Word: mud
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...president Yuniwati Teryana. "We met the requirements." Teryana offers another explanation for the eruption. Two days before Lusi started, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake shook the city of Yogyakarta, about 190 miles (300 km) to the west of Porong. Lapindo believes that the quake opened natural fractures that allowed the mud to escape. "The mud eruption is caused by a natural phenomenon," Teryana says. That's an opinion shared by Adriano Mazzini, a geologist at the University of Oslo. After studying data provided by Lapindo, Mazzini concluded that Lusi was probably caused by the May 27 earthquake. "There is strong evidence...
...idea was to bleed off pressure inside the volcano slowly enough so that Lusi wouldn't simply erupt elsewhere - or shoot the concrete balls back out like a cannon. Satria Bijaksana, one of the Bandung scientists who came up with the idea, says that the balls reduced the mud's flow temporarily. But the project was abandoned last March when a new government team took over management of the site. More recently, a Japanese team proposed building a 130-ft.-high (40 m high) dam to contain the mud. Scientists familiar with Lusi have dismissed that idea. Because the ground...
...unstoppable. In 1979, the oil company Shell set off a similar eruption while drilling off the shore of Brunei. That mudflow took 20 years and 20 relief wells to halt, according to Mark Tingay, a geologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Lusi may eventually choke itself as mud clogs its interior plumbing. But if left to die on its own, Davies estimates that it could continue to erupt for years, and perhaps even decades. Hardi Prasetyo, deputy head of the new government team in charge of Lusi, says that his workers are now focusing on containing, rather than...
...animism, and Lusi has drawn mystics from Bali and Borneo, who have sacrificed chickens, monkeys and even a cow to mollify the upset spirit. The government's engineering team has tried similar tactics; a spokesman says the group has hired diviners to pray for rain to wash the mud away...
...Along with the mystics have come opportunists. To attract curious visitors, one enterprising local hotel changed its name to Kuala Lumpur: "Lake of Mud." In the roads near Lusi, shirtless men dart in and out of traffic selling bags of roasted nuts and dried fruit. They have also installed themselves at certain busy intersections, and demand a small levy to let cars pass. At the top of a levee, the men eagerly tout CDs compiled from video footage of the disaster. "Professional best," promises one CD featuring a photo of a charred, mud-crusted corpse on its front cover. Some...