"The dam's breaking... it's collapsing...," a resident of Siring, Porong, Sidoarjo, shouted as he noticed hot mud flowing toward his house last week.

Hundreds of people living near the walls holding back the mudflow were sent scurrying in fear to Porong's main road, effectively blocking the road linking Surabaya and the eastern part of East Java.

Dressed in rags and mud stained, villagers of all ages raced to reach the road, seen as a safe mud-free place, clutching anything worth salvaging like important documents, school uniforms and kitchen utensils. Parents carried their children on their backs, willing them to stay calm.

The walls, which are holding back more than four million cubic meters of mud have been collapsing here and there as they are not strong enough to contain the increasing amount of mud, estimated at an additional 50,000 cu m per day. Damage to the walls has panicked the community living near the huge mud ponds, which now cover 180 hectares, and may soon double to 360 hectares.

Locals are worried about their safety and anxious over not only blistered skin due to the heat of the mud, which has reached 60 degrees centigrade, but also damaged property resulting from hot mud inundation.

"All we can do now is to save ourselves and our most prized belongings. We would have carried our whole house had we been able to pull it up," said Suwarno, a Siring villager.

Though he originally refused to take refuge because he was confident in the capabilities of the joint team handling the mudflow, doubt began to set in when he saw the walls were higher than his house. Then the dam started cracking and hot mud flowed into Siring.

There was also an atmosphere of fear in the villages of Jatirejo, Ronokenongo and Kedungbendo as their dams developed fissures. In Jatirejo, the dark gray mud spread extensively over places previously unaffected. Locals were particularly worried when it crept over the railway tracks running through the village. "The mud could cause a train accident," Jatirejo villager Haryadi pointed out.

In Jatirejo, dozens of cows owned by the Agil Hasan Al Syadili Islamic boarding school had to be evacuated for fear that dehydration would kill them. "The cows, which were one of the school's main income sources can't be milked for the moment," school principal Gus Maksum Zubair told The Jakarta Post.

The school, which has about 200 students, also found its 2.5 hectares of paddy fields flooded by hot mud. "Our students have been sent home for a while. Some staff members have stayed behind to take care of the school," Gus Maksum said.

More than 9,000 displaced people from the four inundated villages are now being accommodated in Pasar Baru Porong, Sidoarjo, five kilometers from the hot mud source. The neatly arranged barracks, originally designed as a public market and terminal, are increasingly packed with the growing number of refugees moving in from mud covered areas.

The 9,000 refugees have to share 282 kiosks in Pasar Baru, each measuring four by six meters with five families and their possessions, separated from one another only by curtains. To shower, they have to wait their turn as there are only 109 bathrooms available.

This situation has gone from bad to worse as there is no certainty about the fate of the mudflow victims, while the mud continues gushing, ruining all that it touches.