Letter to the editors, 20 June, 2018, Honolulu Star-Advertiser: a close copy.
Today I learned from another former resident of Puna that the geothermal protests I recall from the early '90's were legitimate. They pointed out that causing disequilibrium under ground by drawing off pressure to run a turbine engine to generate electricity was not desirable.
The state agreed to pay an Israeli company to insert a mechanism to draw off the pressure in the underground cavities under for example Leilani Estates. Electricity was generated, and sold to Maui which offered the highest price. Big Island residents never got any electricity from the plant.
The Israeli company had already done the same thing in two other parts of the world with the same result we saw in Puna before entering into a contract with the State of Hawai'i. When enough time had passed, a honey comb of cavities was left where formerly things under the ground were in a state of equilibrium. Nature abhors a vacuum. The ground collapsed to fill the spaces.
Normally, when volcano erupts a cone is formed because a spurt of lava comes up. The Puna case this year was not that at all - instead - bursting up all over the place because the state of disequilibrium caused the ground to collapse.
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Topic: Geology ? - the Puna Volcano, 2018 (Read 860 times)