PAHOA, Hawaii — Lava from the Kilauea volcano has forced Shawn Heard to move her house once already, back in the 1980s. She’s at peace with the possibility of eventually doing so again.
Heard lives just miles from a cluster of homes that is being threatened by a lava flow inching its way down the lush, rain forest-like slopes of Kilauea. She knows lava could one day get to her house.
Yet she doesn’t think about living anywhere else.
“It’s such a magical place,” Heard said in her shop, Puna Style, in downtown Pahoa, the largest town in the district.
Kilauea has been continuously erupting since 1983. As the lava flows, however, it’s giving those who are in the process of moving here, or planning to, reason for pause.
Next door to Heard’s boutique, is Savio Realty, where the usual bustle of walk-in traffic from tourists hoping to own a bit of paradise has quieted down in recent days, broker Sandra Lee Hegerfelt said.
Some potential home buyers are backing out of escrow because of the possibility that lava may block roads, she said. Officials are warning residents about the possibility that lava might cover part of a highway that could isolate about 8,000 people.
Some lenders, meanwhile, are adopting a wait-and-see attitude and have been slow to approve mortgages, Hegerfelt said.
“There’s no way to know whether it will continue or just stop,” she said of the lava.
Homes in Puna may sell for one-third or half of comparable homes on Oahu, where Honolulu is located.
Lava from Kilauea was still at least a mile from homes in Kaohe Homesteads, Hawaii County Civil Defense Director Darryl Oliveira said.
Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has warned the lava could reach the subdivision in a matter of days.
Heard initially came to the island more than three decades ago. After about five years of repeated evacuation warnings, she dismantled her house in Royal Gardens subdivision and reassembled it in Leilani Estates, a subdivision nestled among the thick forest.
She left not because lava was about to cover her property but because lava could cover the main access road, a circuitous 70-mile one-way route through a nearby national park. Lava eventually consumed her Royal Gardens property in 2009.
George Cortez, a security guard who was born and raised near Hilo, reminds people that the land belongs to Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, and that people are living on it because she lets them.
“If she’s going to come and wants to take your place, she’s going to do it,” he said, echoing a common Big Island refrain.
