Twenty-three people have been injured after a volcanic explosion caused molten rock to barrel through the roof of a tour boat in Hawaii.
A woman in her 20s was taken to Honolulu in a serious condition with a broken thigh bone.
The other 22 were treated for minor burns and scrapes, including 12 who were treated at a hospital in Hilo.
The Coast Guard prohibits vessels from getting closer than 300 metres from where Kilauea volcano’s lava oozes into the sea.
The agency had been allowing experienced boat operators to apply for a special licence to get closer, up to 50 metres, but it stopped allowing those exceptions on Monday.
Shane Turpin, the owner and captain of the vessel that was hit, said he never saw the explosion.
He and his tour group had been in the area for about 20 minutes making passes of the sea entry about 500 metres offshore, Turpin said.
He did not observe “any major explosions,” so he navigated his vessel closer, to about 228 metres from the lava.
“As we were exiting the zone, all of a sudden everything around us exploded,” he said. “It was everywhere.”
The US Geological Survey says explosions of varying sizes occur whenever lava enters much colder seawater.
In Kīlauea Volcano’s #LERZ, fissure 8 feeds lava into a perched channel that’s full but not quite up to the rim. The southern margin of the flow remains about 0.6 miles from Isaac Hale Park. https://t.co/73zvQqhXJT pic.twitter.com/temvQAhzsV
— USGS Volcanoes? (@USGSVolcanoes) July 16, 2018
Kilauea is sending as much as 26 times the amount of lava per second to the sea than it did during the 2016-17 eruption.
The Kilauea volcano has been erupting continuously for the past 35 years.
In May its eruption entered a new phase when it began spurting lava through newly formed fissures in a residential neighbourhood.
It has destroyed more than 700 homes since then.
