Man hit by lava in first serious volcano injury

PAHOA ( Hawaii): A stream of lava threatened to block a key Hawaii highway 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 thirdfloor balcony got hit with lava spatter,” said Janet Snyder, a spokesman for the Office of the Mayor, County of Hawaii on Saturday.

“It hit him on the shin and shat tered 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 said .

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 40km east in the lower Puna district.

“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 it’s going to produce flows that will move much further away.”