Property losses mount in Hawaii’s Big Island as lava flow spreads
PAHOA, Hawaii: A river of lava spewing from the foot of Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano swallowed about three dozen more homes on the Big Island during a weekend of destruction that brought to nearly 120 the number of dwellings devoured since last month, officials said.
Mounting property losses were reported a day after five or six people who initially chose to stay in the newly evacuated Kapoho area after road access was cut off were rescued by helicopter, according to the Hawaii County Civil Defence agency.
All but a few of the estimated 500 inhabitants of Kapoho and adjacent Vacationland development are now believed to have fled their homes, an agency spokesman said.
The area lies near the site of a seaside village buried in lava from a 1960 eruption.
The latest damage came from a large lava flow that crept several kilometres before severing a key highway junction at Kapoho on Saturday and then obliterating about a half dozen blocks of the subdivision over the weekend, the spokesman said.
One finger of the lava poured into a small freshwater lake, boiling away all its water late on Saturday, while another finger spilled into Kapoho Bay on Sunday night, officials said.
On Monday, civil defence reported a total of 117 homes and other structures destroyed across the island’s larger lavastricken region, as the eruption from Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, continued through its 33rd day.
About three dozen of those structures, mostly private homes and vacation rentals, were lost during the weekend in Kapoho.
The rest were consumed weeks earlier in the larger Leilani Estates subdivision several miles to the west, where lava- spouting fissures in the ground first opened on May 3.
About 2,000 residents have been displaced from Leilani since earlier this month as fountains of lava and high concentrations of toxic sulfur dioxide gas continued unabated. A mandatory evacuation of much the subdivision was imposed last week.