Lava threatens escape route

Hawaii reports first serious injury from Kilauea volcano

A stream of lava threatened to block a key Hawaii highway on Saturday that serves as an escape route for coastal residents, while the first known serious injury was reported from fresh explosive eruptions from the Kilauea volcano.

“A homeowner on Noni Farms Road who was sitting on a third-floor balcony got hit with lava spatter,” said Janet Snyder, a spokesperson for the Office of the Mayor, County of Hawaii.

“It hit him on the shin and shattered everything there down on his leg,” she said, adding that lava spatters “can weigh as much as a refrigerator and even small pieces of spatter can kill.” No other information was immediately available.

As magma destroyed four more homes, molten rock from two huge cracks merged into a single stream, threatening to block escape routes. It was expected to hit Highway 137 overnight if it kept up its rate and direction of flow, the County of Hawaii’s Civil Defense Agency said.

Authorities are trying to open up a road that was blocked by lava in 2014 to serve as an alternative escape route should Highway 137 or another exit route, Highway 130, be blocked, Jessica Ferracane of the National Park Service told reporters.

The park service is working to bulldoze almost a mile of hardened lava out of the way on nearby Highway 11, which has been impassable, she added.

The Hawaii National Guard has warned of mandatory evacuations if more roads become blocked.

For weeks, geologists have warned that hotter, fresher magma from Kilauea’s summit would run underground and emerge some 25 miles east in the lower Puna district, where older, cooler lava has already destroyed 44 homes and other structures.

“Summit magma has arrived,” US Geological Survey scientist Wendy Stovall said on a conference call with reporters.

“There is much more stuff coming out of the ground and its going to produce flows that will move much further away.”

Fountains of bright orange lava were seen spouting at least 20-feet high, and spewing rivers of molten rock on Saturday.

Carolyn Pearcheta, operational geologist at the Hawaii Volcano Authority, told reporters that hotter and more viscous lava could be on the way, with fountains spurting as high as 600 feet, as seen in a 1955 eruption. “We’ve seen the clearing out of the system,” she said. “We call that the ‘throat clearing’ phase.”