PAHALA

60 years ago, for my first job, I became a sugar engineer with C. Brewer in Naalehu within Kau on the Big Island of Hawaii.  

• Next door 12 miles away was Pahala, where I found my wife, Pearl.  
• 34 miles further was The Volcanoes National Park.
• Hilo was another 22 miles (66 miles from Naalehu), and at my arrival in this southernmost point of the U.S., there was no television nor radio reception in these two sugar cities.  Not sure if there was any area in the continental USA where this was possible.  The reason was Mauna Loa, which blocked signals.  At night you could with the right equipment listen to some radio static.

About the history of this region, not  much happened in Kau until in 1868 when there was a 7.9 Richter quake which produced a tsunami devastating coastal villages, and five days later triggering a Mauna Loa eruption (yellow spot below), forming an 18-mile fissure, and fountains of 1000 feet, where lava entered the sea just northwest of South Point (black flow) .  This is partly why the entire coastline from South Point all the way north to the Puna region never developed, the only exception being an attempt near the Punaluu Black Sand Beach, where in 1971 C. Brewer built a golf course to start a resort.  Course closed in 2018.

Such a coincidence, but also in 1868 the Hutchinson (owner was Alexander Hutchinson) Sugar Company at Naalehu, where I got my first job, began operations.  

• The Volcano House first welcomed guests in 1877.  I have tended to stay there every decade or so for the past half a century.

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  Hawaiian Agricultural Company in Pahala also began producing sugar, but in 1880.  I worked there in the mid-1960's, and that photo of their hospital is where Pearl served as a nurse.
• A census of the labor population in 1884 showed 568 Chinese, 933 Portuguese, 116 other Caucasians and 1543 Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians.  476 Japanese laborers arrived in Kau by 1890.
• Hawaiian Ag's mill in 1890 was one of the two largest in the world, rivaled by one in Jamaica.

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  1906 saw the arrival of first Filipino workers.
• All told, eventually 140,457 came from Japan, 125,810 from the Philippines and 45,064 from China.  Portugal with 14,670 brought what became the ukulele, malasadas and ranching.  Interesting that 2,356 workers arrived from Russia and  110 were Blacks from the U.S.
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  Hawaiian Volcano Observatory was established in 1912 by Thomas Jaggar (right) of MIT as the first continuously monitored volcano.
• Kilauea Military Camp was established in 1915, and including me a couple of times, this facility, built as a rest/recreation site for the military with Navy cooking, has hosted American presidents and other world leaders.
• In 1916 the U.S. Congress established Volcanoes National Park.

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  The Volcano Golf Course opened for play in 1922.
• It was on 3 January 1993 when golfing there, the ground shook, and we saw only a few miles away fountains of lava.
• This became known as the Pu'u'o'o Eruption, which continuously vented for 35 years until 2018.  When the winds came from the Big Island, Honolulu was among the worst in the world for air pollution, many times exceeding the extreme of Delhi and Beijing.

The history of Naalehu and Pahala reflect the evolution of a sugar town in Hawaii, which sprouted throughout the major Hawaiian Islands.  The sociological make-up of Hawaii resulted from these sugar villages.  C. Brewer bought both plantations in 1910.  I left Hutch in 1968 and both companies in 1972 merged into the Kau Sugar Company.

I've written numerous times of our volcanoes, and a lot about Naalehu, for that is where I most lived in my 6 years of Kau life.  So today I'll focus on Pahala, which today has a population of around 1400.  Not much there to see, except sugar has become macadamia nuts and coffee.  Their signature attraction today is the Kau Coffee Mill tour.

Pahala is at an elevation of nearly 1000 feet.  The weather there can be confounding.  On 27 April 1931 the temperature reached 100 F in Pahala, the hottest ever recorded in the State of Hawaii.  You would think elevation brings cool.  The monthly record high of the town is 89 for June, but in the 90's for the other eleven months.  More expectedly, the monthly record low is 59 in August and 48 in December and January.

A very special record was set when sugar strikes occurred.  Because of the cooler weather at elevation, sugar cane, which normally has a two-year growth cycle in Hawaii, was kept in the field for four years, and subsequently broke the world record for most tons cane/acre.  Today, no more sugar in all of Kau and Hawaii.

Particularly troubling is a recent report released by the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory that the number of earthquakes in the Pahala region has increased 70-fold since 2015.  Note in particular that the location is nearby where that cataclysmic 7.9 earthquake occurred in 1868.

This summer Helen Janiszewski of the University of Hawaii is leading a team to hike across this region and deploy seismic nodes to better understand why these quakes are occurring.  Many living in Kau anxiously await the results.  So do others on the Big Island.  One of my books looked closely at part of the Big Island falling into the sea, creating a mega-tsunami headed for Seattle, Anchorage or Los Angeles.   In 2018 I visited those sites,  leading me to re-focus my attention to Los Angeles.  This latest potential warning has now adjusted my thinking to Chile.

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