Borobudur’s post-Merapi eruption rehabilitating may take three years: Official

The Jakarta Post, Thu, 02/17/2011

It may take as much as three years to rehabilitate the Borobudur Temple after last year’s eruption of nearby Mount Merapi covered the temple with volcanic ashes and affected the surrounding environment in general, an official said.

“The rehabilitation process includes the revitalization of the environment and the social economic [condition] of local residents,” the Tourism Ministry's director of history, Yunus Satrio Atmojo, said Thursday as quoted by Antara.

He added that ridding the temple’s stones of volcanic sediment would take at least six months.

The next phase would involve planting trees to prevent temperature increase, which can impact on the temple’s stone forms.

Yunus said that activities of local residents had also been affected by the eruption.

“Such a rehabilitation process needs around two to three years for the condition of the temple to return to how it was before the disaster, as long as there are no further Merapi eruptions as intense as the previous ones,” he said.

The Jakarta representative of UNESCO, Hubert Gijzen, said that the organization had donated US$ 3 million to the restructuring process.