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By Rod Thompson, Star-Bulletin
Highway 137 is known in Puna as "The Red Road." Red shows
up as the rusty looking part of the road. The color comes from
red cinder and heavy oil, used to make the road.
The black part is asphalt, used to repair it.

KALAPANA, Hawaii -- The Puna District of Hawaii prides itself on being a little different.

So when money came available recently to repave a portion of "Highway" 137, along the area's south shore, folks were concerned.

Since the 1960s, when it was paved with a mixture of red volcanic cinders and bunker oil, the road has been commonly referred to as "The Red Road."

And people want to keep it that way.

Plans for repaving a stretch of the road with asphalt would have meant a controversial end to the much-loved rusty red. Then county officials and area residents agreed on a solution: Paint the road red.

After the county repaves the road in the next two months, volunteers will spray a thin, non-slippery coat of red paint over the entire five miles of blacktop.

Ginny Aste, community leader and Green Party candidate for the state House of Representatives, is among those happy the road will stay red. "We're not like everywhere else," she said.

Athena Peanut, president of Friends of the Red Road, is happy that the agreement includes keeping the 16-foot-wide road narrow. She fought unsuccessfully for underground electric lines along the road in the mid-1990s, and says a narrow road discourages development.

"Sometimes a community's first line of defense is a bad road," she said.

Actually, two years ago the county used fuel tax money to repave six miles of the Red Road black. There was no public hearing and no public fuss.

But the current project will use money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency as compensation for roads destroyed by lava flows at Kalapana.

FEMA wanted an environmental study for a wider road, but there wasn't enough time to meet a Jan. 31, 2001, deadline for spending close to $4 million.

Instead, FEMA accepted no widening and informal talks with the community. That's when some people called for red and some called for a safer road of any color.

"I don't think anybody was pro-black," said area resident Lorn Douglas. "Some people were afraid if they held out for red, it wouldn't be paved at all."

Environmental laws now prohibit the use of bunker oil for paving, as was done before. To meet the public demand for red, county engineer Jiro Sumada considered cinder and asphalt, asphalt and red dye, and red concrete -- all two to five times more expensive that plain asphalt.

Asphalt with a top "dusting" of red cinder would work, but Sumada couldn't justify paying for the extra labor, and the United Public Workers union wouldn't permit volunteers to spread cinders.

Instead, the union proposed spray-painting by volunteers, something no union workers do, so there is no conflict.

The happy outcome has community leader Aste dreaming of more such projects.

With a grin suggesting playfulness and a voice suggesting earnestness, she says, "I have this idea of rainbow roads all over the island. We think it's worth a million dollars of publicity."