For weeks on end last year, Darryl Clinton watched the Kilauea Volcano from a front-row seat on the deck of his friend’s house in Kapoho on Hawaii’s Big Island, only leaving after a “lava bomb” from an erupting ground fissure flew onto the porch and nearly sliced his foot off. On Monday he drove back to live at the house where he was injured after the County of Hawaii announced it had opened a makeshift road into the area, nearly a year after the historic eruption of the Kilauea Volcano forced hundreds to evacuate and destroyed more than 700 structures. Clinton and his neighbors now occupy what Hawaiians call a “kipuka,” an area of land surrounded by a now-hardened lava flow.
