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Powerful bursts of hot ash and gravel erupted from a rumbling volcano in western Indonesia early on Monday, sending panicked villagers streaming down the sides of the mountain.

Six new eruptions in the morning sent lava and searing gas tumbling at most 1.5 kilometers down the slopes of Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra province. Volcanic material spewed as high as 2,000 meters into the air a day after authorities had raised the volcano's alert status to the highest level.

About 12,000 people from villages on the mountainside have fled their homes since Sunday,bringing the total of displaced persons to nearly 20,000, officials said on Monday.

Bowo Asa, a senior official at the disaster management and mitigation agency in North Sumatra, told Xinhua News Agency that about 12,000 people living in more than 10 villages had been evacuated since Sunday to government camps, more than 6,000 others fled to the shelters previously.

Thick, gray ash covered villages, farms and trees as far as 70 kilometers north of Mount Sinabung's crater, hitting the towns of Binjai and Langkat.

"Everything turned hot surrounding us," said Jatah Surbakti, a 45-year-old farmer who fled with his wife and four children to a shelter on trucks provided by the local disaster agency, along with hundreds of other villagers.

No casualties were reported as the status of the volcano was raised from “standby” to "caution".

"We have raised the status to 'caution', which is the highest of levels for volcanic activity because we anticipate there will be more eruptions and because the intensity of eruptions has been increasing," the National Disaster Mitigation Agency said in a statement.

Sinabung is one of nearly 130 active volcanoes in the world's fourth-most populated country, which straddles the "Pacific Ring of Fire", an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

The 2,600-meter Mount Sinabung has sporadically erupted since September. An eruption in 2010 killed two people and caught scientists off guard because the volcano had been quiet for four centuries.

（中國日報網(wǎng)英語點(diǎn)津 Helen 編輯）

About the broadcaster:

Anne Ruisi is an editor at China Daily online with more than 30 years of experience as a newspaper editor and reporter. She has worked at newspapers in the U.S., including The Birmingham News in Alabama and City Newspaper of Rochester, N.Y.