(ABOVE) Lava from Fissure 8 covered Kapoho Road during the 2018 eruption of Kīlauea.
Reader beware: The aa field on both sides of Kapoho Road is as dangerous and foreboding as it looks. Though just a few minutes' drive from welcoming Puna town, the journey has all the hospitality of a trip to Mordor. Going makai (toward the ocean), the road traverses the meandering path a river of lava took in 2018 and dead-ends at what was once a four-way stop-now it's a wall of rock, with a 90-degree turn onto Government Beach Road.
"Access to an aa field is self-regulating," says Philip Ong, a geologist and co-executive director of the nonprofit Hawaiian Volcano Education and Resilience Institute (HVERI). "Most sane people get a few steps off from the road, realize how hostile the ground is and turn back." Walking on the lava, you quickly realize that the ground is eating your footwear and that a slip could easily turn a scenic lookout stop into a trip to the ER. This is the site of a flow-now named Ahuailaau-that destroyed over seven hundred homes in a neighborhood called Leilani Estates, causing an estimated $800 million in damage to private and government property.
From afar, sections of the fields where bubbles of acidic gas expanded and gently burst appear to have the texture of baked bread. In other places, innumerable small clinkers no bigger than a fist floated atop a stream of lava and eventually settled into place. In areas where no person or animal has yet trodden, the ground crackles satisfyingly underfoot and exposes lava tubes about the width of a human arm.
There have been several attempts to stop or divert lava on Hawaii Island, beginning in the nineteenth century, when members of the Hawaiian monarchy made offerings to Pele during an 1880 eruption of Mauna Loa. Above, geologist Philip Ong examines a lava wall near Puuhuluhulu. On the previous page, lava from Fissure 8 covered Kapoho Road during the 2018 eruption of Kilauea.
Kapoho Road is named for Kapoho town, now buried under lava from eruptions that began in 1960. A hundred feet below us are the elementary school, post office, homes and hastily built berms that were part of a weeks-long battle to save the town. Over the course of thirty-eight days, heavy-machine operators and firefighters battled an advancing wall of lava. The State of Hawaii, barely a year old, and the County of Hawaii constructed six fifteen-foot-tall barriers across two and a half miles. Images of the bulldozers with a fountain of fire spewing in the background illustrated both bravery and futility in the battle against the inexorable power of nature. First they tried to save the whole town, then they retreated to save the school, then the post office and, in the last stand, the lighthouse. Whether the berms had anything to do with it, the flow stopped just short of the 125-foot steel-framed Kumukahi Lighthouse. Everything else is gone.
Though largely ineffectual, the managed retreat to save Kapoho town could be viewed as something of a victory: It at least bought people time to save their belongings.
On Hawaii Island there have been several attempts to stall, divert or even blow up lava to protect human settlement, with limited results. One of the most memorable mortal interactions with the works of Pele occurred in 1881. An eruption near the summit of Mauna Loa's Northeast Rift Zone began on November 5, 1880, near the two-mile elevation, heralding a flow that would eventually send lava closer to Hilo than any other had in a thousand years. Lava traveled through a massive lava tube from the summit to the edge of Hilo and split into three forks outside the town, re-formed and threatened Hilo Bay a mile and a half away.
Lava stopped within a few hundred feet of Pahoa Village Road in 2014. Had it continued, it would have cut through Pahoa, forcing residents south of the flow to evacuate by a long, circuitous route. One resident, Alfred Lee, managed to build a berm to protect his property (ABOVE), one of the very few success stories in the history of lava diversion efforts in Hawaii.
The loss of Hilo town and bay would be disastrous. In addition to plans for berms, a contingent of the royal family arrived to help. "Without delay a council, high and solemn, was held in Honolulu by the principal natives; and Princess Ruth, or Luka, as her name was in Hawaiian, a lineal descendant of Kamehameha the Great, the conqueror of all Hawaii, was dispatched to offer compelling sacrifices to the goddess," reported Ko Hawaii Pae Aina, a Hawaiian language newspaper. Though the monarchy had abolished traditional Hawaiian religion in 1819, its practitioners and beliefs remained. At the edge of town, Princess Ruth Keelikolani and several priests offered traditional oli (chants) and hookupu (tribute) to Pele and camped near the advancing flow. The lava stopped and the berms were never built. Pele's path can be plainly seen just north of the present University of Hawaii-Hilo campus.
The 1880-1881 eruption became one of the most popular international stories of its time. Journalists, writers and artists from around the world descended on Hawaii Island and Hilo town, curious to see the earth forming anew. The global interest in Mauna Loa eventually led to the creation in 1912 of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, which has since become one of the premier sites for geological study in the world. Thomas A. Jaggar, the observatory's first chief scientist, managed its programs with a skeleton crew until 1940.
Decades later, the US government tried neither prayer nor retreat. The golden era of lava diversion saw the American government at war with nature itself. In 1935 an active pahoehoe (ropy lava) channel on Mauna Loa's north flank was experimentally bombed. The idea was to blow a gap in a retaining wall of previously hardened lava, which would theoretically divert a flow, like water through the kicked-over wall of a sand castle. Observing from the flank of Mauna Kea, Jaggar helped oversee the operation. Though the military declared victory, numerous subsequent studies have shown that the bombing probably didn't do much to alter the lava's eventual path.
Dane DuPont (left) and Ong, co-executive directors of the Hawaiian Volcano Education and Resilience Institute, discuss how walls and berms might help divert a lava flow under the right circumstances. In the case of a large, fast-moving flow like Ahuailaau, which spewed from Fissure 8 in 2018, the only viable defense is information-and evacuation.
In 1942 the military tried again, this time with a bit more oomph. Mauna Loa began erupting in April of that year from Mokuaweoweo, the summit caldera, lighting up the mountain with lava fountains three hundred feet high. But unless you were living in Hawaii at the time, you might never have known about it: Fearing the Japanese military might use the glow from the eruption to orient its warplanes, the US military declared it a secret, barred the press from reporting on it, then tried to snuff it out. "Not a lot is known about the 1942 bombing, but man, those guys were just goin' for it," chuckles Dane DuPont, who along with Ong is co-executive director of HVERI. "Keep in mind this was a few years after Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Territory of Hawaii was under martial law, and the military believed that the eruption made the mountain appear as a beacon to the Japanese. The idea was to blow deep enough to get to the aquifer and harden the flow." It was a long shot, but that didn't stop the military from trying. The US Army Air Force dropped sixteen three- to six-hundred-pound bombs on Mauna Loa, to little effect.
"That's just crazy," says Leila Kealoha, executive director of the nonprofit Pohaku Pelemaka, which stewards the wahi pana (sacred sites) of Puna, and a cultural adviser to Hawaii County. Kealoha is one among many Native Hawaiians who believe that lava should be left alone, much less subject to aerial bombardment. "That was a very different time in Hawaii, not even fifty years after the overthrow of the government. Hawaiians didn't have a say; it was a different set of people to make decisions." For centuries, Hawaiians have revered and paid homage to Pelehonuamea, the powerful deity and kupuna (ancestor). "Our students learn the stories of her, the pits that she dug from Waiapele [Green Lake] to Halemaumau, the dances of Pele and Hi'iaka and more. She is a prominent, real, living entity."
That didn't stop residents of lower Puna from trying to give her a nudge in 1955, when lava spewed from Kilauea's lower East Rift Zone for the first time since 1840, requiring the evacuation of most of the coast from Kapoho to Kalapana-the first time that a volcanic eruption threatened a populated area in the United States and its territories. Bulldozers piled several earthen berms to protect homes and farms and seemed, initially, to succeed-a group of homes called Iwasaki Camp survived two waves of lava behind the berms until succumbing finally to a third as new vents opened.
Ong studies lava flow maps from the 2018 eruption at the end of Kapoho Road, which was cut off when the Ahuailaau flow streamed downhill from the Leilani Estates subdivision. What was once a four-way intersection is today just a ninety-degree turn.
Aside from buying time for Kapoho in 1960, the only known successes against the flow of lava in Hawaii to date have been small-scale. In 2014, Pahoa resident Alfred Lee built a berm around his property using heavy machinery from his work as a contractor and saved his home. In 2018, several property owners in Puna sprayed the lava with garden hoses and erected small berms to slow the advance of Ahuailaau across Kapoho Road and through Leilani Estates. But there has been nothing in Hawaii on the scale of the battle against Iceland's Eldfell volcano in 1973, when Heimaey Harbor was saved by pumping 1.9 billion gallons of seawater onto the advancing flow over the course of weeks-the first known instance of a successful lava intervention. Or when Italian scientists convinced government authorities to use dynamite to direct a flow away from inhabited areas near Sicily's restive Mount Etna in 1983 (coincidentally the site of the first known-and failed-attempt to redirect lava, when an eruption threatened the city of Catania in 1669). While largely successful, that effort remains controversial among Italians, some of whom believe, as many Native Hawaiians do, that nature should be allowed to take its course-and that humans must take things in stride-even if it means losing one's home.
"For people in Puna, it's happened for generations of our families," says Kealoha. "When it does, we pick up and move. It's not preferable, but it's not our place to stop it. We are the best stewards we can be and hope she doesn't cover our homes."
In 2018, Fissure 8 sent fountains of lava more than 150 feet high, creating the Ahuailaau flow.
"In 1880 it took around 375 days for the flow to reach the outskirts of Hilo. That's more than enough time to plan," Ong says. "In 2018 we didn't have that luxury." So Ong, DuPont and several others posted updates to HI Tracker, an online resource created by Pahoa resident Ryan Finlay to track the 2014 Puu Oo eruption. HI Tracker kept residents informed in real time about what was happening during the 2018 eruption of "Ahuailaau-then called Fissure 8-which erupted in May 2018. At the peak of the eruption, Fissure 8 (of an eventual 24) shot lava 200 feet high and created a rushing river of lava flowing to the sea, eventually burying almost 14 square miles and adding nearly 900 acres of new land extending into the ocean.
In lieu of fighting the volcano, the community rallied to help each other. Ikaika Marzo, a Puna tour operator and musician, became a social media phenomenon and ad hoc director of what would be called "the hub," or Pu'uhonua o Puna, a grassroots community center across from Pahoa High School that provided food, shelter and supplies for hundreds of displaced residents. "We tried to gather people, to give them ownership and agency as things unfolded," remembers Ong. "In a disaster, people want information." DuPont, whose parents lived in the neighborhood, began tracking the eruptive vents where they emerged, and led a community drive to map locations of homes lost to lava using photos from commercial pilots, USGS maps and people on the ground monitoring the progression of lava flows. With a sudden, unpredictable and fast-moving event like the lower Puna eruption of 2018, information is-so far- the only defense against Pele.
The last structure left standing after an eruption that began in 1960 is Kumukahi Lighthouse (ABOVE), the lone survivor of a weeks-long battle to save the town of Kapoho using bulldozers and berms. While the barriers failed to save the town, they might have bought residents time to gather their belongings before evacuating.
Apart from the spiritual belief that Pele should be left to her chosen course, there are more mundane reasons not to interfere with a lava flow. "When the government intervenes, they 'own' the disaster, muddying future intervention with FEMA, insurance and blame," explains DuPont. "There is an incentive to play hands-off." And there are pressures against rebuilding, in part because lava is so thoroughly beyond human management. Those still living in Leilani Estates have significant issues with insurance-providers have recently denied covering homes or mortgages, and a state insurance fund has become contentious. The community's roads have yet to be fully rebuilt, as the government has not committed to encouraging people to return. Looking at satellite images of Leilani Estates today, it seems as if a dark portal opened and swallowed up sections of a rural neighborhood. Through it all, the people of Puna remain tight-knit and resilient. Many have stayed and some have left, mostly to other communities on Hawaii Island.
Still, there might be a future attempt to guide a flow. When polled in 1960, residents of Kapoho, who predominantly identified as Native Hawaiian, supported the creation of berms at the time. Though the Puna community was mostly opposed to diversion in 2014 and 2018, a state hazard mitigation plan grants the government the ability to intercede to protect critical infrastructure or a population center.
Whatever course Pele chooses, those who live in her path face at least one certainty: that she will return. "Given enough time," Ong says, "there is a high likelihood that everything along this slope of Kilauea will be covered in lava."
