Indonesian mudflow victims pray for relief

By Heri Retnowati

SIDOARJO, Indonesia (Reuters) - Around 2,000 Indonesians whose homes have been submerged by a gushing mud volcano prayed for relief from the torrent on Tuesday on the first anniversary of a disaster that shows no sign of abating.

Dressed in white, the victims packed into a football stadium dotted with banners to listen to a sermon blaring from loudspeakers as four giant video screens ran pictures of the mudflow throughout the three-hour ceremony.

"I don't have the strength any more to cope with this," said Jarot, a 73-year-old woman whose home was engulfed by the noxious-smelling hot mud that has defied all efforts to stop it since it started on an oil drilling site on Java island.

"I have stopped pleading with the government and Lapindo; now I only plead to God."

PT Lapindo Brantas is the operator of the oil well from where the mud has been flowing.

Jarot, who goes by one name like many Indonesians, is one of some 15,000 people facing an uncertain future since being forced out of their homes when the mud began flowing from a drilling site in Sidoarjo, near Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya.

The government has tried several schemes to halt the flow, including dropping giant concrete balls into the crater, but the hot mud still spurts at a rate of 148,000 cubic metres a day.

With an area four times the size of Monaco now under mud, some 6,000 families are living in makeshift plastic shelters in a nearby vacant market.