At 10:30 am on May 3rd 2018, the Big Island of Hawai’i would experience a sizable 5.0 earthquake. Later that afternoon at around 5 p.m. witnesses began to see smoke and lava splatter coming from a crack in the ground located in the eastern part of the Leilani Estates neighborhood. For the next four months the Leilani Estates would become home to an active lava flow that would change the geography of the island once again.

  At the time of the eruption I was living on O’ahu and was receiving phone calls and messages daily asking if I was ok and safe. I had to explain to my loved ones that the islands were not as close as they thought and that we were about 200 miles away from where the eruption was taking place. I had a trip planned to the Big Island for June but I thought that possibly the eruption would be over and that there was no real harm in going.

Our trip to the Big Island began on June 29th. We had several Airbnbs booked across the island that way we could see as much of the island as we could. We were only able to tell that an eruption was even happening on Day 3 at our second main location. This is when we were headed to our Air BnB in Kea’au . Driving down the highway you could see the smoke billowing out from the horizon and across the sky. I had never seen anything like it before, and immediately I became very aware of just how small and powerless we are against Mother Nature.

Growing up my mom loved watching natural disaster movies, everything from tornadoes and tsunamis to volcano films. I in turn grew up with very vivid nightmares of these events and I still have them now as an adult. The most famous of my fears among my family was of volcanoes. When I announced that I was moving to Hawai’i in 2012 my family found it funny how much I was willing to accept my fears for island life.

Fast forward to 2018 as I am in the car seeing the smoke from the volcano, I felt like I was back in one of my childhood nightmares. I face timed my parents so they could see what I was looking at, and I started having a panic attack. My husband of course found it hilarious but I could not shake my nerves. I was driving towards my worst nightmare. Obviously I was overreacting, and after a beer at lunch I was able to breath a little better. 

Our Airbnb was twelve miles away from Leilani Estates. There was a lady who was staying in the main house that was an evacuee from the Estates. She talked to us about how the last update she had was that the flow had gone through her property but she still had a house. It was surreal talking to her about this, but she conversed with a form of calmness. As she put it, this is Pele’s house [Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes] and we are all just visitors. 

Throughout the day my husband Matt’s curiosity grew about the eruption and he wanted to see how close we could actually get to it. All the movies my mom watched gave me the craziest scenarios as to what could happen. The roads opening up, rocks getting hurled through the air, Bruce Willis having to save us all. Again I know these are beyond reality but this was a fear I had been holding for over 20 years.

Driving around the eruption area felt odd, the air itself had a heavy feeling to it. The sky had a bright orange and red glow to it, we later learned that the locals called this spectacle the “Pahoa Glow”. When we rolled down the windows of the car you could still here the coqui frogs singing in the night as if nothing different was happening in their lives. 

After relaxing and taking in everything that we were viewing, I asked Matt if we could find a hill nearby so I could get a photo from a higher view. It took us a while to find an area that was not fully residential, but eventually we found one that gave us enough of what we were looking for. I can’t tell you where we ended up, but we did have a vantage point to view Fissure 8. My photos are not the best because I was shooting without a tripod, but they give you a general idea of what we were witnessing. Every once in a while a sizable mass of lava would fly straight up and out of the fissure. I had never seen anything like it, it was the most beautiful and terrifying event I had ever seen.

I look back now on these photos and can appreciate just how privileged I am that I got to be there during the eruption. I will admit that I was uneasy our few days on the eastern side of the island, but I am thankful that I was there. Perhaps this was the kind of exposure therapy I needed. 

The following photos are not mine but I felt like they were important to share so that you could obtain a firmer grasp on how magnificent this eruption was.