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In 2012, about 1.3 million people lived on the slopes of Merapi, one of the most active volcanoes in the eastern part of Java Island in Indonesia. A majority of Merapi inhabitants, grouped together in small villages, live off agricultural income, relying on hydraulic infrastructures for their daily activities. Not only do these farming activities require a substantial amount of water, but an entire community in one village also depends on water resources to maintain its organization and functioning. The proximity of water availability and its access with community dependence on it is well illustrated by the first water management position in the community initiatives: the term socio-hydraulic system highlights the dependency of the community organization profile on water resources. However, the eruption of Merapi in 2010 and the following pyroclastic flow or lahar-related crises have recently made water availability and access to water the main challenges to be addressed by the hydraulic community. Many research projects have highlighted actions taken by the Merapi communities to face successive disasters using the resilience concept, which is closely linked to sustainability. However, the interviews we carried out in 2013, 3 years after the eruption and a few months after lahar recurrences, revealed persistent fragilities and readjustments to water management in hazard-prone areas. This present work first aims to discuss multiple social vulnerabilities and in some cases, the capacity to adapt, by investigating the hydraulic community’s responses in the face of lahar issues after the 2010 Merapi eruption. In order to reassess the resilience concept and to draw the limits of its operative aspects, studies of multi-dimensional responses to the interviews and of explicative factors have been developed within the Merapi community. Focusing on resources, people’s roles and socio-environmental risks, we discuss the main influence of the ‘cultures of risks’ observed through a 1-month period of fieldwork, a notion that add another focus to the notion of local resilience(s): in doing so, we defend the idea that risk assessments must be undertaken through a systemic approach, focusing on the coupled-notion vulnerability/resilience, and we question the limits of the operative aspect and the durability of the resilience concept on longer temporality and geographical scales.