Many Return to Imperiled Homes : Residents Keep Their Cool as Kilauea Spews Hot Lava

When the molten river oozing from Kilauea Volcano took a capricious turn toward this close-knit seacoast hamlet late last week, the free spirits in town reacted the way people living in a lush, out-of-the way tropical setting on the edge of a surf-beaten black sand beach might be expected to react.

They rounded up some rock bands and planned a party down at Harry K. Brown Park. “Lava Aid,” they were going to call it.

Madame Pele, the Hawaiian fire goddess who legend has it lives in the volcano, apparently was not amused. Before the bash could begin, the glowing, 2,000-degree flow scraped the western edge of the area’s main subdivision, setting 15 of its 97 homes ablaze.

Police ordered an evacuation, and residents--some of whom had left traditional offerings of liquor and leaves of the ti plant to Pele to halt the lava--hastily packed what belongings they could and retreated to a Red Cross emergency evacuation shelter 15 miles away.

Such disasters are a constant danger for those who live at the base of the 4,000-foot-high Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano. The current eruption began nearly four years ago. From 1969 to 1974--five straight years--the volcano belched smoke, gas and molten rock.

In geological terms, Hawaii, the state’s largest island, is an adolescent, still growing through the frequent eruptions of Kilauea and its much larger, 13,679-foot-high sister, Mauna Loa. Only last month, lava from Kilauea swept through the Royal Gardens subdivision 2 1/2 miles from here, destroyed 13 homes and then poured over the coastal highway into the Pacific Ocean, creating approximately 20 acres of new land.

Another volcano is bubbling less than one mile underwater only about 15 miles south of Kalapana, gradually shaping what someday will emerge as a new island in the Hawaiian chain.

Geologists think Kilauea sits atop a hot spot in the earth’s crust that is responsible for forming all of the Hawaiian chain. It shoots up magma through a tube into a nearly two-mile-thick reservoir buried a few miles below the 2.5-mile-wide caldera, or rim, formed by ancient lava flows. Rather than explode violently like Mt. St. Helens and many other volcanoes, the discharge from Kilauea usually seeps out through cracks or vents in elaborate subterranean plumbing systems that extend for miles along a pair of rift zones from the caldera down into the earth.

The area around Kalapana lies below the east rift zone and is a prime target for a lava flow.

‘Asking for Trouble’

“Anyone who builds a house down slope of a rift zone is just asking for trouble,” said Christina Heliker, a geologist with the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, a federal lookout post for scientists perched at Kilauea’s edge.

Heliker said that the flow that hit Kalapana stopped over the weekend when the underground “pipes” backed up. But she warned that the volcano is still pumping out more than 500,000 cubic meters of lava a day--enough to fill 60,000 cement trucks--into a pool higher up the mountainside. Such a heavy output almost certainly will send a new river of fire churning downhill toward the ocean within a matter of days or weeks, she warned.

“The long-term prognosis for that stretch of Kalapana is not very good,” Heliker said. “Unless the vent shuts off, any reprieve is short-term.”

Such predictions have not deterred many of Kalapana’s 400 residents from trickling back from their forced weekend exodus. “It moves slow enough so you’re not in danger of your life,” said Lloyd Davis, 70, a retired electrical worker who moved here from Culver City, Calif., five years ago with his wife, Freda. “I’m at the age now where I don’t want to think about moving around again.”

Removes Furniture

Like many of his neighbors, though, Davis is being cautious. Friends removed most of the furniture and appliances from his 2,000-square-foot cedar-framed house, and he does not intend to bring it back until authorities sound the all-clear.

Not everyone is coming back, however. The rented house Debra Smith and her 7-year-old daughter lived in for the last six months escaped damage, but Smith said that she’s too nervous to return.

“It’s just too hard to sleep at night when you know the lava’s up above you,” she said as she drove around the neighborhood to take a last look. “It’s just too risky. At any time, another finger can come down and wipe out the whole area.”

There was ample visual evidence Tuesday of the lava’s destructive might. Huge mounds of black, steaming lava filled what once were yards, driveways and living rooms. All that was left of one home on Lokelani Street at the lava’s edge were a few strips of mangled, charred sheet metal and the chain link fence guarding the driveway. On the fence was a sparkly Christmas wreath and a now pointless sign warning outsiders to “Beware of Dog.”

Eerie Red Glow

The lava cut a winding, quarter-mile-wide, seven-mile-long path of destruction down the mountainside, charring and mangling vegetation as it moved. At night, the route was outlined in an eerie red glow thrown off from the still boiling rock under the black lava crust.

“It’s been sunset for months around here,” beamed Al Ritter, a fisherman who bought his Kalapana house three years ago and who insisted that he has no qualms about remaining. Ritter said that the first thing he rescued from the house when he left was his surfboard, and it was the first thing he unpacked when he returned.

“Where else can you get a place like this for $30,000, a few blocks from the beach in Hawaii?” he asked. “Yeah, there’re safer places to live, but they’re not Kalapana. I feel safer living here than in Oregon near St. Helens or in San Francisco near the San Andreas fault. . . . This hasn’t killed one person, and it’s been going on for four years.”

Some Kalapana homeowners said that the danger might actually make life here better. “A lot of people feel with the volcano it will keep out some of the development that would really ruin the neighborhood,” said Carolyn Faget.