Biohazard Cleanup Near West Volcano Volcano, HI

Volcano, also known as Volcano Village, is a census-designated place (CDP) in Hawaii County, Hawaii, located in the District of Puna with a small portion of the CDP in the District of Kau.

The 2020 census recorded a population of 736 in the Volcano CDP, with 387 households according to the Hawaii Data Book 2023, which is based on the 2020 Census Redistricting Data, down from 2,575 people at the 2010 census as recorded, with no cause for the change asserted here.

Volcano is located on the east side of the island of Hawaii, on the border of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and near the northeast rim of Kilauea's summit caldera, and Hawaii Route 11 passes through the southern part of the community, leading northeast 27 miles to Hilo and southwest 37 miles to Naalehu.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 58.6 square miles, all of it land, and its altitude ranges from below 2,800 feet in the southeast to over 6,200 feet at its uninhabited northern end, with an elevation of 3,750 feet at the village center.

Owing to its altitude, Volcano has a subtropical highland climate, with relatively uniform temperatures and abundant rainfall throughout the year, and the park headquarters station recorded an average of 96.24 inches of precipitation a year in the 1991 to 2020 normals, with rainfall concentrated from November through April.

For centuries before settlement, the Volcano area was primarily a place of passage, as Native Hawaiians traveled through the forests and lava fields between Hilo, Puna, and Kau, gathering plants, capturing birds, quarrying stone, making tools, and observing Kilauea's eruptions.

Before 1900, the area now known as Volcano Village consisted of just two privately owned parcels, one belonging to William H. Shipman, who built a mountain residence in 1882 after purchasing the ahupuaa of Keaau.

Volcano's transformation began after the turn of the 20th century, when the territorial government opened land for settlement, with seven large tracts known as the Kilauea Settlement lots awarded in 1902 and the first subdivision, the Olaa Summer Lots, offered in 1907, and by 1910 more than 75 people claimed residency.

The Crater Hotel opened in 1911 as Volcano's first guest facility, followed by a short-lived tent city and the village's first general store, and by 1920 Volcano had homes, a school, farms, a dairy, vacation houses, and a golf course.

Volcano's first public school was built in 1915 on a one-acre site on Haunani Road donated by entrepreneur Peter Lee, and it was named Keakealani School in honor of one of Lee's daughters, with a larger two-room building constructed in 1934; the school operated until 1973, when students were transferred to Mountain View Elementary School, and since 2010 the site has served as the middle school campus of the Volcano School of Arts and Sciences, a public charter school.