Part-time Cd'A residents return from volcanic zone

The neighborhood of Leilani Estates is looking more like a war zone than an island paradise.

"The vibe here is almost like a war-torn bomb area, a war-torn Europe during World War II," said Ziggy Steele, a part-time Coeur d'Alene resident whose winter home is not quite two blocks from a fresh fissure on the slope of the Kilauea shield volcano.

"There's the noxious gas people are worried about. They’ve got evacuation centers. It's really a devastation," he said this week in a phone interview with The Press. "A lot of people who are landscapers and carpenters who live or work in Leilani, they're without jobs now."

Steele and his wife, Harry (Harriet), will be returning to North Idaho next week. They have been bunking with their son in Kona, about two and a half hours away from their Big Island home, since the earthquake and volcanic activity picked up last week.

He said they started feeling constant tremors last Tuesday, May 1, resulting in a sleepless night followed by another sleepless night "because the bed kept moving and all of that," Ziggy said. Then the road at the bottom of their subdivision cracked.

"Then (last) Thursday we got up, and it was rumored that things were settling down. They started picking up," he said. "I was talking to my wife that we should start preparing to leave and this is not good."

Then the first earthquake hit.

"The house started just rolling back and forth," Ziggy said. "Our plants were shaking and it went on for quite a while."

They packed their things to come back to Coeur d'Alene and stay with their son, just in the nick of time.

"When we left, we were all done. We were driving over cracks in the road," Ziggy said. "Twenty minutes later we started hearing reports of lava shooting up in the back of people's yards"

So far, lava flows have destroyed more than two dozen homes and structures in Kilauea neighborhoods. People are being evacuated and the fissures and seismic activity are unpredictable.

"Last Friday, we were here at my son’s house and all of a sudden that's when the 6.9 quake hit," Ziggy said. "It was rocking the whole house, aquariums were shaking. That's when fissures started opening by our house."

Ziggy and Harry have been part-time Hawaii residents for about five years. They experienced slow-moving lava a few years ago, "but it wasn't anything like this," Ziggy said.

"There wasn't any real danger. This is a whole different animal," he said. "There weren't any of the earth opening up and these eruptions and fountains going 200 feet into the air. You never know when a new one is going to explode."

Their home has so far been untouched by lava flows, what Ziggy described on Facebook as "an oasis in the mass of destruction that surrounds us."

As of Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that active eruption of spatter and lava along Kilauea's lower East Rift Zone within Leilani Estates had paused.

"However, earthquake activity and ground deformation continue and additional outbreaks in the general area of Leilani Estates are expected," states the update. "High levels of sulfur dioxide continue to be released from the fissure system."

Although they love the easygoing lifestyle of the Aloha State, Ziggy said he and Harry are very much ready to return to the Lake City, especially given the current situation in an area under evacuation orders and a code orange alert level.

"You don't know how much we're looking forward to coming up there," he said.