A rising tide of lava on Friday turned a Hawaii street into a smoking volcanic wasteland, destroying at least eight homes as residents stood on the road and watched their houses burn.
The destructive fury of the erupting Kilauea volcano has been unleashed on the Big Island’s Leilani Estates housing development, with the number of homes and other structures destroyed jumping to 82 from a previous count of 50 only a few days earlier, Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman David Mace said.
About 6,000 hectares of land have been torched by lava since May 3, in what is likely to be the most destructive eruption of Kilauea in more than a century, the County of Hawaii said.
Photo: EPA
“There were eight houses taken on this road in 12 hours,” Ikaika Marzo said in a Facebook video as he stood on Kaupuli street and showed a black, glass-like lava field where his cousin’s house previously stood.
Where there were once houses and tropical back-gardens in Leilani Estates, magma now spews from 30m-high cinder cones and forms elevated ponds of molten rock that cascade over their banks to engulf the next street.
“It’s this tide of lava that rises up, and overflows itself on the edges and keeps rising and progressing forward,” US Geological Survey (USGS) geologist Wendy Stovall told journalists on a conference call.
About 37 structures are “lava locked,” meaning homes are inaccessible, and people who do not evacuate them might be hemmed in by 9m-high walls of lava.
Magma is draining underground from a sinking lava lake at Kilauea’s 1,247m summit before flowing about 40km east and bursting from giant cracks, with two flows reaching the ocean just more than 4.8km away.
Marzo said he was told by a USGS geologist that there was much more to come from Kilauea.
“What has been coming out is just a small fraction of what was in the volcano,” Marzo said he was told.
Though lava destruction from the volcano is confined to an about 26km2 area, the eruption is hurting the island’s tourist-driven economy, as potential visitors fear ashfall or volcanic smog belching from Kilauea’s summit.
A magnitude 4.4 earthquake at the volcano’s summit on Friday prompted County of Hawaii Civil Defense to reassure the island’s 200,000 residents that there was no risk of a tsunami.
Year-to date visitor numbers to the island are “trending a little bit lower” than last year, with the cancelation of some port visits by cruise ships expected to have a US$3 million impact, Island of Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau executive director Ross Birch told a conference call.
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