‘Not worried’

Volcano residents tough out the threat of Pele's toxic fumes

HILO » Volcano Village is so friendly that a woman who doesn't want a reporter to interview her comes back three minutes later to explain why.

It is a 4,000-foot-high community on the edge of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park where many homes have a fireplace or wood-burning stove and artists have their own education center.

It's also a community where, any day now, with a change in the winds, people could be gasping for breath.

The Volcano business area is just three miles from Halemaumau Crater, which is releasing 480 to 2,500 metric tons of sulfur dioxide per day. So far, tradewinds have carried all of it away from the village.

But Volcano residents know a reversal of the wind could blanket the community of 3,500 people with gas and volcanic ash.

The gas is a special threat to the young, the old and people with certain medical conditions, authorities say.

Many Volcano residents don't seem to care.

"I'm just not worried about it because it's not here," said Adele Tripp, manager of the Kilauea General Store.

"I'm a fatalist," said Marilyn Nicholson, interim development director for the Volcano Art Center.

But center Executive Director Phyllis Segawa said a group of residents has ordered gas masks.

Center receptionist Pam Patton confesses she's a little nervous. Like others, she plans to stay indoors and tape her windows shut if the winds switch.

Patton, like Segawa, already is using a medical inhaler. Even Segawa's dog, Koki, was sneezing and coughing.

That's because Volcano already gets sulfur dioxide from a different source. Since 1983 the Puu Oo area nine miles southeast of Volcano has periodically hit the community with vog. That's the same mix of gases that Halemaumau is putting out.

"We've had to deal with vog before, but it's always gone in a few hours," Tripp said.

Vog produces a taste "like eating a book of matches," said resident Nedette Nihipali.

The acidic vog also "burns" vegetation, but Nihipali is used to that. "It grows back. It comes back real green," she said.

Down a long, one-lane road edged by non-native ginger plants, artist Eva Lee lives with her husband, ceramist Chiu Leong.

Lee has a new interest: growing tea plants where she has cleared away invasive ginger in the couple's five acres of native forest.

Tea in the open gets burned by vog, but tea planted in the forest escapes major damage, she said.

Besides arts and agriculture, major sources of income in Volcano are work at the national park, bed-and-breakfast operations and home-based work like software development, Tripp said.

This self-contained community breeds a mind-set independent of Hilo, just 30 miles away. Volcano people go there maybe twice a month, Tripp said.

"Once they're up here, they hardly ever go to Hilo," she said.

But self-sufficiency and familiarity with vog might not withstand a direct hit from Halemaumau.

A federal standard requires warning affected people when 24-hour averages of sulfur dioxide go higher than 0.14 parts per million. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has measured brief concentrations at Halemaumau of 40 parts per million.

The St. Louis (Missouri) University School of Public Health says, "At 50 ppm the victim will experience extreme upper respiratory symptoms, but no significant injury will occur with exposures limited to less than 30 minutes."

As Tripp said, vog attacks often last for hours.