(BIVN) – Two weeks after the Hawaiʻi County Council failed to advance a measure that would have initiated a Puna Makai Alternate Route study, the local lawmakers were back considering a different bill on Tuesday.

Most residents agree that an alternate route is needed to alleviate the traffic congestion on the highways between Hilo and Puna. The lack of an alternate route also presents danger in times of emergency.

The Puna Makai Alternate Route, or PMAR, has long been discussed, but has never become reality. Bill 107 would have started the process, using $500,000 in County funds and $1 million from the State to do the study. But the Hawaiian Homestead community, which is already overburdened with East Hawaii’s industrial infrastructure, objected to the possible use of Railroad Avenue in the plan. The bill was voted down.

On Tuesday, Puna residents came out in force to support the new measure, Bill 131. The new measure drops the word makai, and refers to the “Puna Alternate Routes Study”. Tiffany Edwards Hunt talked about the day she had to evacuate her home in Kapoho due to the lava from the 2018 Kīlauea eruption on the lower East Rift Zone. Hunt said she has a reoccurring nightmare “of going down every road in Puna and being blocked by 40 foot lava wall.”

file image from drone video showing lava approaching Kapoho in 2018 (USGS)

“If there’s another disaster, how am I going to get out of here?” Hunt asked. “I’m hiking the Puna trail, folks. That’s what I’ll have to do, because there’s no way I will survive driving up Kaloli, or Paradise, or Makuʻu, to Highway 130 and make it. I look at the Paradise, California fire. I look at Lahina. I see the charred cars. I’m just gonna accept that I may perish in traffic.”

Other testifiers mentioned how whenever there’s a fatal crash on the roadway, traffic must stop while police investigate the scene, sometimes leaving motorists stuck for hours.

“Alternative Access Road in lower Puna is supposed to be Chain of Craters Road,” testified Sara Steiner. “That’s what we were told at a Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense meeting in Puna a couple months ago, which was supposed to be about how we would escape from Puna Geothermal Venture when we have no emergency response and no roads. That got turned into a Lahina moment, so we discussed about how to evacuate from fires and different things, and which government agencies would be responsible.”

Steiner noted Chain of Crater Road has perpetually been closed, “so we don’t have an alternative access.”

Puna councilmember Ashley Kierkiewicz explained her reasoning behind introducing the new bill after the previous measure was voted down by the council. “(Bill) 107 felt really unsettling and there was just no way to kind of fix it, so it just needed to die, and provide us a clean slate.”

“I got to say, I worked really, really hard to make sure we didn’t lose $1 million” in State finding, Kierkiewicz said. “We don’t have a million dollars in our contingency accounts. A million from the State to do something, that this community of Puna has asked for for decades. They just want the study.”

“They want options,” Kierkiewicz said, “because if you heard the testimony, it is nightmarish to think about what could happen if we’re hit with another natural disaster and people are trying to get out of Puna, upper and lower, and folks have actual lived experience that they are still traumatized by, and they just want to prevent that kind of situation from happening again.”

“I also think that it behooves to look at Puna as an entire region,” Kierkiewicz continued. “And let’s just get on the record already: Hawaiian Homes is not consenting to using their lands. We’ve already acknowledged that in the resolution.
Let’s do a new bill, that covers all of Puna, and I’ll get the county to throw in an extra $500,000. So, there’s $2 million
to do this study.”

The committee advanced Bill 131 to the full council with a positive recommendation.