Less than a week ago, Leilani Estates was the picture of serenity on Hawaii’s Big Island, a subdivision in the island’s eastern Puna district filled with wooden homes nestled in tropical plant-filled lots.

The latest eruption of the island’s most active volcano changed everything.

Shortly after Kilauea erupted Thursday, the ground split open on the east side of Leilani Estates, exposing an angry red beneath the lush landscape. From the widening gash, molten rock burbled and splashed, then shot dozens of feet in the air.

The Hawaii County Civil Defense Agency called it “active volcanic fountaining.” Some residents insisted it was Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, coming to reclaim her land. Residents were ordered to flee amid threats of fires and “extremely high levels of dangerous” sulfur dioxide gas.

Soon, another such fissure had formed a few streets to the west. Then another, and another. From the vents, hot steam — and noxious gases — rose, before magma broke through and splattered into the air.

As of Sunday night, at least 10 such fissure vents were reported in the neighborhood — including two that had opened anew late Saturday night — and at least 26 homes had been destroyed, according to the county civil defense agency.

“That number could change,” Hawaii County spokeswoman Janet Snyder told the Associated Press. “This is heartbreaking.”

The U.S. Geological Survey said some of the lava was shooting 330 feet into the air — higher than the tip of the Statue of Liberty torch.

The fissures are forming along a northeast-southwest line in the rift zone, and not all of the older fissures are actively spewing lava, said Wendy Stovall, a volcanologist with the USGS.

More outbreaks are likely to occur along the rift zone, officials said.

Drone footage showed lava spouting along the fissures that had formed, creeping toward Leilani Estates homes and leaving lines of smoldering trees in their wake.

The flows destroyed or cut off several streets in the neighborhood, typically home to about 1,700 people — before most of them evacuated last week.

Meanwhile, over the past few days some photographers have followed the fissures, posting dramatic photos and videos of lava spattering into the air or oozing across roads. Officials have urged everyone to leave Leilani Estates, where a mandatory evacuation order remains in force.

“This is a very fast-moving situation,” Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim told Hawaii News Now. “This is unfortunately not the end.”

The road ends here… This mornings eruption crossed Leilani Boulevard !! . . #lava #leilani #ig_oahu #ig_worldphoto #hnnsunrise

A post shared by Demian Barrios (@dbphotogallery) on May 5, 2018 at 4:13pm PDT

When Kilauea erupted Thursday, it sent fountains of lava gushing out of the ground and billowing clouds of steam and volcanic ash into the sky on the eastern side of the island.

Three days later, some residents there continue to suffer through a triple whammy of threats. From below, lava has spewed forth from an increasing number of fissures that have opened up in the ground, oozing toward homes.

Several earthquakes — including the strongest to hit Hawaii in more than four decades — have jolted the Big Island’s residents, some as they were in the midst of evacuating. Temblors have rattled the Big Island at regular intervals over the past several days — including 18 between 6 p.m. Sunday and midnight local time; another struck early Monday.

And in the air, noxious fumes from the volcano are what some officials say could be the greatest threat to public health in the wake of its eruption.

After the eruption Thursday, the island shook at regular intervals, but especially about midday Friday: A 5.6-magnitude quake hit south of the volcano about 11:30 a.m., followed about an hour later by a 6.9-magnitude temblor, according to the Geological Survey.

The latter was felt as far away as Oahu and struck in nearly the same place as a deadly 7.4-magnitude earthquake in 1975, according to the Geological Survey.

Videos posted to social media showed homes visibly shaking, items clattering to the floor at supermarkets and waves forming in swimming pools as the quake rattled.

“I think the whole island felt it,” said Cori Chong, who was in her bedroom with her foster dog, Monty, when the earthquake struck, frightening both of them. Even though Chong lives on the Hamakua coast, about an hour north of the earthquake’s epicenter, the shaking in her home was so violent that it caused furniture to move and glass to shatter.

David Burlingame, who lives about two miles west of Leilani Estates, told The Washington Post that he and a friend ran outside when the earthquake hit “and watched my house just shake back and forth.”

“Everybody is kind of on edge,” Burlingame said Saturday of both the potential for additional earthquakes and the unpredictability of the lava flows. “The worst part is kind of waiting to see, because you really never can tell what can happen.”

The earthquakes also prompted the rare closure of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park after they damaged some of the park’s trails, craters and roads. The first earthquake triggered a cliff to collapse into the ocean, and fissures began to appear in the ground at a popular overlook near the Jaggar Museum.

Park officials said they canceled hikes Friday and evacuated about 2,600 visitors, along with all nonemergency employees.

“Safety is our main priority at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, and it is currently not safe to be here,” Park Superintendent Cindy Orlando said in a statement. “We will monitor the situation closely, and reopen when it is safe to do so.”

The county civil defense agency reported that the threat of a tsunami was low after the earthquakes, although officials warned that residents were not in the clear.

“Everything is still elevated,” Civil Defense Agency Administrator Talmadge Magno said, according to Hawaii News Now. “It kind of gets you nervous.”

Thursday’s eruption prompted the County of Hawaii’s managing director, Wil Okabe, to issue a state of emergency declaration. Gov. David Ige (D) also issued an emergency proclamation and activated Hawaii’s National Guard to help with evacuations.

“Please be safe,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote on Twitter.

Jordan Sonner, a Big Island Realtor, was on another part of the island taking pictures for an upcoming listing Thursday when she “got the call that there was lava in Leilani” and rushed back to her home just outside Leilani Estates.

As of Friday afternoon, at least a few hundred people had evacuated their homes in Leilani Estates and nearby Lanipuna Gardens, taking refuge at local churches, Red Cross shelters, and with family and friends in other parts of Hawaii, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Gabbard warned that, in some ways, the threat from the sulfur dioxide gas could be more dangerous than the lava flows, which had stopped in places after the eruption. If conditions worsened, even first responders would not be able to go into the affected neighborhoods to help trapped residents, she added.

“Sulfur dioxide gas can be so toxic and thick in some areas that it can be fatal, especially to those who have respiratory illnesses,” Gabbard said. “The wind can push [the gas] in different directions, so that’s a very serious concern given the high levels, and, you know, people don’t necessarily have the kinds of protective gas masks that they would need if they were right in the thick of this gas.”

Kilauea is the youngest and most active volcano on Hawaii Island, according to the USGS. The eruption from the volcano came hours after a 5.0-magnitude earthquake jolted the island Thursday morning. As The Post’s Sarah Kaplan reported, Kilauea is made of basalt, a fluid lava that makes for effusive — rather than explosive — eruptions:

Rather than building up into a steep, towering peak like Krakatau in Indonesia or Mount St. Helens in Washington state, the fluid rock at Kilauea creates a broad, shallow dome known as a shield volcano.

Shield volcanoes “are really voluminous, the largest volcanoes on Earth, but because they have those long, low-angle slopes, they’re not very dramatic,” said Tari Mattox, a geologist who worked at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory for six years. “People are surprised when they go to Hawaii and they say, ‘Where’s the volcano?’ And I tell them, ‘You’re standing on it!’ ”

… Rocks moving upward through the mantle beneath Hawaii begin to melt about 50 miles beneath the surface. That magma is less dense than the surrounding rock, so it continues to rise until it “ponds” in a reservoir that’s roughly three miles wide and one to four miles beneath the summit. As pressure builds in the magma chamber, the magma seeks out weak spots in the surrounding rock, squeezing through the earth until it reaches a vent to the surface.

Geologists said the seismic activities around Puna most closely resemble the events that precipitated a 1955 eruption, according to Hawaii News Now. That eruption lasted about three months and left almost 4,000 acres of land covered in lava, the news site reported.

More recently in 2014, lava again threatened the Puna district, specifically the town of Pahoa and its surrounding area, The Post reported. During that event, lava flowed as quickly as 20 yards per hour, and up to 60 structures were at risk.

Lindsey Bever, Allyson Chiu and Gene Park contributed to this report.

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After days of media appearances intended to explain President Trump’s role in a legal settlement with an adult-film star that only raised fresh questions about the payment, his new attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani on Sunday said Trump still has confidence in him and believes the media blitz “all worked out.”

“I’ll give you the conclusion: We all feel pretty good that we’ve got everything kind of straightened out and we’re setting the agenda,” Giuliani, the former New York mayor who recently joined Trump’s legal team, said in an interview with The Washington Post. Giuliani said he met with the president at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., to discuss developments and legal strategy.

“Everybody’s reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that’s what I came in to do,” he said.

“We’ve made a deal this weekend: He stays focused on North Korea, Iran and China, and we stay focused on the case and we’ll bother him when we have to,” Giuliani said of his meeting with Trump.

Since last week, Giuliani has made various assertions about the $130,000 that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film star who said she had a relationship with Trump a decade before he won the presidency. On Friday, after Trump said that Giuliani needs to “get his facts straight” about the payment, Giuliani appeared to walk back some of his comments, saying he was still learning the facts of the case. Trump and White House officials have also weighed in on the payment.

And after all of these media appearances and statements, the only thing that is clear is how little has been cleared up.

[Giuliani says Trump doesn’t have to comply with a Mueller subpoena and could invoke the Fifth Amendment]

Giuliani began his media blitz last week on Fox News by saying that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for the payment to Daniels in 2016 in exchange for her silence. More interviews — and more claims — soon followed. Giuliani told The Post that Trump repaid Cohen in 2017, which would predate Trump’s assertion last month that he did not know about the Daniels payment or where Cohen got the money. During one of his follow-up appearances on Fox, Giuliani also seemed to link the payment to the looming 2016 election.

“My issue is getting up to speed on the facts here,” Giuliani told George Stephanopoulos during an interview Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week.” “I’m about halfway there.”

Giuliani’s freewheeling remarks in the ABC interview included commenting that it was possible Cohen paid off other women, assailing the special counsel probe investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, comparing former FBI director James B. Comey to Judas and calling Daniels “opportunistic.”

In a statement Friday, Giuliani said that Cohen’s payment was made to resolve a “personal and false allegation” rather than protect Trump’s campaign on the eve of the election.

[Giuliani says it is possible Michael Cohen paid off other women for Trump]

Giuliani’s comments on Sunday were notable for how much he said he still did not know on his fifth consecutive day of media interviews. During his ABC interview, Giuliani said that he did not know when Trump learned about the payment, when Trump discovered Daniels would take money to remain quiet about her allegations and why Trump publicly denied knowing about a payment for which he had already reimbursed Cohen.

When asked by The Post if he was confident that Trump had no knowledge of the payments to Daniels during the campaign, Giuliani declined to directly answer, instead repeating his argument that no campaign finance laws were broken.

“The critical thing is, it wasn’t a campaign finance violation,” he said. “It was a personal thing, not something that should be looked at by a prosecutor.”

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in legal ethics, said Giuliani’s interview Sunday reminded her of a garden hose that was whipping around wildly because nobody had a handle on it yet: “Just erratic, unpredictable, aimless.”

Still, she said, the appearances also made her wonder what Giuliani’s goals were on television and whether he understood campaign finance law.

“When he starts on a matter and the matter’s ongoing and he needs to get up to speed, yes, there’s risk involved in making any statement,” she said. “But what’s even more striking to me is, I couldn’t tell what he thought he was going to accomplish.”

[Giuliani tries to clarify comments on Trump’s reimbursement of Stormy Daniels payment]

Experts have said the timing of the Daniels payment raises possible campaign finance issues, as does the fact that it was never revealed in financial disclosure forms. A watchdog group has filed complaints about the transaction with the Federal Election Commission and Justice Department.

Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, appeared on “This Week” after Giuliani and sharply dismissed the former mayor’s claim that the payment had nothing to do with the campaign.

“This guy’s all over the map over the last 72 hours on some very simple facts that should be very straightforward,” Avenatti said. “I think it is obvious . . . to the American people that this is a coverup, that they are making it up as they go along. They don’t know what to say because they’ve lost track of the truth.”

Giuliani also said Sunday that Cohen is no longer Trump’s attorney. Cohen did not respond to a message on Sunday regarding that claim or whether he had made payments to other women.

Trump, who has denied the affair, told reporters aboard Air Force One last month that he did not know about the payment to Daniels or where Cohen got the money to make the payment. After Giuliani said Trump reimbursed Cohen, the president’s Twitter account posted a statement saying Cohen was repaid through a monthly retainer.

Trump was asked Friday about his contrasting statements, and he denied changing his story, telling reporters to “take a look at what I said” in his remarks aboard Air Force One. He did not elaborate.

[Federal judge says Mueller’s team wants Manafort to “sing” about Trump]

On Sunday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Trump’s comments on Air Force One were actually him saying he did not know about the payment when it was made.

“I’m going to relay to you what the president has told me, which is the best I can do,” Conway said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I asked the president what he meant. And he said, ‘I didn’t know about it when the payment occurred.’ ”

Conway denied that the White House has a problem with credibility, saying of Trump’s remarks: “He spoke honestly. He said no, which refers to when the payment occurred.”

The Post’s Fact Checker has analyzed Trump’s public statements since he took office and has found that, so far, he has made more than 3,000 false or misleading claims, an average of nearly 6.5 such claims per day.

In his interviews Sunday with The Post and ABC News, Giuliani made multiple unprompted criticisms of Daniels for her appearance the night before on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

He also repeatedly sought to highlight on Sunday the comments made by T.S. Ellis III, a federal judge who last week sharply questioned the special counsel’s fraud case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Ellis said that the special counsel’s team is only interested in getting information on Trump that could “lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

Giuliani called the judge’s comments a “pretty serious blow,” and he added in reference to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III: “I feel bad for Bobby.”

During his ABC interview, Giuliani insisted that Trump would not have to comply if Mueller subpoenas the president. He also suggested that it was possible Trump could invoke the Fifth Amendment if he sat down with Mueller’s team, which is seeking to interview the president.

“We don’t have to” comply with a subpoena, Giuliani said, a situation that could make its way to the Supreme Court if it is not resolved. “He’s the president of the United States. We can assert the same privileges other presidents have.”

Giuliani told The Post that Ellis’s remarks “probably makes it much more defensible for [the president] not to be interviewed.”