PAHOA, Hawaii >> ‘We have an eruption,” announced Ikaika Marzo on Facebook Live late in the day of May 3, 2018, as he stood on Mohala Street in Leilani Estates, where the first of 24 fissures began spewing molten lava during the historic 2018 Kilauea eruption in Lower Puna.

Marzo, a Kalapana resident and then-lava tour operator, took on the responsibility of providing Lower Puna residents with “boots on the ground” reporting on where cracks were opening in the streets and other crucial real-time information.

His urgent message to residents to immediately evacuate and his subsequent updates during the course of the nearly four-month-long eruption remain an indelible memory of the disaster that caused an estimated $296 million in home losses and $236.5 million in damage to public infrastructure.

As the fifth anniversary of the Lower East Rift Zone eruption neared, Marzo stood next to his pickup truck in the parking lot at the Woodland Center gas station in Pahoa after grabbing a quick bite. Hitched to his truck was a trailer loaded with a small Komatsu excavator for his latest enterprise, Ohana Excavation and Landclearing. His family started the business in November 2021 to take advantage of the building boom in Puna after his tour company shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve been real busy,” he said.

Marzo, 39, was instrumental in organizing Pu‘uhonua o Puna, known as “The Hub,” in a vacant lot at a busy intersection in Pahoa town where many of the 3,000 people initially displaced by the eruption could find hot meals, food and household supplies, vital information and fellowship. His high profile during the disaster helped boost his campaign for Hawaii County mayor in 2020, when he finished second to Mitch Roth in the general election.

“Even though there was a massive, historic eruption in 2018, there’s still a lot of people moving into Lower Puna, and our community has changed from five years ago,” he said. “Now we have new people moving in who don’t even know what really happened in the 2018 eruption and don’t even fathom how severe that eruption was. It’s just a little different.”

According to community members, many of the post-eruption newcomers were part of a wave of mainlanders who decided to work remotely from Hawaii during the pandemic, along with Hawaii residents priced out of the market in other areas of the state.

“Puna is still the last frontier of the whole archipelago. It’s still one of the cheapest places to buy land,” Marzo said before driving off to a job site.

Leilani Estates, ground zero for the 2018 eruption, continues to attract buyers despite its recent history. Lava inundated the lower portion of the large rural subdivision of 1-acre lots and virtually obliterated Kapoho Vacationland, Lanipuna Gardens and Kapoho Beach Lots.

“I personally had a listing that was within eyeshot of Fissure 8, and we sold it,” said Hilo Bay Realty owner and principal broker Ed Torrison, referring to the eruption’s dominant vent, since renamed Ahuailaau, which produced 260-foot-high lava fountains and vigorous flows at rates exceeding 100 cubic meters per second.

An estimated 1,139 people were living in the subdivision at the time of the 2020 census.

“The upper half of Leilani Estates that’s still there is beautiful, with paved roads and native forest and all that,” said Torrison, who has seven active listings in the subdivision.

The pandemic “was a game-changer, with an incessant influx of people from the mainland who wanted to get the hell out of the city and away from the shootings and the horrible weather,” he said.

According to data from Title Guaranty Hawaii, in the four-year period following the eruption, from 2019 to 2022, the Puna region reported 11,238 residential and agricultural property transactions, with sales peaking in 2021. Nearly 70% of those sales involved Hawaii buyers, while Californians accounted for 10% of buyers, the largest out-of-state contingent.

During that same four-year period, there were 411 property transactions in Leilani Estates, 257 of them, or about 62%, involving Hawaii buyers. All but 10 of those buyers were from the Big Isle, the data shows. In the first two months of 2023 alone, the subdivision recorded 51 sales.

Even the hardest-hit subdivisions of Kapoho Beach Lots, Kapo­ho Vacationland and Lanipuna Gardens are drawing buyers, with 60 property transactions combined in 2022, and 51 sales in January and February, according to Title Guaranty Hawaii. However, a substantial number of the recent property transactions in areas affected by the eruption were properties purchased under Hawaii County’s Voluntary Housing Buyout Program and not by private buyers.

“If the price is right, just like any commodity, and the buyer sees value, they’ll buy,” Torrison said — even when denied home insurance because the properties lie in highest-risk Lava Hazard Zones 1 and 2. “It’s still the most affordable place in the state.”

He offered a sampling of eight home sales in Leilani Estates from Jan. 1 to April 20 for a median price of $338,000, 64% higher than during the same period in 2018, prior to the eruption, but still well below home prices outside Puna.

The Pahoa broker said he’s sold real estate through three eruption cycles — Kalapana in 1990, the 2014 flow that threatened Pahoa and the 2018 Lower Puna disaster — and is not surprised that people are willing to buy in known hazard areas.

“Everybody thinks they’re going to second-guess what Madame Pele is going to do, and that’s just the risk that they take,” he said.

Buyout payments

To limit future losses in areas affected by the 2018 Lower East Rift Zone eruption, Hawaii County has been processing applications for its Voluntary Housing Buyout Program, funded by approximately $107 million in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant disaster recovery funds.

The housing buyout program, launched in April 2021, is the first of its kind in Hawaii, although similar efforts have been offered in flood-prone communities on the mainland. Priority is being given to lower-income households, with a maximum award of $230,000 for primary and secondary residences and $22,000 for undeveloped properties.

As of April 12, 787 applications for buyouts had been submitted, 243 of which have already closed at a total cost of $47.36 million, according to the county Planning Department’s disaster recovery team, which is administering the program. The first payment was in late June, with average buyouts so far of $194,878.

Beyond helping property owners move past the disaster, the program’s main goal is to clear out areas prone to lava flows and keep the lots as open space to avoid future losses. Eligible properties include those inundated or isolated by the eruption, damaged by fire caused by lava or subjected to secondary effects such as heat or gases.

Recovery team spokesperson Jennifer Myers said there are ongoing discussions on how to best utilize the purchased properties. A range of options floated by the program include preserving cultural sites, transferring titles to land stewardship groups or leasing lands for agricultural uses that require a minimal investment in crops and infrastructure.

“At this time, we’re still working with the community and local leadership to decide how to proceed, but it’s a challenge because it isn’t one contiguous swath of land, but rather a checkerboard of properties across the eruption area,” Myers said in an email.

The payment Noah and Shantel Friend received from the program provided some financial security and helped pay for their new home in Ainaloa just outside Pahoa. After evacuating their former residence on Moku Street in Leilani Estates at the start of the eruption, they returned a few days later to find a 10-foot-wide crack running 500 feet through their backyard and beneath their house.

Shantel Friend, 36, said her husband has other family members who have lived in the subdivision for decades, and the couple had envisioned eventually passing their home on to their two children, now 17 and 16. She said they moved quickly to get a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural home loan to purchase the Ainaloa property in September 2018 but didn’t apply for a county buyout of their Leilani Estates property until several months after the program was announced.

“It was a tough decision because we raised our children there for the past 13 years,” she said. “It was hard, but once we did the inspection, it was unlivable because of the cracks, and it was even more impossible to live there because my children have asthma.”

Friend, a cafeteria baker at Pahoa High & Intermediate School, said she found it difficult the first couple of years after the eruption to visit family still living in Leilani Estates because “it was too much memories.”

“We’ve managed to move forward because the most important things were our health and safety; materialistic things didn’t really matter to us,” she said. “So we were able to easily move forward knowing everyone was safe and healthy. But it was sad that we had to lose our property.”

Settling in anew

James and Jenni Clear also applied for the buyout program and received the maximum payment of $230,000 in October. It had taken 16 days from the start of the eruption for lava to claim the home and small farm they had built six years earlier on 12.5 acres in the large-lot Malama Ki subdivision in Pohoiki.

After evacuating with their three children on May 3, the Clears, both chiropractors, were able to move to a home they owned in Hawaiian Paradise Park, also in Puna, that at the time was occupied by in-laws. James Clear, 50, said they all lived together in cramped quarters for about six months before his relatives were able to find a place of their own.

He called the buyout program “phenomenal” and said the application process was “smooth sailing.”

“It basically got us back on our feet because like most people, even us as chiropractors, you really live paycheck to paycheck in Hawaii. Everything is so expensive,” said Clear, noting their practice dropped 50% in the wake of the eruption.

They used the buyback funds to build a garage and enlarge and remodel their Hawaiian Paradise Park property to better accommodate their family.

Five years on from the eruption, Clear said his children have little interest in visiting their former community.

“The kids call it a graveyard. They don’t ever want to go down there again,” he said.

Clear said he still feels vulnerable even in their current neighborhood. “Long term, I’d rather get to the Hamakua side to get away from the lava,” he chuckled.

Dawn “Kieba” Blacklidge felt “relief, just a big sigh of relief” when she received a buyout check for $127,000 in September. Her former home of 14 years in Lanipuna Gardens is entombed under more than 60 feet of lava.

The property she had lived on for 14 years included a three-story home with a gym, massage and yoga studios, and cabins for her fitness and well-being business, Body Temple Boot Camp. She was on the mainland for her daughter’s wedding when she lost “her dream house” on May 20, 2018.

With nothing left but what she had packed for her trip, Blacklidge, 63, stayed on the mainland for nearly five months, living with relatives while watching the eruption unfold online and through Marzo’s reports. She returned to Puna in September 2018 and eventually was able to purchase a much smaller property in Hawaiian Shores, where she began building a tiny home with gym attached to restart her business.

She said the buyout enabled her to pay back loans and finish her home. Although Blacklidge says her current situation “is working out,” she hesitated when asked whether she’s managed to move past her losses.

“Nah, it will always be with me. That was my dream house, that was me,” she said. “I’d saved everything I ever made … to buy that property and it was a magical, magical place. And the cat that I had for 14 years died there, and that breaks my heart every day, that I wasn’t here to get her.”

Despite the shared experiences of those who lived in the affected areas, “People don’t even talk about it very much except for those of us who went through the loss. We know who we are, and we know what we’ve been through, but it’s not talked about much anymore.”

‘No trespassing’

Kris Burmeister first bought land in Leilani Estates in 2003 and has contributed to recent property sales there, but perhaps in an unexpected way. Since the 2018 eruption he has acquired a patchwork of nearly a dozen 1-acre parcels, most of which are buried under lava, including a lot on Fissure 8.

Burmeister, 47, was living with this two teenage sons on Hookupu Street on May 3, 2018. After several “nerve-wracking” days of ground shaking, rumbling and widening ground cracks, he recalled, they heard a “jet engine sound” followed seconds later by the overwhelming smell of sulfur.

Burmeister and his sons piled into a truck, and as they evacuated, they spotted a 150-foot-high lava fountain on Mohala Street. “I told my boys, ‘Let’s get a picture because we’re never gonna be here again,’” he said.

Lava claimed Burmeister’s home on May 28. In 2019 he bought his former next-door neighbor’s summer home, which somehow was spared. In 2021 he moved in after extensive repairs.

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t,” Burmeister said, referring to persistent trespassing by hikers, off-roaders whose tire tracks are evident on the flows and slopes of Fissure 8, and even tours offered by companies run by other Leilani Estates residents.

Since he “literally would have to stand there” on a daily basis to ward off intruders, Burmeister said he purchased the lava-inundated lots as a preemptive move to manage illegal activity there, including occasional squatters.

He staked out some lot boundaries on the flows, and to clearly demarcate private property, he’s been erecting wooden posts, barbed-wire fencing and “no trespassing” signs, barely visible against the rugged expanse of blackened landscape.

“I wanted to push the others out. This land was part of the event of our lifetime for us, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to let someone who didn’t see it come and buy it,” he proclaimed. “My whole intention was to push the tour thing away from the lower portion of the neighborhood because people live there, but we still got people coming in.”

Burmeister also began offering his own guided tours on land he owns or has permission to cross. His tours are offered by appointment only for $65 a pop and are limited to no more than four people a day, he said. After talking story about his own experiences, Burmeister walks them across the flows and to the top of 160-foot-tall Fissure 8 and adjacent small cones still venting hot, sulfurous gas.

“Geologically it looks ‘wow,’ but there is a neighborhood that used to be here,” he likes to tell his guests by way of backstory.

Overshadowed by COVID

In the year immediately following the eruption, the Leilani Estates Community Association considered entrance gates and other measures to keep out tour buses and other outsiders who came to gawk at the destruction. But the remnants of the 2018 Lower East Rift Zone eruption no longer attract the crowds they once did.

Pahoa town, Kalapana and other area sights still draw visitors, but “they don’t even have the lava flow in mind,” said Matt Purvis, owner of Tin Shack Bakery, which opened in 2013 just off Pahoa Village Road in a former tire shop. “Really, they want to see the volcano national park, but they’re not thinking of it as visiting a disaster zone.”

For Purvis and other business owners, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic overshadowed the eruption-related downturn in Pahoa’s fortunes.

“As a business we’re busy again, but I would not say we’re recovered, and that’s probably more related to the pandemic than lava,” said Purvis, 43, on a recent midmorning as mostly locals crowded his funky cafe. “We had not even begun to recover from the economic disaster that was the lava when we were hit with COVID, which was economically worse.”

He estimates that at least six businesses in town closed for good during the pandemic, and said it’s still a struggle to find good employees, forcing him to cut back days and hours of operation.

“But coming back to a positive point, on a daily basis people are walking around happy, we have nice weather, people are coming to eat food, even though I’ve had to increase prices a ton, so the community wants to be recovered,” Purvis said. “People are supportive, people want to be here.”

Purvis and others interviewed by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser all lamented the loss of roads and coastal recreational areas damaged or destroyed by the eruption, and expressed frustration at government delays in restoration efforts.

“There’s been a lot of work to revitalize and activate the community, and those are absolutely the bright spots, but there is still a sense of frustration around how long it’s taking to get the infrastructure restored,” said Hawaii Council member Ashley Lehualani Kierkiewicz, whose district includes Puna.

She said many of the delays have been caused by “monstrous bureaucracy” since so many layers of county, state and federal government are involved.

Restoration delays

Foremost among residents’ concerns is restoration of Pohoiki Road, Highway 137 (Kalapana-­Kapoho Road) and a section of Lighthouse Road, as well as dredging of state-owned Pohoiki Boat Ramp at Isaac Hale Beach Park. A portion of the park was inundated by lava, and an accumulation of black volcanic sand and rubble is blocking navigational access to the ocean.

Under a cost-sharing agreement, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is funding about $61.5 million, or 75% of the $82 million in eruption-related repairs to public infrastructure, not including Highway 132. The county’s 25% share, covered by state loans, is about $20.5 million.

In a YouTube update, county Planning Director Zendo Kern acknowledged community frustration that the review process for road and waterline projects is taking longer than expected and has “caused some delays outside of our control.”

As of late March, Kern reported, FEMA had completed its review of a draft environmental assessment, and county officials hope to finalize the document by mid-May, with a 30-day public comment period and community meetings to follow. The revised timeline shows construction beginning in February.

Kierkiewicz dismissed any arguments about spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to restore infrastructure subject to possible future eruptions.

“If we have another eruption in 50, 60 years, that’s a long period of time in human years. So I’m absolutely for restoring that infrastructure because you have a community of people that is there who haven’t historically gotten their fair share, and so it’s due. It is absolutely owed to this community,” she said.

“What kind of conversation would we be having in these high-hazard areas if the (recent) Mauna Loa eruption went toward Hilo? Would we not invest in Hilo? I think not. The bottom line is the community is still there, and we’re still on the road to recovery but there’s certainly hope.”

Meanwhile, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation on April 23 released a draft environmental assessment of a proposed project to dredge and restore Pohoiki Bay “to a shape and depth that resembles pre-eruption conditions to the extent possible,” the report states.

Closure of the boat ramp, one of the most productive in the state, has affected ocean rescue serv­ices, commercial fishing, ocean and volcano boat tours, recreational opportunities and food sustainability, the EA said. Vessels that normally launch from Pohoiki have had to set out instead from Wailoa Small Boat Harbor in Hilo, adding significant travel time and fuel costs to reach their usual fishing grounds.

“That’s a lifeline for Puna,” Marzo said of the boat ramp. “There’s a lot of good fishermen here, and that area is so far to access now to drive (their boats) from Hilo all the way around. That’s one of the main priorities for Puna, economically, culturally and for sustainable living for the Puna people.”

Public comment on the draft EA is due May 23.

BY THE NUMBERS

Kilauea Lower East Rift Zone eruption from May to August 2018:

1 cubic kilometer

Amount of lava erupted

60,000

Earthquakes

13.7 square miles

Inundated with lava

875 acres

New land created along shoreline

612

Residences destroyed

111

Other structures destroyed

3,000

People initially displaced

$296 million

Cost of home losses

$236.5 million

Cost of damage to public infrastructure

32.3 miles

Roads inundated with lava

$415 million

Revenue lost islandwide

Source: Hawaii County

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify that a substantial number of recent property transactions in Leilani Estates, Kapoho Beach Lots, Kapoho Vacationland and Lanipuna Gardens were properties purchased under Hawaii County’s Voluntary Housing Buyout Program and not by private buyers.