Puna, Hawaii Lava Flow - September 16th Update
From Hawaii 24/7, some nice aerial shots including pictures of the road improvements to Railroad Avenue and Government Beach Road to create alternate routes in case Highway 130 is cut.
I’m kind of chuffed about the improvements to Railroad Avenue. It is in fact the old right-of-way from the railroad that used to run from the Hamakua coast in the north all the way out to Kapoho at the extreme eastern tip of the Big Island. I’ve driven all the parts of it that are still navigable. If you follow it to where the old roundhouse used to be in Hilo you can still find discarded rail spikes without too much trouble.
When I win the Powerball and become a billionaire from trading in financialized student loan futures I’m going to pour all that money into rebuilding the Big Island railroad as a green people-mover alternative to the auto.
Daily liveblog update from the USGS. As of the 16th the flow front has entered an unoccupied corner of Kaohe Homesteads. It’s advancing now at an average rate of 705 feet/day (that’s 1.75364759 × 10-23 furlongs per femtosecond).
Big Island Video News has several video clips, including a flyover of the flow and a story about an incident command center being opened in Pahoa town (which makes about as much sense to me as putting a terrorism response center on the top floor of the WTC).