Bill seeks historic site status for internment camp
HONOLULU — A bill going before Congress would designate a World War II internment camp on Oahu as a national historic site, allowing it access to more protections and funding.
The Honouliuli Internment Camp opened in 1943 to detain hundreds of Japanese-Americans and thousands of prisoners of war. It was established as a national monument in 2015.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii introduced the measure that aims to give the site the new designation.
Under the new designation, the site would be entitled to additional funding, Hanabusa said. The measure also would open up opportunities for more preservation efforts and archaeological research.
Two of Hanabusa’s grandfathers were detained in internment camps during the war; one was in the Honouliuli camp.
The public is not currently allowed to visit the site, but a public memorial is being planned.
The National Park Service said the site plans to give the history of internment, martial law and the experiences of prisoners in Hawaii.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done at Honouliuli to preserve it and, more important than that, to ensure that people understand what happened so that we never repeat that mistake again,” Hanabusa said.
Erupting Kilauea is not raining gemstones
HONOLULU — The ongoing eruption of Kilauea volcano in lower Puna is not causing crystals to rain from the sky despite reports of residents finding little green gems in the area.
“Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano Is Literally Raining Gemstones Now, And We Want Some,” said a headline on sciencealert.com, with reports on the phenomena also picked up by newspapers and magazines. They all featured photos of small stones said to be olivine, which were tweeted by a woman who identified herself as a meteorologist in Arizona. The woman, Erin Jordan, told the Associated Press in a Twitter message her friends who found the stones live in Kalapana.
While olivine is a common mineral in Hawaiian lava, and it is embedded inside the lava coming from fissures in lower Puna, sizeable rocks of actual olivine “gems” are not showering down.
“There’s not olivine raining from the sky, except in clumps of lava,” said Cheryl Gansecki, a geologist at University of Hawaii at Hilo. “I think this is pretty much a nonstory, unfortunately.”