My wife and I just got back on Saturday from a visit. Life very much goes on. Throughout the whole week, everyone back home was freaking out / trying to make sure we were alive, while the locals all just kinda shrugged and said, “Just Pele doing her thing.”
I find it hard to take a disaster seriously when people are playing golf. At what point do they start telling the tourists to leave, or at least stop arriving? I'd imagine a mass evacuation of Hawaii, or any part of it, would be a logistical nightmare.
Hawaii is a big island. Most of the land downwind of Kilauea is a desert in large part due to centuries-long sulfur dioxide emissions as opposed to lack of rain.
Lava is currently erupting in the East Rift Zone of Kilauea. The subdivisions where the lava is fountaining have been placed under a mandatory evacuation, and travel in that region of Kilauea is now limited solely to residents. Places like Hilo and Kailua-Kona are completely unaffected, except maybe for vog and future ashfall issues.
The National Guard for Hawaii is actually presently planning for a potential evacuation of Puna, since lava is currently threatening to close off all of the roads that reach those districts. The restrictions on tourists and vacationers are already in place to facilitate that putative evacuation.
That's because there is no "disaster". Apart from sucking for the ~thousand residents who are living in the area where the lava is now flowing, there is no effect on the rest of the island.
Maybe not today, but the Hawaiian islands are all temporary. There is a reason they get smaller the further they are away from the hotspot. The big island is doomed.
Well on a long enough timeline we're all doomed, but that doesn't mean golf is out of the question. This eruption has been going on for decades (1983!), it's OK to live a normal life on the Big Island.
