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Kīlauea


Prophet Zacharia

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40 minutes ago, Prophet Zacharia said:

There may have been other warnings that preceded the flow.

Are people who live near flow areas really surprised by lava flows?  Doesn’t it flow really slowly, like inches/feet per hour? Id think fires, smoke & such would tip them off...

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6 minutes ago, ChrisL said:

Are people who live near flow areas really surprised by lava flows?  Doesn’t it flow really slowly, like inches/feet per hour? Id think fires, smoke & such would tip them off...

This is the lava flow that produced the picture I took above. But this was proceeded by a serious of earthquakes and other smaller lava flows in the area.

 

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Here's how I first learned Kilauea had a goddess named Pele.

When the "April Fools Blizzard" of 4/1/75 (the day AFTER people had to take steel-studded snow tires off cars) dumped 3 feet of snow on Chicago, a lot of us IIT Chemistry grad students had been running lab experiments and syntheses all through the 3/31-4/1 night and there was no way to leave campus and get back to our apartments.  The roads were filled with stranded cars, the plows couldn't get through, the elevated train wasn't running and we were stranded. The drift on one side of the building became too high to open the door and we had to keep scooping newly fallen snow away from the front steps with cardboard boxes, until the snow ended, in order to remain able to open those doors from inside the building.

IIT had married couple apartments and Richard and Lenora, a chemistry grad student and his also-a-chemist chemistry-department employee wife, both from Hawaii, let us crash on their apartment furniture and floor and eat their food for a few days.

Lenora told us about her grandmother who believed in Pele, the goddess of Kilauea.

Once, the Hawaiian government decided to build a road the ran along a lower part of Kilauea.  Grandma complained, "Pele won't tolerate that!"  Sure enough, Kilauea became active, lava flowed down the side and then stopped - right after it covered the road.

Another time, an experimental electricity generation station was built that pumped water down a hole drilled down into Kilauea and used the steam that came back up to turned generator turbines.  Again, Grandma screamed about how Pele would be upset!  Sure enough, Kilauea became active and the lava stopped after it covered the station.

Lenora didn't believe in Pele but said there was too much in what Grandma predicted that came through to simply dismiss the idea.

After grad school, Richard and Lenora did not move back to Hawaii: they found a more beautiful place to live: Maryland!  They still live in the D.C. suburbs.

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