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...both blessed and cursed by geology. Volcanic ash contributes to the archipelago's fecund soil. Yet eruptions periodically kill thousands. Indonesia is also rich in minerals and oil, exporting nearly half a million barrels a day. All told, the country's buried wealth accounts for almost 30% of its total exports. But the same grinding geologic processes that make this wealth possible also bedevil Indonesia with disasters like the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 160,000 people in Sumatra. Lusi is unlike any previous disaster, however. Unfolding in implacable slow motion, it has confounded Indonesian engineers...
...with much of the rest of Porong, is gone, swallowed by an ash-gray lake of mud. The noxious sludge, incredibly, continues to flow at a rate of up to 5.3 million cu. ft. (150,000 cu m) a day - enough to fill 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools. In total, Porong has been smothered beneath nearly 3.5 billion cu. ft. (100 million cu m) of the stuff. The mud has buried 12 villages, displaced around 16,000 people and caused more than a dozen deaths. Porong hasn't just been destroyed; it has been erased. Where Mudakir's house once...
...destruction is total. At the eruption's epicenter - known to workers at the site as the Big Hole - a 100-ft. (30 m) plume of white smoke billows into the sky, obscuring the sun and spreading the sulfurous odor of rotting eggs. On a narrow causeway leading to the caldera, dozens of trucks idle in a queue, waiting to deliver soil for the massive earthworks meant to contain the mud. Already, they have transported more than 88 million cu. ft. (2.5 million cu m) of dirt to build eight miles (13 km) of levees around the site. Dozens of cranes...
...health effects of the mud (though the government team says the gas coming from Lusi has no ill effect, locals complain of difficulty breathing and strange rashes). Mostly, though, they complain about money. On the orders of the Indonesian government, Lapindo has agreed to compensate the villagers with a total of $412 million - the company is offering 20% of the money up front, with the balance paid within two years. "It will not be enough," says Riati, a 45-year-old woman sitting outside the 16-ft.-wide (5 m wide) cubicle where she lives with her husband and sister...
...Then get out of here, you total jerk.' NICOLAS SARKOZY, President of France, to a man who accused the increasingly unpopular leader of "dirtying" him while greeting constituents at a Paris trade fair. A video of the outburst posted the next day by the newspaper Le Parisien tallied more than half a million hits in just a few hours...