PARADISE LOST IN THE LAVA
Thousands still struggling to recover from the most destructive disaster to hit the Big Island in decades
PAHOA, Hawaii – Months-old rocks crunch beneath Deb Smith’s feet as she carefully follows a barely visible path snaking across the top of the 50-foot-deep lava covering what once was her peaceful neighborhood.
Like breadcrumbs, small pieces of white coral placed atop the hardened lava flow mark the ankle-twisting trail to the lava-covered homes and farms destroyed last summer during the Big Island volcanic eruption. The lava covered roads, making it impossible for survivors to drive back to their properties.
Deb Smith, 63, and her husband, Stan, 65, farmed the rich, volcanic soil before the eruption. They must trek nearly 4 miles round-trip to reach their orchard.
She pauses to catch her breath and admire the things that made this piece of the Big Island a tropical paradise. There’s the bright morning sun, birds chirping in the bush, ripening oranges, coconuts and bananas and the warm Pacific Ocean less than a mile away.
“We all had this assumption we’d be fine, that we’d be back pretty quick. We never thought it would end like this,” she says.
A year after lava began flowing May 3, 2018, in
Kilauea flooded an area 10 times the size of New York’s Central Park, destroying more than 700 structures, including 200 homes, and displacing about 3,000 people.
Hawaii’s largest and most destructive volcano eruption in decades, thousands of residents and business owners are still struggling to put their lives back together. Hundreds can’t return home or rebuild. Tourism is down, and unemployment is up. The ground steams in some places, and major roads remain impassible. Frustration is mounting over the pace of recovery.
Officials say it would be foolish to rush back so soon after the months-long eruption. Many property owners say they’re tired of living with friends or paying rent. Other evacuees live in their businesses or in tents.
Few people have been able to rebuild. Although 200 homes were destroyed, county officials issued 17.5% fewer building permits in the first quarter of this year compared with 2018, losing out on nearly $30 million in fees.
“The recovery is more painful than the disaster was,” Nancy Seifers says.
Seifers, whose home survived, spent months living with friends because she could reach her house only by helicopter or via a 90-minute hike across hardened lava. Late last month, utility workers bulldozed a road through the lava and across a neighbor’s property so she could move home.
Like many evacuees, Seifers, 72, says county officials should act faster to reopen roads to areas like her neighborhood, where more than 50 homes sit on a kipuka, a Hawaiian word for undisturbed land surrounded by fresh lava.
Seifers, a school counselor, says she knows she’s better off than many of her neighbors, because her house survived and she could go back to work. Reopening the road turned her 90-minute hike into a five-minute drive, and she wishes county officials would talk less and spend more. “No money has hit the ground,” she says.
Seven years ago, the Smiths, who are Colorado natives, semi-retired to the Big Island, leaving their jobs as an electrical contractor (him) and X-ray tech (her) to live a simpler life growing and selling fruit on their 5-acre plot.
Every day, the five volcanoes that make up the Big Island loomed in the distance. The last significantly destructive flow from Kilauea started in early 1990, slowly consuming about 150 homes before fading away. The volcano continued to ooze small amounts of lava but usually only in areas that had been previously covered or harmlessly into the ocean. Still, it was a constant reminder of what could happen again.
“Everybody takes a chance by living out here,” Stan Smith says.
For decades, most residents stayed lucky. Mount Kilauea’s small flows did little damage and were enough to attract tourists willing to hike out to watch the lava ooze out and to keep the sightseeing helicopters in business.
The danger seemed to recede every year, and more people built houses in areas where experts predicted lava could flow. Many of the homes were built under zoning rights that predated modern lava-flow predictions, and some people built unpermitted houses down dirt roads behind locked gates, far from prying eyes and county inspectors.
The luck ran out May 3, 2018, when underground magma began forcing its way to the surface. The next day, it poured through Leilani Estates, a 700home community of about 1,500 residents. Within days, dozens of lava vents opened, spewing magma high into the air and sending a slow-moving avalanche of molten rock downhill. The lava’s intense heat set homes ablaze before it ever reached them, then the liquid rock buried the flaming remains.
Over the next three months, Kilauea flooded an area 10 times the size of New York’s Central Park, destroying more than 700 structures, including 200 homes, and displacing about 3,000 people. The damage estimate totaled nearly $300 million for residents, and there was an additional $236 million in damage to roads, waterlines and parks.
A forever changed island
The lava took the Smiths’ home in early July in a slow-motion disaster they watched coming for months. The unstoppable flows prompted widespread evacuations as the molten rock crept downhill toward the ocean, first burying Leilani Estates, then the heavily forested farm lots where the Smiths grew their fruit.
Like many evacuees, the Smiths removed a few valuables and pictures from their house, but they didn’t pull out furniture or appliances. By the time the lava reached them, most of the island’s storage units were stuffed with the belongings of earlier evacuees.
“To start over, in a new location at our age, it’s not realistic,” Deb Smith says. “We didn’t have enough to rebuild what we had.”
Mark Bishop and his wife, Jennifer, 56, have a front-row view of fissure 8, the largest lava vent in Leilani Estates. What once was a gentle, jungle-covered downhill slope alongside their house is now a rocky hill topped with the fissure’s 60-foot-high cinder cone. On rainy mornings, it steams.
For years, the couple’s two adult sons – both of whom have geology degrees – suggested their parents move from their two-story, four-bedroom home.
“You’re dealing with geologic time. It could have been another 300 or 400 years without this happening,” Mark Bishop says. “But it didn’t.”
Even though the family’s home still stands, the insurance company deemed it a total loss, largely because sulfur emissions rotted away almost everything metal, from electrical sockets to frying pans. That meant paying out of pocket to make their home livable again.
When the Bishops returned, they discovered volcano watchers had broken their kitchen window, pulled chairs onto the deck and beer from their refrigerator and partied while the lava erupted. The couple are part of a class-action lawsuit with their insurer over what damages will be covered.
Like many Big Island residents, the Bishops have an emotional connection to the area, and they mourn their losses daily: neighbors who have abandoned their homes, the no-longer-private outdoor shower, the trees that once lined their driveway, the road down the valley.
“We’d try to go for a walk down the street and remember it no longer exists,” Bishop says with a sigh.
A beautiful ‘graveyard’
Neighbor Stacy Welch says many residents share symptoms of PTSD: sleepless nights, worry over earthquakes, a sensitivity to loud noises.
After the eruption, Welch spent 121 days in a shelter with her daughter, the lava creeping ever closer to her 364square-foot home in Leilani Estates. The house survived, but the gases ate away at the metal.
“All my hinges have to be replaced,” Welch, 49, said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if my front door fell off.”
Welch worked at a restaurant inside Volcanoes National Park but lost her job for months when the eruption forced the park’s closure. The park and the restaurant reopened, and she’s trying to rebuild her savings, thankful she found a replacement job during the closure.
Welch says she feels a mix of sadness and joy as she looks across the lava flow she seeded with plants and flowers.
“Basically, it’s a graveyard. Everyone’s memories are out there, and I have so much guilt,” she says. “It’s still beautiful. It’s still paradise. But it’s different.”
In many cases, property boundaries remain unclear because it’s too dangerous for surveyors to walk atop the lava field, where seemingly solid rock could break open under a person’s weight, dropping them into holes ringed with jagged volcanic glass.
Reopening roads requires county officials to conduct surveys, formally notify property owners, consider alternatives and prepare for any runoff that could be created by their work. Federal authorities will pay for 75% of the infrastructure repairs if they meet federal standards. In some cases, roads set for repairs fell far short of meeting those standards in the first place.
County officials plan to hire workers to expedite the building permit process. The state of Hawaii approved $20 million in grants and $40 million in interest-free loans to help rebuild, although none of that money has been used to help residents. “Am I satisfied with what we have done so far? No,” Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim says.
Many residents say the government has no right to tell them how they can use their property. The risks, they say, are theirs to take. If this were the mainland, they say, government officials would have quickly reopened roads and launched the rebuilding process.
Kim mandated a six-month waiting period after the eruption ended before beginning to consider plans for rebuilding. He says he understands the impatience but wonders why people are so willing to disregard the danger from a volcano that destroyed their property.
Business owners say they understand the balance Kim tries to strike, especially when it comes to opening lava areas to tourists.
Tourist dollars are critical to the economy, says Amedeo Markoff, who owns a gift shop near Leilani Estates. Markoff, 47, opened the shop a few months before the eruption, showcasing jewelry, artwork and clothes made by about 100 local artists.
The lava flow destroyed or forced the vacancy of dozens of rental homes in the area, and now he sells less artwork. Instead, the customers he gets buy $20-$40 items.
Tourism, the island’s biggest economic driver, has slowed significantly. The sugar-sand beaches on the island’s west side are sunny and uncrowded; Volcanoes National Park has almost fully reopened; and the restaurants in Hilo serve up fresh poke and rum drinks in pineapples. Cruise ships port in Hilo and Kailua-Kona, and both of the island’s main airports offer nonstop flights from the mainland.
But in the first quarter of 2019, visitor volume dropped 9.3% compared with the same period in 2018, right before the volcano erupted. Every tourist counts, since the average visitor spends about $1,400 per trip. Because fewer tourists are coming, there’s less need for workers at restaurants, hotels and vacation homes, and unemployment has ticked up, from 2.3% for the final quarter of 2018 to 3.2% for the first quarter of 2019.
“Nothing is selling. There’s no volume – but what we are selling are lavacentric items,” Markoff says.
Steaming vents and toxic gases
Pamela Ah-Nee, 61, has a front-row seat to the area’s new geological features, including a 60-foot-deep lava ravine running diagonally across her land. Steam vents emit stinking sulfur into the air, painting the rocks in otherworldly orange and yellow.
Before the eruption, Ah-Nee envisioned using the lot to build a retreat for her fellow Alzheimer’s caregivers, a place where they could seek respite from their emotionally draining work. Her own house a few streets over was undamaged in the eruption, but she comes to her volcano-damaged lot every day to marvel at the scene.
Because she can’t build, she’s considering charging tourists for lava tours: “What can we do with our own property if we can’t put structures on it?”