TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Mount Soputan, North Sulawesi erupted on Sunday at 3:09 a.m. local time spewing a column of ash at a height of about three thousand meters above the peak (4,809 m above sea level), the Volcano`s Monitoring Post said in a statement on Sunday.

"The ash column was observed to be gray with a thickness intensity leaning to the southeast. The eruption was recorded on the seismographs with a maximum amplitude of 40 mm and a duration of about 5 minutes and 51 seconds," the Monitoring Post said in the statement.

Soputan`s second Monitoring Post some 10 km southwest of the peak could still hear the roar until Sunday morning.

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The seismographs are still recording tremors which continued to indicate that the eruption is still ongoing, the statement said.

At present, Mount Soputan is declared to be at level III alert status. The local people are not expected to carry out activities within the radius of four kilometers from the peak.

The residents were not either allowed to carry out activities in areas as far as 6.5 kilometers in the southwestern sector as the area constituted a lave prone area from the crater to avoid the threat of lava flow and hot cloud avalanche.