Hawaii volcano erupts, 1,700 ordered to evacuate

About 1,700 residents have been ordered to evacuate their homes after an eruption of Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Residents of Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens were issued a mandatory evacuation order after an eruption on Thursday sent lava shooting up from a crack in a street.

“It sounded like if you were to put a bunch of rocks into a dryer and turn it on as high as you could. You could just smell sulphur and burning trees and underbrush and stuff,” Jeremiah Osuna, a resident who captured drone footage of the scene, told Honolulu television station KHON.

On Friday morning, the Hawaii Country Civil Defence Agency said the volcanic activity still continued and another vent had opened up overnight.

The eruption was preceded by hundreds of small earthquakes in recent days. The strongest, a 5.0-magnitude earthquake, struck on Thursday morning.

Dangerous gas

The Hawaii Fire Department reported “extremely high levels of dangerous Sulfur Dioxide gas” in the evacuation area, according to the Hawaii Country Civil Defence Agency.

At least 100 people were staying in shelters on Thursday night.

Drone video shows the lava burning through the trees in Leilani Estates. The lava is shooting up like a fountain through cracks in the road. Video : Jeremiah Osuna https://t.co/YRuq3aGYnh pic.twitter.com/k03UzhjiYX

— Lynn Kawano (@LynnKawano) May 4, 2018

One of the world’s most active volcanoes, Kilauea has been erupting nearly continuously since 1983.

“It is quite usual for Kilauea to erupt, not at the summit, but through cracks on the volcano,” Eleonora Rivalta of the German Research Centre for Geosciences told AFP news agency.

“What is slightly unusual, but only for the last tens of years, is that the eruption is taking place quite distant along the East Rift Zone, so close to some settlements. But this is within the known behaviour of the volcano.”

In 1924, one person was killed when Kilauea spewed ash and rocks into the sky.