At least 1,700 are displaced after Hawaiian volcano Kilauea erupted, scattering ash and lava through a neighborhood. USA TODAY
Hawaii officials who ordered the evacuation of hundreds in the path of the erupting Kilauea volcano warned Friday that seniors, young people and those with respiratory problems should leave nearby areas immediately because of extremely high levels of sulfur dioxide gas.
Some 1,500 people fled late Thursday from a small residential area on the island after the initial eruption sent lava snaking through a forest, spurting from a 500-foot crack and flowing down a residential street.
Hawaii Gov. David Ige issued the mandatory evacuation order for the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens subdivisions and activated the National Guard to help with evacuations and security.
Hawaii civil defense officials said on Friday that the volcano is still erupting and driving up sulfur dixoide gas to extremely high levels.
Exposure to sulfur dioxide gas can cause irritation or burns, sore throats, runny noses, burning eyes and coughing.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
At one point, lava fountains were shooting 150 feet in the air, and molten lava spread out over an area about 200 yards wide behind one house in Leilani Estates, Big Island resident Ikaika Marzo told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser .
“It sounds like a jet engine. It’s going hard,” he said.
The evacuees were sheltering at two community centers near the town of Pahoa on the Big Island.
“The danger is of such magnitude that it warrants pre-emptive and protective action in order to provide for the safety, health and welfare of the residents of Leilani Estates and surrounding areas,” Ige tweeted.
Resident Jeremiah Osuna captured drone footage of the lava burning through the trees, a scene he described as a “curtain of fire.”
“It sounded like if you were to put a bunch of rocks into a dryer and turn it on as high as you could. You could just smell sulfur and burning trees and underbrush and stuff,” he told Honolulu television station KHON.
The eruption is not an unusual event there: “This eruption is typical of Kilauea,” said Jessica Johnson, a geophysicist at the University of East Anglia, who worked for two years at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. She said Kilauea is one of the most active and well-monitored volcanoes in the world.
Officials said there is no way to predict how long the eruption will continue or what shape it will take. “This eruption could be finished or could go on for a long time,” Johnson said.
After the 500-foot fissure appeared in Leilani Estates, it generated mostly spatter and intermittent bubble bursts for about two hours, with lava stopping after only a few yards, according to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, but could start again at any moment.
The eruption comes after days of earthquakes that rattled the area’s Puna district. A nearby school was closed due to the ongoing seismic activity, and several roadways cracked under the strain of the constant temblors. A magnitude 5.0 earthquake was recorded hours before the eruption began Thursday.
The Puu Oo crater floor began to collapse Monday, triggering a series of earthquakes and pushing the lava into new underground chambers.
The collapse caused magma to push more than 10 miles downslope toward the populated southeast coastline of the island.
USGS geologist Janet Babb said the magma crossed under Highway 130, which leads to a popular volcano access point, on Tuesday night.
Contributing: Doyle Rice, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
A Puerto Rico Air National Guard plane crashed shortly after taking off in Georgia on Wednesday, killing all nine airmen on board.
The plane, a C-130-type cargo plane from Puerto Rico’s 156th Airlift Wing, had been in Savannah for maintenance and took off about 11:30 a.m., bound for Arizona. The Associated Press reported that the decades-old plane was due to be retired in Arizona, though a National Guard spokesman would not confirm that at a news conference Thursday morning.
The plane made it only about a mile from Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport before it nose-dived toward a state highway intersection and exploded into a ball of fire and black smoke, which could be seen across the northern suburbs of the city.
All the victims served in Puerto Rico’s National Guard, officials said. Their names have not yet been released, and the military has only begun to investigate the cause of the crash.
Col. Pete Boone, a spokesman for Georgia’s Air National Guard, denied that the plane was more than 60 years old, as one of his counterparts in Puerto Rico had told reporters.
Boone said at a news conference on Thursday that the C-130 was built in the late 1970s and had been in Georgia for routine maintenance.
Regardless, the colonel said, “the Puerto Rico Air National Guard and the whole Puerto Rico community has been through quite a lot over the last few months.”
Hours after the crash, Isabelo Rivera, an adjutant general of Puerto Rico’s National Guard, described the island’s air fleet as old and in disrepair. Of the unit’s six C-130-type planes, he said, two were inoperable and the one destroyed Wednesday had been scheduled for retirement.
“The planes that we have in Puerto Rico — it’s not news today that they are the oldest planes on [National Guard] inventory,” Rivera told the Associated Press after the crash.
“This pains us,” he added.
Whatever its exact age, the destroyed C-130 had been used to rescue Americans stranded in the British Virgin Islands after Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean late last year, the AP reported.
Days later, Hurricane Maria slammed into the 156th Airlift Wing’s home base in Puerto Rico, and the plane subsequently transported supplies from the U.S. mainland to the ruined island.
All nine crew members killed Wednesday had helped with the hurricane recovery effort, the AP wrote, even as the 156th struggled to rebuild itself.
“Our wing was devastated by two back-to-back Category-4 hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico, and we’re still in that process continuing to work with higher-level command to get us through the recovery phases and rebuild the wing,” Col. Raymond Figueroa, wing commander of the 156th, said in a military news release last month.
Now his unit will mourn again.
Chelsea Sinclair, who works at a store near the crash site, told the Island Packet newspaper that the plane went down nose-first and shook the building. Mark Jones, speaking to the Savannah Morning News, said he was in his car when the plane hit the road in front of him.
“It didn’t look like it nose-dived, but it almost looked like it stalled and just went almost flat right there in the middle of the highway,” Jones said. “I’m still shook up and shaking. My stomach is in knots because I know they’re people just like me. I wasn’t that far from it, and I could have just kept going and it would have been me and we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Jones said.
Scott Cohen tweeted what he said was footage of the crash from his business’s surveillance cameras. In it, the plane appears to lose altitude quickly and twirl into the ground.
