Puna residents got an early Christmas present this week.

The deep flow of lava that crossed a 500-foot stretch of Cemetery Road last year — cutting off Kaohe Homestead residents from Pahoa town — is now cleared, and motorists can drive along a new 12-foot-wide road edged with stone-cold lava on either side.

Motorists driving between the walls of lava will get a feel for what threatened Pahoa, Civil Defense Administrator Darryl Oliveira said in October when the work began.

For the contractor, it was tough going at the project’s start, when excavators faced a thick layer of pahoehoe lava as high as 10 to 15 feet in places, a county spokesman said.

“It was difficult getting through, busting the rock,” said Barett Otani, Department of Public Works spokesman. “People think lava’s like cinder, but it’s not. It’s hard rock. … It’s dense rock.”

The lava was broken up, and pieces were hauled by dump trucks to the quarry.

Otani said before work began, a kahuna blessed the project.

Everything went as scheduled and was completed within the scheduled 40 days, and there were no problems, he said, and residents are happy with the smoothed-out stretch of road. The county opted to restore the one-lane road as it was, with no centerline, but the shoulders were widened.

The completion of the $150,000 Cemetery Road restoration project means the roadway can provide access to the Hawaii island community’s transfer station and serve as an alternate route for emergency vehicles, according to Hawaii County’s Department of Public Works. The Federal Emergency Management Agency funded 75 percent of the project’s construction cost.

On Oct. 25, 2014, molten lava from the June 27, 2014, Kilauea flow crossed Cemetery Road from Apaa Street, near the Pahoa Transfer Station. The flow spared major roadways and Pahoa town, but some graves in Pahoa Cemetery were destroyed. The only house consumed by lava during the flow, which halted around Christmas of that year, was on Cemetery Road across from the Pahoa Transfer Station.