Former Greenville News sports editor Bart Wright, wife weathering volcano's wrath in Hawaii home

When I heard there was a volcano running amok in Hawaii a few weeks ago, I immediately thought of the only people I know who live there, my old friend and our former sports editor, Bart Wright, and his wife Debbie.

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I checked on Facebook and found that, although they live only about 12 miles from the crater at Kilauea, which has been spewing hot lava into nearby neighborhoods and destroying homes, they are uphill from the lava flow and upwind from most of the noxious gases it produces.

So I was relieved to hear that they were OK.

Then it occurred to me that many of you who used to read Bart’s sports column might be interested to hear what things are like for him out there, so I gave him a call. 

“Aloha!” Bart said.

“Aloha to you, Bart!” I replied.

Then he started teaching me some new words, such as "vog" and "laze."

Vog, or volcanic fog, is a problem out there. It can make people very sick. And according to Debbie, it smells like rotten eggs.

“We get a little bit of it,” Bart said, “but we have some friends on Maui and they will often get more.”

Maui is about 100 miles from the volcano, but the prevailing winds blow in that direction, to the west. Bart and Debbie live northeast of the volcano.

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Vog is created when sulfur dioxide and other gases and particles spewed out by an erupting volcano react with oxygen and moisture in the presence of sunlight, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has been monitoring the eruption closely since it started May 3.

Laze is even more toxic. It was just beginning to be a problem on the island when I spoke with them Monday.

“Laze, the word for when the volcanic river, the magma, meets with the salt water, is really dangerous gases which can basically kill you,” Bart said.

The word is an amalgam of lava and haze.

Amazingly, I saw some videos of people taking a tour on a boat to watch the island’s gastric nightmare. It was producing a very pretty but sickening pink plume out on the ocean.

That’s the kind of reaction many of the locals are having to the eruption, Bart said, as “lava bombs” the size of refrigerators are crashing around them. (Well, maybe not quite as big as refrigerators.) Lava bombs are chunks of hardened magma projected into the air as if from cannons, and landing with explosive force. There's a great video on Bart's Facebook page of a guy just walking around loving it as the bombs explode all around him.

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Bart tells this story to illustrate the attitude many Hawaiians have toward this disaster: “A woman was being interviewed (on TV) and the lava build-up was right behind her, 50 yards or so, and you could see the lava splattering up and stuff,” Bart said. “And she said, ‘Yeah, we lost our house. It’s gone. But we’re OK. We packed up all our stuff that we really needed and put it in the truck. We all got out safe.’"

Then she said: "It’s just amazing. Look how beautiful it is."

Wow.

The thing about it is, people who live in the areas that are getting incinerated knew they were in a lava hazard zone when they bought their homes. Prices in those areas are “outrageously cheap,” Bart said. He and Debbie wisely decided to pay more to get a house outside the lava zone.

Such is life on an island that, you have to remember, is made entirely of the stuff that volcanoes have been vomiting out for thousands of years. The whole Big Island, where all this is happening, is actually the biggest mountain on earth, with its highest peak reaching more than 32,000 feet above the ocean floor. Mount Everest is only 29,028 feet above sea level.

The way Bart describes life there, it’s an amazing coexistence, Hades in paradise.

“If you just want to live and relax and enjoy – hike, surf, boating, that kind of thing – and you don’t care about making more money and all that, this is a pretty good place for that,” Bart explained.

Sounds like my kind of place.

But then there’s that fire and brimstone. Bart figures there must be enough energy in the nearby volcanoes to provide electricity for the whole Hawaiian Islands, if somebody could figure out a way to harness it.

There’s a lava lake in a crater called Hale Mau Mau near their home in Mountain View, and sometimes when there’s a lot of seismic activity, the lake level will climb way up in the crater.

“Sometimes we go up there at night when it’s like that, and you can see this literal lake of fire just bubbling and splattering,” Bart said.

Debbie, who was a copy editor at The Greenville News when they lived here, from 2002 until they moved to Hawaii in 2013, has been following the technical aspects of the volcano more closely than Bart has, according to Bart. (Copy editors are usually the smartest people in the room.)

She explained that this is a shield volcano, which means the magma rolls down the slopes rather than blasting thousands of feet up into the sky, Mount St. Helen-style.

She signed up for alerts from the U.S. Geological Survey so she can keep up with what’s going on. But she didn’t need an alert to notice a 30,000-foot pink plume from Hilo, where she works part-time.

She also didn’t need the USGS to tell her she had lived through two earthquakes there in one day.

“The first was 5.6 (on the Richter scale), and that was like, 'OK, we’re good. That was fun,'” she said. “And then an hour later, there was a 6.9. It was like, 'Nah, it’s not so much fun.'”

I also learned a new word from Debbie: lava schmutz. That’s what she calls the pinkish dust that settled on their house last week.

Anyway, here’s hoping our old friends stay safe as Madame Pele puts on a continuing display of her glorious power.

Oh, and Bart says say “hi” to all the folks back in South Carolina. So, "hi," from Bart and Debbie.

Contact Ron Barnett at rbarnett@gannett.com.