Lava flows on the Big Island of Hawaii travel over periods of months, leaving residents and communities at the will of this natural force with the only option of evacuation. These events cause the destruction of homes, road closures, and permanent changes to a community’s day-to-day living. Though tactics - such trenches, berms, and even explosives - have been practiced to protect against and divert lava, they’re small, temporary, and only focus on individual buildings. How can the environment be engineered to divert such natural forces? This project is an exploration in how hidden landform structures can be combined into existing topography to divert lava. The event of interest is the June 27, 2014 Kilauea volcano lava flow in the small town of Pahoa. The proposal consists of a series of lava barriers, made of a combination of townsized berms and trenches that channels lava away from towns and disperses it to allow flows to cool faster. This is combined with an aquifer system that extracts water from underground as needed in order to cool and slow down lava. The scale of time that it takes lava to travel and the potentials for a fluctuating ground level dictate the tactics for the proposed design.

The proposed project is part earthform, part master planning. It consists of a series of canals that divide the land into terracing parcels. The canals and land parcels adjust the topography to slope southward towards the ocean, rather than northeast where the local towns are located. The location of the development is based on USGS’s predicted lava flow paths. The pattern stretches across a number of these prediction paths, interrupting the topography. The grid of canals and land parcels is inspired by the Native Hawaiian kapa, a fabric made from pounding plant fibers with wooden tools that are etched with geometric patterns.