Category: HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND

By Kelly Moran

Life Goes On

“Hurricane Downs Trees” was last month’s big headline; and “Lava Cuts Highway” may well be next month’s big headline.  But right now, the big news in Hilo is that it’s hot.

This time of year is often the warmest, and on occasion the thermometer can hit 90, though that won’t break any records.  But for the last few weeks, daytime Hilo temps have been consistently above 85.  Some nights, a few clouds may pile up around Mauna Kea, dropping a sprinkle or two on some mauka communities.  But in Hilo itself there’s been virtually no rain to break this heat-wave for a month or so.

One effect can be seen at the Farmers’ Markets, perhaps most vividly in the rare proliferation of “dragon fruit.”  They are the fruit of those ropey cacti that you see on rock walls, especially on the drier, western side of the Big Island.  (Honolulu’s famous night-blooming cereus is in the same cactus family.)

Dragon Fruit Cacti on a Rock Wall

But with all this heat, and in the absence of precipitation that could stunt or rot cactus fruit in Hilo, our local eastside cacti are enjoying the rare dry spell that allows them to set fruit and keep it growing until their green skin turns red at maturity.

Dragon Fruit in the Farmers Market

Dragon Fruit – Unripe

Two kinds of dragon fruit are on the market, the difference being the color – red or white – of the flesh inside.  On the outside they look the same, but the vendors know their sources, and will tell you which is which.  In general, the white flesh is firmer, with very tiny black seeds; the red fruit is softer, with slightly larger seeds; and though both are sweet, the reds tend to be sweeter – they’re also rarer, and hence more expensive.  If you’ve eaten the fruits of prickly-pear cacti, the taste is similar; if you haven’t, imagine a not-so-juicy watermelon.

Chilled fruit is great in hot weather, but when temperatures go up, many people figure it’s time to visit someplace that’s air-conditioned.  So here’s one that, while popular with tourists, is visited by relatively few people who live here: the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut factory.

Between Hilo and Kea‘au on Hwy 11, follow the signs for Macadamia Drive, and after three miles through papaya and mac-nut orchards, you’ll come to the factory. The last time I was there, the factory itself was not running; harvest and maintenance schedules control its calendar, and you may want to call ahead and ask if you’ll be seeing it run.  But there is a self-guided self-guided tour along the outside wall.  You peer through big windows at the machinery, and watch instructive videos that explain the processes of sorting, seasoning and packaging in a delightfully humorous way.

Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Factory – Tour Video

Finally, there is that air-conditioned visitors’ center [www.maunaloa.com/visitor-center], where a dozen different flavors of nuts are for sale.  Besides “dry roasted” and “sea salt,” there are exotic savories like wasabi-teriyaki, and Maui onion and garlic.  And for one’s sweet tooth, there are nuts that are “glazed” with Kona coffee, and nuts that are “enrobed” with several kinds of chocolate.  You will notice, however, that like wineries and coffee mills, the mac-nut factory does not undercut its retailers; you’ll pay pretty much the same prices here as anywhere else in Hawaii.

Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Visitors Center

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND

By Kelly Moran

Nature Always Wins (Part III) [see Part I]

Puna’s population has grown enormously since the 1960s, when the big subdivisions were created: Hawaiian Paradise Park (HPP), Nanawale Estates, Hawaiian Beaches, Hawaiian Shores, Ainaloa, and Orchidland.  The lots were not expensive – some cost as little as a Volkswagen Bug.  Back then, it was assumed that only retirees, farmers and hippies would want to live so far (20 or more miles) from Hilo.  Developers were encouraged, but not required, to install curbs, gutters and sidewalks along their interior roads; but since there was only one paved road in and out of Puna anyway – the two-lane State Highway 130 – it seemed pointless to bring the subdivision streets up to even that modest standard.  But after the sugar industry was shuttered, in the 1980s, many people who worked in Hilo started buying the relatively inexpensive lots out in Puna, and commuting along Hwy 130.  Traffic increased, and the morning and evening drive-times became so frustratingly congested, that finally, in 2010, the State began a project to widen Hwy 130 between Kea‘au and Pahoa, and to install roundabouts where Pahoa’s main street and the largest subdivision roads feed into the highway.

But there have long been calls to upgrade two dirt roads, makai of and roughly parallel to the highway, so they could take some of the traffic load away from the highway.  One is Railroad Ave. which, when it had tracks, carried sugarcane trains from Kapoho all the way to Hilo.  The other, hugging the coast, and very rugged even for 4WD vehicles, is called Government Beach Road; it originally linked Kapoho with Kaloli Point in HPP.  From lack of foresight, however, neither of these roads goes its full length, anymore; they’re in segments, interrupted by overgrown lots, and allowed to become residential, in some places enabling homes to be built within their rights-of-way.  And nothing was ever done to improve them.  Until now.

The lava from Pu‘u O‘o, which in September emerged in the forest-reserve above Pahoa town, is steadily flowing downhill, burning the ohia and waiawi trees and everything else in its path.  No one knows exactly where it will go, nor when nor if it will stop before reaching the ocean.  Whether or not it goes through the streets of Pahoa, it would have to cross Hwy 130 somewhere; and that would force everyone on the Kapoho side of Pahoa to evacuate along Railroad and/or the Beach road.

Here is video captured by Mick Kalber, flying with Paradise Helicopters, showing the lava flow burning its way through trees, as it nears the edge of the forest.

County and state highway departments are working, right now, punching through undeveloped brushlands to connect their segments, and improve them at least enough to be passable by ordinary cars.  Lava would eventually cross those roads too, although by that time, it should be possible to repair and re-open Hwy 130.  And there is talk of (once again) repairing the Chain of Craters road.  That would enable people in lower Puna to get out by going up through the National Park to Volcano.

Here is an official county map of the roads undergoing improvement. Photograph of an official Hawaii County map showing planned roadwork. Much of it is already well underway.

Whatever happens, it is important to remember that the Island of Hawaii is alive.  We take our friends and family to Halemaumau and gape at the big crater; we walk through the steam-vents; we hike trails that, only a few years ago, were eruption sites.  We stop along the jet-black landscape of Kona, leaving bits of white coral as our graffiti, but little thinking what that land must have been like when it was a miles-wide river of red-hot molten rock.

Hurricanes form every summer, in the warm waters of the Pacific, but they “hardly ever” come ashore in Hawaii.  And as frequent as eruptions have always been, we only rarely get to see their end-game, when lava makes its inexorable way down from summit to sea.  And whether we choose to accept this phenomenon of nature as expressing the will of the volcano goddess Pele, or prefer to examine it through the scientific lenses of volcanology and seismology, it is a defining characteristic of life on the Big Island.  Those of us who choose to live here are compelled to accept the fact that, whatever we may do to make a home for ourselves on this living island, in the end, Nature will always win.

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND

By Kelly Moran

Nature Always Wins (Part II)

As if a hurricane in August weren’t enough trouble for the Puna district [see Part I], a new source of trouble arose in September.  It seemed to echo the words of an old hymn: “No more water, but the fire next time.”

There are three active volcanoes on the Big Island.  Hualalai, in the west, rises above North Kona and South Kohala. The flows from its last eruption, in the early 19th century, are what you drive through on the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway.  Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano on earth, takes up half of the entire island.  It erupted briefly in the 1970s and ‘80s, but hasn’t made much of an impact on the island since the 1920s, when its lava burned through an enormous wedge of South Kona, including what’s now called Hawaiian Ocean View Estates.

But Kilauea is the most active, having been erupting on-and-off for centuries, and in continuous eruption since 1983.  Like its neighbors, Kilauea is a “shield” volcano, meaning that its summit does not come to a (stereotypical) point, like Fuji.  Rather, it’s a lengthy ridge called a “rift zone,” along which vents can emerge almost anywhere – and do.

1959 Eruption of Kilauea Volcano by Hawaii Volcano Observatory, USGS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In 1960, a previously unknown vent at the far end of Kilauea’s East Rift Zone opened up under the village of Kapoho.  In the 1970s, lava from vents within Hawaii Volcanoes National Park closed the Chain of Craters road.  A couple of times, the road was repaired, but new flows cut through it again and again, and the effort was discontinued.  Kilauea eventually wiped out the park’s heiaus and historic sites along the coast, and flowed beyond the park’s boundaries, where it smothered a couple of subdivisions, two famously photogenic black-sand beaches, the spring-fed Queen’s Bath pond, and much of what had been a thriving, mostly native Hawaiian neighborhood called Kalapana.

For the past ten years or so, Kilauea’s most active vent has been under the cinder cone called Pu‘u O‘o.   Lava there has tended to pool and puddle close to the vent, making the surface swell, then slowing down and dribbling off in the general direction of the ocean (makai), but stopping far uphill, well short of the coast.

“Puu Oo – Crater Lava pond 1990” by J.D. Griggs – USGS HVO. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In early September, though, lava originating at Pu‘u O‘o found (or created) a lava-tube, through which it has since been moving at high speed downhill on the inland side of the East Rift Zone: that is: mauka, into the island, heading toward a rural subdivision and – beyond it – to the little town of Pahoa.  (To Be Continued … Read Next, Part 3 of 3)

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND

By Kelly Moran

Nature Always Wins [Part I]

In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins is trying to teach young Eliza Doolittle to say the “h” at the start of words, since Cockney folks like her tend to drop it (as in “’ow are you?” or “’ave a nice day”). So he gives her this sentence to practice: “In Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.”

He might have added “Hawaii” to that list – meaning the Big Island of Hawaii, which had apparently never experienced a direct hit by a hurricane, at least not since haoles started keeping written records about 200 years ago.  But that changed last August, when a hurricane named “Iselle” slammed into the eastern corner of our diamond-shaped island.  The south- and east-facing flatlands of the Puna district took the biggest hit.  Iselle tore solar panels off roofs, and some roofs off houses; but the felling of trees – one kind of tree in particular – caused the most serious and widespread damage.

During the 20^th century, Puna was extensively planted with trees to replace ohia and other native species that had been logged off, and to make forests out of fields where sugar cane land had gone fallow.  Everyone – developers especially, who were subdividing land into house-lots – believed that people needed trees, both for shade and for giving or restoring a tropical look-and-feel to the place.  The tree-of-choice for this enterprise was albezia (Falcataria moluccana), from the islands of Southeast Asia.  It seemed ideal.  One of the fastest-growing trees in the world, albezia can reach 60 feet in just ten years; it produces a wide-spreading canopy that drops lots of seeds, and thereby extends its range without further human effort.

Unfortunately, albezia is trouble.  Those long branches are brittle, easily snapped away by strong winds; and sometimes, for no good reason, they just break off and fall.  Land in Puna is very young, geologically, so there isn’t much soil above the underlying lava; all trees there are shallow-rooted; so heavy, mature albezia are therefore extremely vulnerable to being toppled in a storm.  And that tendency to colonize new ground squeezes out other trees, and turns otherwise vacant lots into a forest of practically no other tree but itself.  Albezia definitely lives up to its nickname: “The Tree that Ate Puna.”

Albezia Tree

So, when Iselle struck on Thursday August 7, its 60-mph wet winds whipped down acre after acre of albezias.  Branches and trunks crashed into on houses, pulled down utility lines, and blocked even the widest roads, isolating pockets of neighborhoods, and cutting off electricity, telephone and cable-TV.  Many homes in Puna had catchment-tanks for rainwater, but unless they also had a generator, they had no way to pump that water through their faucets.  This was an emergency, the likes of which had not been seen anywhere in the state since hurricane Iniki devastated Kauai in 1992.

Road crew workers clearing the main thoroughfares of the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Iselle in Pahoa, Hawaii, 08 August 2014.  [LA Times – www.veooz.com/news/QHP36N9.html]

And just two days later, on Saturday Aug. 9, Hawaii held its Primary Election.  With several thousand people unable to get to their polling-places, two precincts in Pun were closed, and a make-up election for those precincts was scheduled in the weeks ahead.  When those folks did finally vote, they did not alter the election-day results.  But the delay added to a general malaise – which admittedly had been growing for many years – that Puna is a backwater, about which the rest of the County and State care little.  But the fact remains that Puna is beautiful, verdant, and one of the most affordable places to live in Hawaii . . . if you don’t mind also being downrift of an active volcano!  (To Be Continued …. Read next, Part 2 of 3)