Bali: Mount Agung looks enormous from the Bhale Dana sand mine in Muntig, a Balinese village inside the volcano evacuation zone, but the miners are not fazed.
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Eight pieces of enormous machinery have been evacuated but the miners themselves continue to show up to work, loading a convoy of lime green trucks with gravel to transport all over Bali.
"The old people who lived through the 1963 eruption said there would be signs when the mountain is going to erupt, like ash," Jaya told Fairfax Media.
"If I evacuate now I will run out of money and die before it erupts."
Jaya's priest said Mount Agung - the largest and most sacred mountain in Bali - is wrathful because the "bule" (white people) had sex and menstruated on the mountain.
"The climbers did that," Jaya said.
Mount Agung looked deceptively calm on Wednesday, with a puff of white cloud hovering above the peak.
But he flexed his muscles at 1.12pm local time with a 4.3-magnitude rumble - the largest since Indonesia declared Mount Agung was on the highest possible alert on Friday night - that had even the tremor-hardened miners shrieking "earthquake".
Ketut is waiting for the animals to come. "The old people advised us the heat from the mountain will make them flee. All kinds of animals - deer, snakes, wild cows, anything."
Until then, he said, the miners would continue working calmly. Ketut said many people stayed in evacuation camps at night but returned to the sand mine in the exclusion zone during the day. "I'm not afraid. Agung is mysterious and no-one can predict his ways."
Ketut said a village-wide evacuation notice had been issued but authorities had not visited the sand mine and told it to shut down. "We are still open because we feel for the workers. This is their livelihood."
On Friday night Indonesian authorities imposed an exclusion zone of up to 12 kilometres from the mountain.
Nyoman Swanjaya, the head of early warning, earthquake data and information service at Bali Disaster Mitigation Agency said people in the red zone should leave the area right away.
"But it is difficult to tell them not to be there because mining is their living. It's a dilemma."
Thousands of Balinese have now evacuated with 82,825 people staying in evacuation camps and with families and friends as of Wednesday.
Gede Suantika from the Centre for Volcanology and and Geological Hazard Mitigation said the earthquakes rattling the region meant the situation was becoming more critical.
Between midnight and 6am on Wednesday there had been 285 deep volcanic quakes, 195 shallow volcanic quakes and 41 tectonic quakes.
Five mobile sirens will be activated if there is an eruption. They will be heard for two kilometres.
He said if there was only volcanic ash from the eruption those in the danger zone may have time to run. "But if the eruption comes with hot clouds, I don't guarantee people will be safe," he said.
Hot clouds, also known as pyroclastic flows, are a fast moving current of hot gas and volcanic matter. They caused many of the more than 1500 deaths when Mount Agung last erupted in 1963.
The Ministry of Transportation announced on Wednesday it had prepared 10 airports outside Bali to cater for travellers should Bali's airport be closed as a result of volcanic ash from an eruption.
Buses would transport passengers to ferry ports so they could leave Bali if the airport was closed.
Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi also said tourists visas would be extended if they overstayed as a result of the volcano erupting.
