Rebuilt Highway 137 nears finish, easing long isolation in lower Puna

Deb and Stan Smith have spent more than half a decade living with a daily routine that never should have been necessary: leaving their vehicle uphill, walking a rocky 700-foot footpath at the edge of the lava field and then hauling groceries, building supplies and other necessities by bicycle and on foot to reach their Kapoho Farm Lots home.

For the Smiths, both in their seventies, the trip back to the property has run over black lava cinders, past surviving road fragments and along a washed-out stretch of Lighthouse Road. Their car often sat more than a mile uphill from the road intersection, turning an ordinary drive home into a punishing trek that captured the wider reality in lower Puna, where homes and land survived the 2018 Kīlauea lava flows but communities were split in two.

That long isolation was nearing an end as a rebuilt 3.6-mile section of Highway 137 moved toward completion later this year. Once finished, the road should reconnect the Four Corners intersection with Isaac Hale Park, Pohoiki Beach and the communities of Opihikao and Seaview Estates farther south, restoring a critical transportation link that has been missing since the eruption.

County officials said waterline installation along the rebuilt segment was nearly complete, aggregate subbase and base course were already being laid, and paving was scheduled to begin in April. The work marked the most visible sign yet that the lower Puna recovery is shifting from emergency response to practical restoration, with the road carrying not just traffic but access to homes, shoreline parks and the daily routines that were interrupted in 2018.

A second phase is still ahead. Inundated sections of Pohoiki Road are expected to reopen by the middle of next year, which would bring back access for another group of displaced residents whose routes have remained cut off since the lava flows. For families who have lived with detours, rough terrain and uncertainty, the road work represents more than pavement and drainage. It is one of the clearest measures that the consequences of the eruption are still being unwound, one segment at a time, in a part of the island where every mile of restored road changes how people live, work and return home.