Crater Rim Drive damage at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park/NPS

With Tūtū Pele seemingly having come to the end of her latest eruptive run, staff at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park are working to get back to the business of running a national park, not responding to an erupting volcano. But it won't be business as usual at the park now, or for the foreseeable future, as repairing the damage carries a bill of an estimated $100 million, at least, and some areas might not reopen for a long, long time.

For nearly four months the park's Kīlauea volcano has been spewing lava and fracturing the surrounding landscape with earthquakes. Since May 11, the bulk of the park has been closed for public safety. Though the eruptions have ended, the damage to the park and the limited reopening scheduled for September 22, National Public Lands Day, has park staff rethinking how visitors should experience Hawai'i Volcanoes.

"Our resource is so dynamic that we’ve always been about change. It is an active volcano, and so we’ve always had to adapt and be flexible in terms of how we manage that resource in terms of vistiation," Superintendent Cindy Orlando said during a phone call earlier this week. "Before the event in early May (when this year's eruptions started), we had the highest visitation in the state. We were the most-visited attraction in 2017. We had 2 million visitors.

"So, for me, I guess I see this as an opportunity," she went on. "The landscape is changed, but our footprint has always been limited. And now it’s even more so. In that regard, it’s like, 'Wait a minute, maybe we don’t want to see 2 million visitors a year at this park. Or do we?'"

Before Kilauea came to life with eruptions this year, the Halema‘uma‘u Crater contained a lava lake that delighted visitors with its golden glow at night. The eruptions not only greatly enlarged the crater, but drained the lava lake/Rebecca Latson file

Since May the park staff, and the park's landscape, have been bruised and battered by Kīlauea's volcanics, a wildfire, and, most recently, Hurricane Lane. The landscape has been cracked in places by earthquakes, vegetation has been burned to a char, and buildings have been all but lost due to semisic damage. The Keauhou Fire in mid-August burned nearly 4,000 acres on the slopes of Mauna Loa, mostly within the national park. At times the fire threatened the Kīpukapuaulu Special Ecological Area, a rare forest habitat for endangered species. Hurricane Lane veered away from the Hawaiian Islands and so spared the national park a direct hit, but it dumped an astonishing amount of rain on parts of the Big Island.

"I had employees who got 48 inches of rain at their hosue," Superintendent Orlando said. "It was something. It was really something. Fortunately, we didn’t get the typical wind we would have gotten, and because the storm, at its furthest point it was about 180 miles offshore, that was really a lifesaver I’ve got to say.”

With those events in the past, Park Service experts are soon to begin exploring the park and assessing the damage that's been done.

"The lull in eruptive activity has allowed us to go out and begin to look at some damages, how much (repairs) can we do ourselves," said the superintendent. "Sort of the small ‘r,’ the repair and emergency stabilization, get the employees back in the park. We just pulled together a professional damage assessment team and they’ll be coming in probably the week of September 10 and they’re going look at those larger, more complex and more long-term repairs that will need to be made and likely cost many millions of dollars, and that includes a team from federal highways as well.

“So, there will be parts of the park that will not be open, for many years or maybe never at all. But those are the kinds of things that we’ll find out after we get the big picture, the capital 'R,' recovery.”

Boulder ejected from Kilauea volcano at Hawai'i Volcanoes NP/NPS

There are areas around Kīlauea that remain geologically unstable, explained the superintendent, and how long they take to settle and stabilize is unknown at this point. As a result, they are a danger to visitors. That didn't sway 11 people who ignored safety signs and closure orders on August 25 and snuck out to the rim of the Halema‘uma‘u Crater. Spotted by park workers, the 11 were cited for ignoring the closure signs and disorderly conduct and fined $350 each, along with a $30 processing fine.

To many, the park and its volcanics are an incredible wonder that, perhaps, seem safer because they're within a national park. That couldn't be farther from the truth, the superintendent notes.

“That always happens at our park," she said of the 11 trespassers. "The closed area signs seem to mean nothing. You’ve got lava junkies, you’ve got people who don’t like somebody else trying to keep them safe. It’s a recurring theme at Hawai’i Volcanoes. One of the reasons the park was established was to provide safe access to lava viewing.

"The lava’s not there anymore, we have our own little grand canyon, now," she added, referring to how the eruptions drained the lava lake from the Halema‘uma‘u Crater and sent the molten rock down Kīlauea's Lower East Rift Zone. "It’s a story in and of itself, of course. We’re going to be writing the next chapter of the park’s history. We just do our best. I’ve got a handful of rangers and 330,000 acres. So it’s inevitable that somebody’s going to try to get out there and, really, those folks were so fortunate that nobody was killed.”

While the crater is greatly enlarged from its size back in April, whether it refills with lava remains to be seen, though the superintendent thinks it likely will. Some day.

"Geologically, it likely will happen. I can’t tell you what kind of geologic time in which it will happen. If you talk to USGS, they expect that one day it will,” she said.

The park's rangers, the interpreters, will face a somewhat greater challenge in describing the history of the last four months, of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park. The eruptions back in May actually prevented a FedEx truck from delivering 300,000 vistor brochures, said the superintendnt. But it was just as well. "They’re no longer valid," pointed out Superintendent Orlando.

“Getting the story right is important. It’s such an opportunity for us," she said. "Not only to make sure that we’re sharing that environmental and cultural part of the story, but measuring what the visitation’s going to do. What kind of impacts they're going to have. But also the visitor experience, it was always life-changing. I’d like people to feel like they’ve seen something that they’ll never see again in their life. And it’s not about the red lava. It’s still a pretty incredible landscape with a pretty incredible story. People visit here for the same reason that we live here.”

Volcanic activity earlier this summer along the volcano's east rift zone/NPS

While the superintendent and her staff work on how best to interpret the park when more areas are reopened next month, they also have to consider what to do about the Hawaii Volcano Observatory and the Jaggar Museum, which sustained significant damage.

"The geomorphologist and a couple seismic engineers that we’ve had out have pretty much all confirmed that they can no longer be used," said Superintendent Orlando. "There are a couple of small outlier buildings up there that USGS used for various functions. We may be able to save some of them, they’re back from the crater, as opposed to the Jaggar Museum and the Observatory (HVO) right on the edge of the crater. They're in a pretty fragile location.

"So we’re not optimistic about that, but we might be able to salvage a little bit. Like I say, some of the smaller outbuildings that USGS uses for monitoring, data collection. We’re working with them on all of that," she added.

The founding of HVO, America’s first volcano observatory, is attributed to Thomas A. Jaggar in the year 1912. Mr. Jaggar arrived at Kīlauea on Jan. 17, 1912, and immediately set forth monitoring earthquakes and changes in the shape of Kīlauea with the best tools available to him at the time: a few seismometers, some meteorological equipment, and a surveyor’s transit.

Replacement costs for the two buildings reach about $50 million, said the superintendent. The park's water and wastewater systems also were greatly impacted, and could cost another $40 million-$50 million to replace, she added

“And then we've got the roads. Early on in the incident the federal highways had a $5 million price tag on it, and that was back in May, so we already know there are roads that probably will never be repaired or used again," Superintendent Orlando said.

Fortunately, in light of current events, the park had in 2016 completed a General Management Plan "that, lo and behold, had called in these kinds of scenarios. And little did we know that this would happen so quickly and so dramatically, and here we have a document that will guide our decisions going forward. Particularly about those two buildings (the observatory and museum). Do you relocate them in the park, do you relocate the functions in the park, do you relocate the functions out of the park? So there will be a lot of I’m sure very thoughtful conversations about that.”

A safe occupancy notice on a building at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park

A more expansive study could be coming to the Big Island soon, to, as U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz has asked his colleagues in Congress to direct the Interior Department to assess the damage Kīlauea's eruptions have made to federal infrastructure, the visitor industry, and the Hawai‘i Island economy.

“It’s crucial that we understand how our communities and our local economy are being affected by the Kīlauea eruptions and earthquakes,” said the senator, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “This is one of many steps the federal government can take to help these communities.

Nearly 13 square miles of the island were covered by the lava flows, which also forced thousands to evacuate their homes; more than 700 homes were destroyed by the eruptions, according to the senator's staff.

In the coming weeks leading up to the scheduled reopening, park staff will be working to contain the expectations of visitors.

"Our approach going forward is, first of all, we’re not going to reopen the whole park in two weeks. Our goal is to open it by National Public Lands Day, to partially reopen it by National Public Lands Day, and to do that very sensitively and sustainably," said Superintendent Orlando. “And just not raise expectations. There will be limited services, and limited areas for access, and we’ll probably open in the morning and close at night, whereas before we were open 24/7, 365 days a year. We’re just going to have to start managing I think the expectation and the overcrowding, and I think that’s something that’s really is going to deserve our utmost attention."

With resources strained, outdated brochures that won't be used, and no grand exhibits to explain what transpired this year, a visit to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park in the months to come could be very different from what it has been.

"I think we’ll see a lot of self-guided tours for a while," said the superintendent. "Maybe this will be an opportunity for more contemplative types of experiences. That’s what we’re looking at going forward."