My sister lives on the Big Island of Hawaii and was one of the 1,700 or so people evacuated from Leilani Estates, near Pahoa. She is safe, staying at a friend's cottage ten miles away, and now occupied with trying to persuade her stubborn neighbors to evacuate. (Yes, there are still holdouts.) It's a frightening time for her. There are now six active lava fissures in the earth at her housing development, one of which is either two or four blocks away, based on different readings of street maps. We all still don't know precisely, we see the drone footage and try to calculate how fast the lava is moving, we are watching maps and news of more fissures, and trying to hope the boiling lava flow doesn't reach Moku Street. It could go on and on, there's no way of knowing when it will stop, so many residents are worried and some tempers are fraying. More frightening still, there were the giant quakes yesterday, which tend to foreshadow big volcanic eruptions, with...(Read Full Post)