Category: Hawai’i

Exploring the islands

Emergency Alert Fatigue

The last month has been a bit… exciting… here on the island. With lava flows and explosive eruptions spawned by our neighborhood volcano.

Another Eruption Message
Yet another eruption status message arrives on my phone.
Along with the ongoing eruption in the lower east rift zone, there are the events at the summit caldera of Kilauea. The withdrawal of magma from the summit storage chamber has resulted in the ongoing collapse of the Haelmaʻumaʻu crater area. Magnitude five point something earthquakes are now a daily occurrence as this collapse continues.

The result? Over the last month we have been bombarded by far too many messages on eruption conditions, vog conditions, earthquakes, and non-tsunami alerts. It is wearing a little thin. And frankly I am ignoring much of it, when I probably should not.

Emergency fatigue has set in.

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Night Market

The Waikoloa Village Association has been looking for ways to arrange activities for the community lately. The Waikoloa Stables are a good facility for community events, a fair amount of parking, bathrooms, and a large lawn to accommodate a crowd.

Our star party last fall was successful enough. While the crowd for the star party was good, it was nowhere near the crowd attending the recent night markets.

Night Market
Strolling through the vendors at the Waikoloa Night Market
This last Friday was the second of the night market events, and it was simply jammed. No surprise, all of the area food vendors were there. Good food plus more than a few booths of arts, crafts, plenty to come for.

I came in for dinner on the way home from work. Deb had let me know she would be in Kona for a while and I was on my own.

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Puna Glow

Puna is glowing.

Not a good glow when you consider that glow is from a raging river of lava between fissure 8 and the sea at Kapoho. Still it can be pretty under the rising Milky Way. I stayed late at work and took a few photos on the way down the mauna. Click on the image for full scale goodness…

Puna Glow
The glow of lava in the clouds and vog over Puna. Five image panorama with a 14mm lens from the summit of Mauna Kea.

The Wai‘ōpae Tide Pools

One of the most beautiful places on the island is gone.

Hawaiian Damselfish (Dascyllus albisella)
A Hawaiian Damselfish (Dascyllus albisella) in a pool at Wai‘ōpae
The Wai‘ōpae Tide Pools were a place where anyone could see the wonders of a coral reef. The calm and protected pools full of fish and lush coral. You could see damselfish hovering over a coral head or watch small barracuda hunt just under the surface.

And they were popular, on any given day a couple dozen locals and tourists could be seen exploring the pools. You could swim across one or two, then have to climb across a few feet of old pahoehoe lava to drop into the next. The more adventurous were rewarded with even richer coral in the outermost pools where the ocean waves created more challenging swimming conditions.

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