Number of houses DESTROYED by Hawaii volcano SKYROCKETS as eruption enters week four
THE NUMBER of houses and buildings destroyed by Hawaii’s erupting Kilauea volcano has skyrocketed in recent days, as more than 80 structures have now been ruined by the lava.
By CAITLIN DOHERTY
Express.co.uk
Sat, May 26, 2018
A total of 82 buildings have now been damaged, a huge jump from 50 only a few days ago.
Another 37 homes are “lava-locked”.
They cannot be accessed, and anybody who chooses not to evacuate could find themselves trapped by 30foot tall walls of lava.
On the ground in Big Island, residents gathered on hardened lava on Friday to catch a view of the eruption, as the molten substance gushed and flew in the distance from a fissure in the Leilani Estates.
One Big Island resident said in a Facebook Live video: “There were eight houses taken on this road in 12 hours.”
Around 15,000 acres of land – a plot half the size of Florida’s Disney World Resort – has been wrecked by the lava since the volcano started erupting on May 3.
The fissures and smaller eruptions have shown no sign of slowing down over the last three weeks.
NASA said one fissure has spewed enough lava in the last few days to create a channel that could reach Hawaii’s southern coast.
A US Geological Survey scientist has said that he was told that the lava that has emerged so far is nowhere near the total that is inside the volcano.
Wendy Stovall said that he was told: “What has been coming out is just a small fraction of what was in the volcano.”
“It’s this tide of lava that rises up and overflows itself on the edges and keeps rising and progressing forward.”
Between 40-60 cubic feet of lava is seen gushing from the volcanic fissures on the Big Island every second.
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