PAHOA, Hawaii: If Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano blows its top in the coming days or weeks, as experts fear, it could hurl ash and boulders the size of refrigerators miles into the air, shutting down airline traffic and endangering lives in all directions, scientists said Thursday.
“If it goes up, it will come down,” said Charles Mandeville, volcano hazards coordinator for the US Geological Survey. “You don’t want to be underneath anything that weighs 10 tons when it’s coming out at 120 mph.”
The volcano, which has been spitting and sputtering lava for a week, has destroyed more than two dozen homes and threatened a geothermal plant. The added threat of an explosive eruption could ground planes at one of the Big Island’s two major airports and pose other dangers. The national park around the volcano announced that it would close because of the risks.
“We know the volcano is capable of doing this,” Mandeville said, citing similar explosions at Kilauea in 1925, 1790 and four other times in the last few thousand years. “We know it is a distinct possibility.”
He would not estimate the likelihood of such an explosion, but said the internal volcanic conditions are changing in a way that could lead to a blast in about a week. The volcano’s internal plumbing could still prevent an explosion.
If it happens, a summit blast could also release steam and sulfur dioxide gas.
Kilauea has destroyed 36 structures — including 26 homes — since May 3, when it began releasing lava from vents about 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of the summit crater. Fifteen of the vents are now spread through the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens neighborhoods.
Hawaii Gov. David Ige said crews at a geothermal energy plant near the lava outbreak accelerated the removal of stored flammable fuel as a precaution. The Puna Geothermal Venture plant has about 50,000 gallons (189,270 liters) of pentane. It was removed early Thursday.
Barbara Lozano, who lives within a mile of the plant, said she would have thought twice about buying her property if she had known the risks.
“Why did they let us buy residential property, knowing it was a dangerous situation? Why did they let people build all around it?” she asked.
About 2,000 people have been evacuated from the neighborhoods were lava has oozed from the ground.
Avani Love, 29, moved to the Big Island about a month ago from Maui with her four children. They evacuated their home May 3, and only found out it was destroyed when a relative went back to get her personal belongings.
While saying she’s sad to have lost her home, she also feels a sense of renewal brought on by Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, to correct overpopulation of the island.
“Everyone comes here,” she said. “When you have that, it’s Pele’s way of clearing house and restoring the place. There’s beauty and also darkness.”
No one lives in the immediate area of the summit crater. The crater and surrounding region are a part of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which planned to close at 10 p.m. Thursday.
Officials don’t expect a possible explosion to be deadly as long as people stay out of the closed park. Communities a mile or two (kilometers) away may be showered by pea-size fragments or dusted with nontoxic ash, said Tina Neal, scientist-in-charge at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory.
What could happen is not an eruption of volcanic gases but mostly trapped steam from flash-heated groundwater released like in a kitchen pressure cooker, with rocks, said volcanologist Janine Krippner of Concord University in West Virginia.
The problem is the lava lake at the summit of Kilauea is draining fast, about 6.5 feet (2 meters) per hour, Mandeville said.
In little more than a week, the top of the lava lake has gone from spilling over the crater to almost 970 feet (295 meters) below the surface as of Thursday morning, Mandeville said. The lava levels in the lake are dropping because lava is spewing out of cracks elsewhere in the mountain, lowering the pressure that filled the lava lake.
“This is a huge change. This is three football fields going down,” Mandeville said.
The fear is that it will go below the underground water table — another 1,000 feet further down — and that would trigger a chain of events that could lead to a “very violent” steam explosion, Mandeville said.
At the current rate of change, that is about six or seven days away.
Once the lava drops, rocks that had been superheated could fall into the lava tube. And once the lava drops below the water table, water hits rocks that are as hot as almost 2,200 degrees (1,200 degrees Celsius) and flashes into steam. When the water hits the lava, it also steams. And the dropped rocks hold that steam in until it blows.
A similar 1924 explosion threw pulverized rock, ash and steam as high as 5.4 miles into the sky, (9 kilometers) for a couple of weeks. If another blast happens, the danger zone could extend about 3 miles (5 kilometers) around the summit, land all inside the national park, Mandeville said.
The small, aptly named town of Volcano, Hawaii, population 2,500, is about 3 miles (4.83 kilometers) from the summit. Janet Coney is office manager of the Kilauea Lodge, an inn and restaurant. She said USGS officials told her lodge employees probably won’t have to worry about rocks raining down on them, but they might experience falling ash.
Hawaii volcano could spew boulders the size of refrigerators
Hawaii volcano could spew boulders the size of refrigerators
US Catholic cardinals urge Trump administration to embrace a moral compass in foreign policy
- The three cardinals, who are prominent figures in the more progressive wing of the US church, took as a starting point a major foreign policy address that Pope Leo XIV delivered Jan. 9 to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See
ROME: Three US Catholic cardinals urged the Trump administration on Monday to use a moral compass in pursuing its foreign policy, saying US military action in Venezuela, threats of acquiring Greenland and cuts in foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering instead of promoting peace.
In a joint statement, Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington and Joseph Tobin of Newark, N.J., warned that without a moral vision, the current debate over Washington’s foreign policy was mired in “polarization, partisanship, and narrow economic and social interests.”
“Most of the United States and the world are adrift morally in terms of foreign policy,” McElroy told The Associated Press. “I still believe the United States has a tremendous impact upon the world.”
The statement was unusual and marked the second time in as many months that members of the US Catholic hierarchy have asserted their voice against a Trump administration many believe isn’t upholding the basic tenets of human dignity. In November, the entire US conference of Catholic bishops condemned the administration’s mass deportation of migrants and “vilification” of them in the public discourse.
The three cardinals, who are prominent figures in the more progressive wing of the US church, took as a starting point a major foreign policy address that Pope Leo XIV delivered Jan. 9 to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See.
The speech, delivered almost entirely in English, amounted to Leo’s most substantial critique of US foreign policy. History’s first US-born pope denounced how nations were using force to assert their dominion worldwide, “completely undermining” peace and the post-World War II international legal order.
Leo didn’t name individual countries, but his speech came against the backdrop of the then-recent US military operation in Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro from power, US threats to take Greenland as well as Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops was consulted on the statement, and its president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, “supports the emphasis placed by the cardinals on Pope Leo’s teaching in these times,” said spokesperson Chieko Noguchi.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to the AP’s request for comment on Monday.
Cardinals question the use of force
The three cardinals cited Venezuela, Greenland and Ukraine in their statement — saying they “raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace” — as well as the cuts to foreign aid that US President Donald Trump’s administration initiated last year.
“Our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination,” they warned.
“We renounce war as an instrument for narrow national interests and proclaim that military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy,” they wrote. “We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance.”
Tobin described the moral compass the cardinals wish the US would use globally.
“It can’t be that my prosperity is predicated on inhuman treatment of others,” he told the AP. “The real argument isn’t just my right or individual rights, but what is the common good.”
Cardinals expand on their statement in interviews with AP
In interviews, Cupich and McElroy said the signatories were inspired to issue a statement after hearing from several fellow cardinals during a Jan. 7-8 meeting at the Vatican. These other cardinals expressed alarm about the US action in Venezuela, its cuts in foreign aid and its threats to acquire Greenland, Cupich said.
A day later, Leo’s nearly 45-minute-long speech to the diplomatic corps gave the Americans the language they needed, allowing them to “piggyback on” the pope’s words, Cupich said.
Cupich acknowledged that Maduro’s prosecution could be seen positively, but not the way it was done via a US military incursion into a sovereign country.
“When we go ahead and do it in such a way that is portrayed as saying, ‘Because we can do it, we’re going to do it, that might makes right’ — that’s a troublesome development,” he said. “There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”
Trump has insisted that capturing Maduro was legal. On Greenland, Trump has argued repeatedly that the US needs control of the resource-rich island, a semiautonomous region of NATO ally Denmark. for its national security.
The Trump administration last year significantly gutted the US Agency for International Development, saying its projects advance a liberal agenda and were a waste of money.
Tobin, who ministered in more than 70 countries as a Redemptorist priest and the order’s superior general, lamented the retreat in USAID assistance, saying US philanthropy makes a big difference in everything from hunger to health.
The three cardinals said their key aim wasn’t to criticize the administration, but rather to encourage the US to regain is moral standing in the world by pursuing a foreign policy that is ethically guided and seeks the common good.
“We’re not endorsing a political party or a political movement,” Tobin said. The faithful in the pews and all people of good will have a role to play, he said.
“They can make an argument of basic human decency,” he said.
