What Alerts and Response To Expect if Maunaloa Looks to Erupt?

USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense comments from the Pāhala Status Update and Community Discussion public meeting held on October 27, 2022. Scientist-in-charge Ken Hon discusses the current Advisory/Yellow level as the second of four stages should Maunaloa look to erupt, and the limits of the volcano advisory system: "The first forecast that will go Orange will be we're expecting an imminent summit eruption. It may or may not come, but we'll be seeing a lot of signals and things will really crank up compared to where we are now. If we go to Orange, we are saying a summit eruption is imminent." "The next thing that will happen is a summit eruption starts, so we'll issue a warning there. As soon as we see which way the lava, if it's going down a rift zone, we'll issue another warning that it's going down the Southwest Rift Zone or the Northeast Rift Zone. And then finally, when there's an eruption and the vents kind of settle down on the rift zones and lava starts coming down the hillside, we'll issue another warning of where lava is likely to intersect people." "We can't do it all at once, it's going to come in a series of things, so the first one is just going to be a forecast saying that a summit eruption is imminent. Maunaloa, the other thing that makes it dangerous, is it does not give us much warning. Kīlauea is generally much kinder to us than Maunaloa is, but generally Maunaloa gives us 1, 2, 3 hours before the eruption starts, and oftentimes it'll move down the rift zones in an equal amount of time, it can move very very rapidly." "When you see things that come out, you can tell if it's real or not by, we're not going to forecast anything more initially than a summit eruption." #Maunaloa #Maunaloa2022 — Note: We use the preferred spelling of the volcano by the local community as “Maunaloa”, though it has not yet been formally adopted by either the State or Federal Board of Geographic Names who still officially refer to it as “Mauna Loa”. This follows in the same spirit as the spelling of “Maunakea” gaining broader acceptance. — Join our weekly live video review of Kīlauea and Maunaloa volcanoes, at 5pm Hawaiʻi time Thursdays! To support our productions (for free) please like, share and subscribe! This content is funded by the Hawaiʻi County Waiwai Grant-In-Aid in association with Malama O Puna and by contributions from viewers like you! To donate, visit https://www.hawaiitracker.com/support. Mahalo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5_bETo2aRc