Pahoa braces for disaster

A flowing lake of 2,100-degree lava continued to bear down a path headed for Pahoa town Thursday as schoolchildren went home with notices about how they will get to class, businesses braced for the worst and Hawaii island’s utility company made unprecedented contingency plans to keep power running.

Five weeks ago Tropical Storm Iselle blew across Puna, knocking out power for two weeks and damaging dozens of homes.

The daunting back-to-back threat of Iselle and the so-called "June 27th" flow — named after the date of the latest lava breakout from Kilauea Volcano — is something several longtime business owners and residents have never experienced.

"We are recovering from one disaster and are preparing for another," said Hawaii Electric Light Co. spokes­woman Rhea Lee. "We do drill and prepare for emergencies, but we have not had this situation before. It is not ideal to have natural disasters close together."

HELCO crews plan to run new power lines along one of two abandoned roads that will be pressed into emergency service if lava should overrun Highway 130, the lifeline to Hawaii island’s lower Puna district. HELCO would install the new lines along a one-lane road that follows the coastline from Hawaiian Beaches to Hawaiian Paradise Park and goes by several names, including Old Beach Road and Government Road.

HELCO also is working on plans to install new poles closer to Pahoa that would be so far apart that they could theoretically avoid the front of the lava, which Thursday was about 50 yards wide and on a track to reach Pahoa in about two weeks.

The most intriguing idea is one that HELCO was not ready to talk about Thursday, which involves some form of new technology intended to protect existing power poles from being destroyed by the massive heat of molten lava.

"We’ve consulted with volcano scientists, but we don’t know if it will work," Lee said. "It is an untested solution."

She declined to elaborate how the technology would protect HELCO poles and power lines and keep electricity flowing to the 8,500 people who live in Lower Puna.

They would be cut off if lava overruns Highway 130, leaving Eileen Mende in a position she has never faced in 40 years running the mom-and-pop Da Store in Hawaiian Beaches.

Da Store is the nearest place to buy food, water and ice for at least 3 miles, and Mende plans to remain open despite the threat of encroaching lava.

"Customers depend on us, so we’re going to stay open as long as we can," Mende said.

Iselle knocked out power to Da Store, which reopened four days later by relying on a gas-powered generator.

"It’s the first time we’ve ever had a situation like that," Mende said. "We’ve never gotten hit like that. Now all we can do is wait to see which way the lava’s headed."

On Thursday the state Department of Education sent letters home with 1,350 students from Pahoa’s three schools — Pahoa High & Intermediate (650 students), Keonepoko Elementary (650 students) and Pahoa Elementary (50 students) — telling parents that children who live north of the flow would be rerouted to schools in the Keaau Complex. Children cut off by lava will continue to attend their current schools.

The children sent to the Keaau Complex schools would have to be bused along the other emergency road, Railroad Avenue, said complex-area Superintendent Mary Correa.

Getting them to school on time, Correa said, will depend "on how many other people will be on that road."

State Sen. Russell Ruderman (D, Puna) owns Island Naturals, a natural food store in Pahoa. If lava buries Highway 130, Ruderman said, "life in Puna will change dramatically."

"Some people will not be able to make the very long and inconvenient commute, which is going to cause some people not to be able to go to town and back," Ruderman said. "Some people will have to relocate for the sake of their jobs and their kids. We’re not going to have a free flow of trucks and gasoline, and we’ll have to improvise some basics. Some people will commute by fishing boat.

"Everyone talks about sustainability," Ruderman said. "This is going to force real sustainability. It’ll force people to do gardening and farming and feed each other and have micro-communities that don’t depend on traveling to town every day. It’s going to force a situation that everyone’s been imagining for a long time, like more solar-powered homes and co-ops and community-based businesses."

Puna also will be overrun by tourists eager to see the lava. And they’ll be competing for space on the emergency roads with residents trying to get to and from work and school, Ruderman said.

To keep Island Naturals in business, Ruderman already has reserved a generator to keep the power on.

But he’s also bracing for the possibility "that the whole town could be evacuated. The hard part is the slow, agonizing dread of having weeks to worry and not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s kind of unique, in many ways, as a natural disaster."

Correction: The map accompanying this story shows the Nanawale Estates subdivision just east of Highway 130 in Pahoa. The subdivision was mislabeled as Hawaiian Beaches in an earlier version of this story.

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Freelance reporter Megan Moseley contributed to this report.

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