 to 200 Hong Kong-bound helpers stuck in Indonesia

Up to 200 domestic workers bound for Hong Kong were still on the ground in Indonesia on 8 September, even as Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport resumed flights. Cheung Kit-man, chairman of the Hong Kong Employment Agencies Association, put the stranded group at 150 to 200 people. Some are new recruits. Others had gone home on leave and were trying to return to employers in the city.

Mount Anak Krakatau, the cone that grew from the 1883 Krakatoa caldera in the Sunda Strait, erupted on Saturday 5 September and kept a lava fountain going for about 25 hours into Sunday. The geology agency recorded two further bursts on Sunday, one of them lasting less than a minute. Ash reached the airspace around Soekarno-Hatta, more than 150 kilometres away. The transport ministry closed that airport and seven others, including Husein Sastranegara in Bandung and Radin Inten II near Bandar Lampung. Alternative fields at Semarang and Surabaya were told to take diverted traffic.

The passenger count grew with each bulletin. On Sunday the ministry said 1,558 flights had been delayed and 170,000 people stranded, more than 900 of the flights tied to Soekarno-Hatta. By Monday the disruption figure was nearly 3,000 flights and 341,000 passengers. Hong Kong's Security Bureau had already posted an outbound travel note on 4 September, when the first ash of this sequence affected Jakarta airspace.

Cheung said some of the helpers were due to fly on Wednesday 9 September if the runways stayed open. He also said the association has contingency plans if the volcano goes up again. "Of course we are worried, because it is a natural phenomenon and [the volcano] can erupt at any time. No one can predict it," he told the South China Morning Post. That sentence is the operational reality for a labour corridor that moves tens of thousands of Indonesian women to Hong Kong flats every year on tickets that assume Soekarno-Hatta will be open on the morning of departure.

Anak Krakatau is one of Indonesia's most active cones. Authorities raised its alert to Level III, the second-highest rung, as early as 2 July after a separate ash event that Copernicus Sentinel-2 photographed the same day. The September eruption was larger. Ash at 50,000 feet is enough to close jet engines. Aviation rules do not negotiate with volcanic glass.

The human cost sits in two places. Inside Indonesia, families in the Sunda Strait were told to watch for ashfall and stay clear of the waterline. In Hong Kong, households that depend on a helper who is sitting in a terminal in Jakarta or Lampung have to cover childcare and elder care themselves, or go without. Employment agencies are the hinge. They book the seats, hold the work visas, and now hold the contingency lists Cheung described.

Soekarno-Hatta's reopening on Tuesday is not a guarantee. Ash can drift back over the field in a few hours if the plume turns. The association's plan, as stated, is to reroute through cities that stayed open and to delay deployments rather than send workers into a second cancellation. For the 150 to 200 people named in Cheung's count, the next 48 hours are a question of whether Wednesday's flights leave, and whether the cone in the strait stays quiet long enough for them to do so.