Mauna Loa erupting

[ironyak]

Obviously I meant, "has access to it".  And by that I mean, "legal access".

Sorry, guess I was just being dumb. I couldn't connect the notion of the government paying for access roads but then just saying do whatever you want on those accessible properties, tax-free, so figured you may have been suggesting a more radical solution (like privatizing access roads in high-risk lava zones so those that choose to build there are the ones financing their risky endeavors instead of everyone else in the state/country helping subsidize such choices, for instance).

Probably all a moot point of course as Rob pointed out you can't legally have inaccessible property, or perform a "taking" without compensation by not issuing building permits, so roads & permits have to provided ultimately (although it can take many years - again, talk to the Kapoho or even the Kalapana folks). Short of eminent domain, the federal voluntary buyback program for lava impacted areas is probably the only workable solution to reduce the development in lava zones 1 & 2, which hopefully includes less costly infrastructure (maybe the Red Road should again be red, but I doubt the feds will buy that ;)

I noticed those bands of increased seismic noise coincided with periods of high winds as recorded on MK, and assumed were happening at ML as well.

Gotcha - given that the wind is a confounding actor, I was wondering why it wasn't just measured separately at the site so it could be filtered out. Ran across this short field report from Pu‘u ‘O‘o about various tactics for reducing wind noise, including site selection, baffles, and array redundancy so you can trace the tremor signal from multiple sources and improve the signal to noise levels.

With the small eruption and immediate reinflation it does make one wonder if we might see a return towards the historical trend of ML eruptions every 5-6 years. Have to keep an eye out and see if this thread is resurrected and check back in then - cheers!