Beauty and Risk of Living With Lava
PAHOA, Hawaii — Jaris Dreaming built his spacious solar-powered home in a clearing of Polynesian jungle. He drinks rainwater and eats avocados from trees in his backyard. Mainlanders express envy when they hear how he bought nearly 40 hectares of Hawaii’s Big Island for just over $100,000.
But there’s a catch to this off-grid paradise: Mr. Dreaming lives a short stroll from a lava-spewing rift of Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes.
The growing ferocity of Kilauea’s recent eruptions, burying home after home under rivers of molten rock, has provoked questions about how thousands of families managed to put down stakes in such a disaster-prone domain in the first place.
Puna, the magnificently forested region of the Big Island where some of Kilauea’s most intense eruptions are taking place, ranks among the most remote corners of the United States, luring real estate developers, renegades and modern- day homesteaders with colossal appetites for risk. Since the 1970s, when Vietnam veterans and other wanderers began settling here, Puna has emerged as a place where people could drop out, reinvent themselves, maybe grow a bit of pakalolo — as cannabis is called in Hawaii.
“We have a reputation for being something of a pirate’s lair,” said Mr. Dreaming, 64, a musician and contractor who was raised in New Jersey with the name John Fattorosi. “But we really just want to live freely in a place of stunning beauty without anyone telling us what to do.”
While rattling people here who generally want little to do with the mainstream, the destruction unleashed by Kilauea is also exposing fault lines in Hawaiian society, bringing scrutiny to the state’s severe housing shortage and the questionable land use regulations that governed the development of one of the state’s last bastions of affordable property.
Real estate speculators set their sights on the Big Island almost immediately after Hawaii became the 50th state admitted to the Union in 1959. By 1960, a developer had carved the area encompassing Leilani Estates, the now evacuated rural outpost overrun by lava flows in some areas, into more than 2,000 housing lots.
The land developers minimized any volcanic risks. Many of the subdivisions in Puna were created in the 1960s before the first lava hazard maps, drawn in the mid-1970s, said Daryn Arai, deputy planning director for the County of Hawaii.
Mr. Arai said the county still has no regulations that apply directly to lava flow hazard zones.
In a column on the area’s history for the news website Honolulu Civil Beat, Alan D. McNarie said the risks have become more apparent over the years. Citing figures from the United States Geological Survey, he noted that about 100 square kilometers of the island were buried in fresh lava between 1983 and 2003 alone.
Many homes in Puna are built in zones where lava flows had already wiped out previous developments. Less than 30 years after an eruption destroyed about 100 homes in the community of Kalapana, many homes now stand atop the lava flow field. The homes, some built without heed to code, lack ties to the electricity grid and sewage systems.
Often, banks won’t issue a traditional mortgage on such properties.
Amber Sengir, 60, a computer chip designer who moved here last August from Portland, Oregon, said she bought her home in cash for $240,000 — much less than the median price of $760,000 for a home in Oahu. Now she is desperately trying to save some possessions in case the lava flows overrun her home, which is uninsured for it.
Rainbow Foster, 33, who bought a home and land on the lava field three years ago, said: “On some days we can hear the roaring of the eruptions in Puna, like a jet engine taking off.”
Ms. Foster and her husband, Tony, 44, are self- employed. They have two children, and get by doing odd jobs and selling tie- dyed T- shirts. They bought their property for $55,000 in an owner-financed deal. “Our credit rating wasn’t good and we had very little money,” she said.
Some of their neighbors have fled, but Ms. Foster, who grew up in Puna, said: “This is the life we chose. We’re hanging tight.”
Building on top of what a volcano had destroyed.