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There are approximately 1,500 homes in the area, the spokesman said. The Red Cross reported 66 people in two shelters overnight, he added.

“I never thought I’d ever be faced with this, I’m just shellshocked,” said Carl Yoshimoto, 69. He was sheltering at Pahoa Community Center with his two dogs, Sako and Suki, and his partner since Thursday afternoon. Their house is in Leilani Estates.

“As soon as I heard the order to evacuate, I grabbed important paperwork, medications, my wallet — we were out of the house within a half an hour.”

Maddy Welch, 19, who works at Kalapana Bike rentals and lives in Leilani Estates with her mother, had set up a tent and a space at Pahoa Community Center with her two dogs, a goose and her friend, Taylor. “I woke up around 1:30 in the morning to earthquakes,” she said. “My mom didn’t want to leave. I told her there are two vehicles leaving this driveway — I hope you’ll be in one of them because we can’t come back.”

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” she went on. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

On Thursday evening lava spilled from the crack in the volcano for about an hour and a half, leaving a large smear in a residential area of bushes and trees. Photos and drone footage showed a line of glowing orange slicing through green yards and white vapor and fumes rising above the trees. Gov. David Ige issued an emergency proclamation that made state funding faster to access, and he called up the National Guard to help emergency workers with evacuation efforts.

Kilauea is the youngest of five volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaii, and lies on the island’s south. Dr. Mandeville said the signal that there might be more activity was the little earthquakes, which happen when magma moves against rock, in this case, two miles under the earth’s surface. “That’s where the plumbing system is,” he said.

It remained to be seen how much damage the structures in the evacuation areas have sustained from the eruptions and the earthquakes.

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Dan Jacobs, 47, who has spent the last six months building his house in Leilani Estates, was standing behind Pahoa Village Museum, a downtown hangout. “I invested all my money here, and I probably won’t have anything to show for it in about a month’s time,” he said. “You should see the floors I built, they’re so beautiful, it’s about halfway done.”

Past volcanic eruptions, some that occurred decades ago, have caused lasting damage to parts of the region.

An eruption from the Pu’u ’O’o cone of Kilauea in 1983 has continued to flow, destroying houses in the Royal Gardens subdivision. In 1990 more than 100 homes in the Kalapana community were destroyed by lava flow.

An eruption from Kilauea in 2014 flowed down the surface of the volcano and burned a house in Pahoa. Now residents worry that more structures could be threatened in the area, which is one of the fastest-growing in the state.

“Living on a volcano, everybody has got pretty thick skin. They know the risk,” said Ryan Finlay, who lives in Pahoa and runs an online trade school. “Lava for the most part has flown to the ocean the last 30 years. Everybody gets in a comfort zone. The last couple weeks, everything changed.”

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VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — NASA’s latest Mars explorer is on its way to the Red Planet.

The agency’s InSight Mars lander lifted off today (May 5) atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, rising off a pad here at 7:05 a.m. EDT (1105 GMT, 4:05 a.m. local California time) and disappearing into the thick predawn fog moments later.

“This is a big day. We’re going back to Mars,” NASA’s new administrator Jim Bridenstine, who took charge of the agency last month, said in a congratulatory call to the InSight team after launch. “This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.” [Launch Photos: See NASA’s InSight Soar Toward Mars]

InSight is the first interplanetary mission ever to launch from the West Coast and NASA’s first Mars surface craft to lift off since the Curiosity rover started its deep-space journey in November 2011. 

If everything goes according to plan, InSight will reach its destination in a little less than seven months, touching down Nov. 26 on a nice, flat plain just north of the Martian equator. After a series of checkouts, the stationary lander will then begin a mission unlike any ever undertaken in the annals of planetary exploration.

InSight “will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust — and our ability then to compare that with the Earth,” NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green said during a prelaunch news conference on Thursday (May 3). “This is of fundamental importance for us to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today.”

Two briefcase-size satellites also hitched a ride on this morning’s launch and will make their own way to Mars, in an attempt to become the first-ever interplanetary “cubesats.” The probe is also carrying a chip with 2.4 million names from space fans, including “Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk William Shatner, who signed up to send their names to Mars.

Taking Mars’ vital signs

NASA officials have compared InSight — whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — to a doctor performing a long-overdue checkup. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: 10 Wild Facts]

For example, the solar-powered lander will take Mars’ temperature using a heat probe that will hammer itself about 16 feet (4.9 meters) beneath the red dirt. And InSight will monitor the planet’s pulse, detecting vibrations caused by “marsquakes,” meteorite strikes and other events, all using an ultraprecise seismometer called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS).

“Ultraprecise” is no exaggeration: SEIS will be capable of spotting vibrations smaller than a hydrogen atom, mission team members have said. The instrument must therefore be encased in a vacuum chamber, so its observations aren’t swamped by environmental noise.

InSight will place SEIS directly on the ground using the lander’s robotic arm, and then place a shield over SEIS to block wind and dampen temperature variations. That’s another first that this mission will achieve: Other Mars robots have generally kept their scientific gear close, and none have deployed an instrument using their arms in this way. 

“It’s a first-time event, so we’re always concerned about that,” Chuck Scott, InSight flight system manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, told Space.com. 

But the InSight team has done “an extreme amount of testing” here on Earth to prepare for the milestone deployment, Scott added, so the team isn’t unduly worried.

SEIS and the heat probe — which is known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) — are InSight’s main scientific instruments. But the mission will perform another experiment using the lander’s communications gear.

During this investigation, known as the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), scientists will track InSight’s location precisely — to within 1 foot (0.3 m). This work will allow team members to detect tiny wobbles in Mars’ axis of rotation, which should reveal key insights about the planet’s core, including its size.

Analysis of the HP3 and SEIS data will also shed light on Mars’ interior, including the thickness of the planet’s crust and the structure and dynamics of Mars’ mantle. Taken together, this information will help researchers better understand how rocky planets form and evolve, mission team members have said. 

We can’t look to our own planet for such information, because Earth’s roiling insides have erased the evidence of what happened long ago. The long-dead moon does preserve such evidence, but our natural satellite is so much smaller than Earth that the processes that occurred inside each world in the ancient past are very different, said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of JPL. [InSight in Pictures: NASA’s Mission to Probe Mars’s Core]

“So, Mars is kind of a unique opportunity. We call it the Goldilocks planet — it’s not too big, it’s not too small, it’s just right,” Banerdt said during Thursday’s news conference.

“It’s actually undergone the processes of planetary differentiation that the Earth did,” he added. “But about maybe 20 [million] to 50 million years after it was formed, it just kind of stopped. We have lots of geology going on on the surface, but all those fingerprints of those early processes are still retained in the deep interior. And so, that’s why we want to go measure the fundamental parameters of the deep interior.”

The mission’s data could also be a boon to future human exploration on Mars, Green said. “How quake-prone is Mars? That’s fundamental information that we need to know as humans then explore Mars,” he said. [How Will a Human Mars Base Work? NASA’s Vision in Images]

The HP3 data may also reveal temperature differentials that humans could harness to heat habitats, Green added. 

“This mission does so many fundamental things, not only in planetary science but in human exploration,” he said.

A two-year delay

InSight was originally supposed to launch in March 2016. In advance of that date, NASA and the mission team decided to launch from here, on the central California coast, rather than the usual site for interplanetary missions, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Launching from the East Coast offers a distinct advantage for such missions: Rockets get an extra push from Earth’s rotation, which is going in the “right” direction. But Cape Canaveral was forecast to be pretty busy in early 2016, and the InSight team wanted to avoid congestion. So, they picked Vandenberg. And InSight is light enough, and the Atlas V powerful enough, to overcome the Earth-rotation issue, mission team members said. 

The launch-site decision held even after InSight failed to hit the original window. In late 2015, the mission team detected a tiny leak in SEIS’ vacuum chamber — so tiny that it would take 50 years to lower the pressure by 1 lb. per square inch in a car tire, Banerdt said.

But SEIS’ need for precision is so great that the team had to fix the leak. And they couldn’t do so properly before the 2016 launch window ended, so InSight’s liftoff was pushed back more than two years. (Mars and Earth align favorably for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)

The fix and the delay added $154 million to the mission’s price tag, NASA officials said in 2016. U.S. investment in the mission is now $814 million, with about $163 million of that total going to launch services, according to NASA officials.

France and Germany have contributed an additional $180 million, mostly to develop SEIS and HP3. The French space agency, CNES, provided SEIS for the mission, and the German space agency, DLR, built HP3.

NASA and JPL ponied up another $18.5 million for those two cubesats. The duo are officially known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B (“MarCO” being short for “Mars Cube One”), but their developers have dubbed them Wall-E and Eva. That’s because the cubesats’ propulsion system uses compressed R236FA gas, which is the propellant in many fire extinguishers — and in the 2008 movie “Wall-E,” the eponymous, trash-compacting robot famously used a fire extinguisher to zoom around space. (Eva was Wall-E’s friend in the film.)

Wall-E and Eva (the cubesats) are tasked with a demonstration mission: to show that cubesats, which to date have stuck close to Earth, can journey to other planets. The plan calls for the two tiny satellites to fly by Mars as InSight arrives for its crucial entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence. Wall-E and Eva will attempt to beam EDL data from the lander back to controllers here on Earth, but it won’t be a disaster for InSight if the cubesats fail to pull it off. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will perform the relay work regardless. [Latest Photos from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]

MarCO team members will assess the health of Wall-E and Eva within a few weeks of the Mars flyby, and that will be the end of the cubesats’ mission.

InSight, of course, will just be getting started at that point; the lander’s prime science mission is designed to last until Nov. 24, 2020.

Mars is still hard

The main body of the 790-lb. (358 kilograms) InSight is based heavily off NASA’s Phoenix lander, which landed near the Martian north pole in May 2008 (and found water ice just beneath the surface shortly thereafter). InSight will also employ Phoenix’s landing technique, relying on parachutes and engine firings to slow itself enough for a soft and safe touchdown on the Red Planet (as opposed to the much heavier Curiosity, which also used parachutes but was lowered to the surface on cables by a rocket-powered “sky crane”). 

And InSight’s avionics and other electronics borrow from the agency’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since September 2014. 

Leveraging such heritage hardware is a way to save money and reduce risk. And Mars missions are still risky, despite the lengthy run of success that NASA has enjoyed at the Red Planet recently. That active six-mission streak of safe arrivals runs from the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which reached the Red Planet in October 2001, through MAVEN’s orbital insertion.

“Mars is hard,” said Tim Linn, InSight deputy program manager and EDL manager at aerospace company Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft for NASA.

“It’s one of the neatest things we do, but it’s still really hard,” Linn told Space.com.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

The West Wing shouting match was so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cursed and yelled at White House Counsel Donald McGahn during the February confrontation, according to two people familiar with the episode. Misleading statements about the domestic abuse scandal that felled staff secretary Rob Porter had dragged the administration into a maelstrom of chaos and contradictory public statements.

Exasperated, Sanders told McGahn she would not continue to speak for the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation.

The dispute, which erupted in a hallway outside Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin’s office, was resolved after Sanders received the clarity she sought, the people familiar with the argument said. Hours later, Sanders returned to her lectern to field queries from a skeptical press corps, though her answers left reporters with more questions.

The moment illustrates the precarious role Sanders has chosen to fill as the public face of the Trump administration — and the doubts about her credibility in representing a president who traffics in mistruths and obfuscations. 

Sanders was thrust into an especially harsh limelight over the past week. She was the subject of an acerbic broadside about her “bunch of lies” by comedian Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Then she was forced to explain the inconsistent accounts from her, President Trump and his new personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, about the hush money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. The week was punctuated by an onslaught of commentary about Sanders’s character.

By virtue of her position, Sanders is inextricably bound in the mistruths of the Trump administration. She is a willing warrior for Trump, and her critics say she should be held accountable for his utterances — from the untruthful to the racist to the sexist. Since taking office, Trump has made more than 3,000 false or misleading claims, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

[Trump and his attorney didn’t tell the truth, if Giuliani is right. Will that change anything?]

“When the president blithely admits to lying, it makes all those who are paid to repeat and defend his stories liars, as well,” said David Axelrod, who was a senior White House adviser under President Barack Obama. “Their credibility is tied to his. It’s a high price to pay for a job, even in the White House.”

Sanders, 35, is no political ingenue. She was raised in the wild-and-woolly politics of Arkansas, the only daughter of former governor Mike Huckabee, and grew up to work on his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns.

By the time she took over as White House press secretary from Sean Spicer in July, the administration’s penchant for misleading the public at the president’s direction was well established. At his first press briefing, Spicer vigorously misrepresented the size of Trump’s inaugural crowds, soaring to national fame for the wrong reasons.

Those in Trump’s orbit argue that the attacks on Sanders have been more sustained and personally vicious than those faced by press secretaries in previous administrations. They argue that in a hyper-polarized nation — and amid the frenzied environment nurtured by a president who is at war with what he calls the “Fake News” media — Sanders has become an unwitting Rorschach test for Trump’s critics.

Allies of Sanders say that she often pushes back on Trump, who wants her to attack the media even harder and more frequently, and that other administrations have also faced credibility problems, such as the mistruths on the Monica Lewinsky affair under President Bill Clinton and the false information on weapons of mass destruction under President George W. Bush. 

“It doesn’t matter who holds this job for President Trump, they’re going to be unfairly attacked and ridiculed,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser. “Since Sarah Huckabee Sanders works for President Trump, it seems to be open season on her professionally and personally.”

Sanders declined to be interviewed for this article.

Fresh trouble for Sanders arose Wednesday night, when Giuliani, in a freewheeling interview with Sean Hannity, told the friendly Fox News host that Trump had reimbursed his longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for the $130,000 in hush money he paid to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The payment helped secure her silence shortly before the 2016 election about an alleged sexual affair with Trump a decade earlier, which the president has denied.

Giuliani’s disclosure appeared to be at odds with Sanders’s repeated insistence that Trump was not aware of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The interview, which Sanders did not coordinate, left her in an untenable position, she told colleagues.

So did Giuliani’s proclamation that three American prisoners soon would be released from North Korea, a development the White House had not confirmed.

Reporters pressed Sanders on Thursday: Was she a liar or simply in the dark? And why was the president’s personal attorney authorized to announce news about sensitive hostage negotiations?

“I’ve given the best information I had at the time,” Sanders said, a line she repeated in general six times. “Some information I am aware of, and some I’m not.” 

[The Fix: Sarah Huckabee Sanders basically just blamed Trump for misleading her]

Sanders said she first learned that Trump had reimbursed Cohen by watching Giuliani’s interview with Hannity. At another point in her briefing, she repeated her assertion that she does not intentionally mislead the public, but acknowledged that she is not always provided the most accurate or complete information about her boss. 

Sanders also offered a general criticism of peddling untruths — or, as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway once memorably dubbed them, “alternative facts.”

“I would always advise against giving false information,” Sanders said. “As a person of human decency, I do my best to give the right information.”

Sanders’s defenders say she spends considerable time crafting talking points that convey the president’s wishes but also are technically truthful. If she is guilty of anything, they say, it is providing incomplete information.

In the Daniels episode, for instance, Sanders has largely cited the president’s own statements and referred questions to his outside attorneys.

Before most briefings, she meets with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss how he would like her to answer news-of-the-day questions, White House officials said. The president sometimes dictates lines for her to read or orders her to use precise words on particularly sensitive matters.

Sanders routinely dodges questions on hot topics by telling reporters she has not asked the president about it — a deliberate strategy to avoid having to wade into delicate issues, according to a Sanders confidant.

She deflects nearly every question about the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election unless she has a prepared statement from the president to read — a protective move against creating legal exposure for herself with extemporaneous answers.

“Sarah has done a fantastic job of keeping in line with understanding how to effectively communicate what the president’s thoughts are at any given time, recognizing that it is a very dynamic and fluid situation in many cases,” Spicer said. “What she has done is, she has realized, you can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say.”

Behind the scenes, Sanders has joked with colleagues that she has no idea whom the president will fire, what he will tweet or when he might change his mind. Unlike the more pugilistic Spicer, Sanders has privately displayed a gallows humor.

Sanders sometimes finds herself out of the loop and is not the ubiquitous presence that former communications director Hope Hicks was in the president’s daily life. 

When Trump offered John Bolton the job as national security adviser, the president had already begun configuring his own press strategy before Sanders was alerted, according to White House officials, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. Sanders was soon hustled into the Oval Office shortly before Trump tweeted about the hiring.

After Trump revealed that he was urging states to send troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, Sanders scurried to figure out why he had said that and how it would work, only to learn he had been briefed on a proposal the week before, officials said.

In a West Wing riven by infighting and a revolving door, Sanders is one of the only senior officials who does not generally draw arrows. She has lasted longer than some of her colleagues expected. 

During the Porter saga, colleagues say, they frequently saw Sanders upset as she managed the fallout. She helped craft a statement that defended Porter and that later became an embarrassment to the administration. But, officials said, she was careful not to betray the administration’s missteps publicly, as her deputy Raj Shah had when he said that “we all could have done better” — which attracted criticism from the president.

Although combative with reporters on camera, Sanders is largely regarded as more pleasant and helpful behind the scenes. She works to provide reporters answers to their questions, including hunting down colleagues for help.

Sanders often mentions her three small children during her briefings, reminding the millions of viewers tuning in on television that she is a mother. She sometimes makes hokey jokes to leaven the mood in the briefing room and is known to wish some reporters a happy birthday from the lectern.

“Sarah has always been coolheaded and professional and always gives our arguments for greater transparency and openness a respectful hearing,” said Olivier Knox, the chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, who will assume the presidency of the White House Correspondents’ Association this summer. 

Last Saturday night, Sanders sat next to Knox at the head table for the correspondents’ dinner. She did not stand up to congratulate the journalists who were presented awards — including a team from CNN, which Trump has assailed as “fake.” And as Wolf mocked her, joking that she “burns facts and then uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye,” Sanders sat stoically.

Later that evening, Sanders and her husband, Bryan, were spotted at the invite-only MSNBC after-party, greeting friends and reporters well after midnight.

A federal agent was shot in the face early Friday while working undercover in a joint mission with Chicago police officers on the South Side, Chicago police said.

The agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was wounded around 3:15 a.m. in the 4400 block of South Hermitage Avenue in the Back of the Yards, not far from Davis Square Park, police said. He was taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition, but officials said his injury was not considered life-threatening.

A second officer was taken by ambulance to a hospital for observation, but was not injured.

No one was in custody.

But the future has become clouded as President Trump continues to flirt with a trade war. The White House has offered little clarity about whether its newly imposed steel and aluminum tariffs will extend to allies like Mexico, Canada and the European Union, and it seems no closer to smoothing over economic tensions with China.

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Economists say it is too soon to tell how employers may change their staffing or expansion plans in response to the tariffs on Chinese goods, or to Beijing’s retaliation. But there are signs that companies that buy metals are feeling the effects already. The Institute for Supply Management said this week that manufacturing activity grew in April at its slowest pace since last July.

Uncertainty over the price of raw materials could prompt factories to cut back from their recent hiring spree. Manufacturers added 73,000 jobs in the first quarter, much more than in the same period last year.

Wages and the Fed

Economists expect that low unemployment will lead to increasingly big pay bumps for workers as employers fight over a dwindling number of candidates. But this recovery has so far bucked that conventional wisdom. The change in hourly earnings varied from month to month last year, but hovered around 2.5 percent, barely keeping up with inflation.

A year-over-year increase of 3 percent in hourly earnings is considered the trip wire that could prompt the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark interest rate more aggressively than it has signaled.

“Wage growth picking up would suggest the labor market is tightening and that the Fed could have to move more aggressively,” said Matthew Luzzetti, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank. Projections released at a Fed meeting this week suggested that officials were leaning toward a total of three rate increases this year. But strong wage growth could fan fears of an uptick in inflation, pushing them toward a fourth increase, Mr. Luzzetti said. “It means borrowing costs will be moving higher for typical consumers.”

Who’s Been Left Out

The good times have been better for some than for others. Some Americans are still hesitating to enter the job market, perhaps because they remain bruised from the particularly harsh recession a decade ago.

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“We have realized that there were even more workers on the sidelines than we previously thought,” said Martha Gimbel, an economist at Indeed.com, a job-search site. She pointed to data showing that more people are working part time, or have been unemployed for a long stretch, than in the last expansion. Ms. Gimbel said that her site had seen an increase in people searching for things like “background check” and “full time,” which could indicate that the economy’s strength is coaxing more people into the working world.

But for some groups, the market has been tougher. The unemployment rate for black workers, for example, has consistently hovered well above the rate for white workers, even as employers complain loudly about a labor shortage in sectors like construction and trucking. The job market has improved for black workers in recent years. But they still faced a jobless rate of 6.6 percent in April, compared with 3.6 percent for whites.

If the numbers were reversed, “the country would be up in arms,” said Andre Perry of the Brookings Institution, whose research focuses on race and structural inequality. Differences in education or degrees don’t explain that gaping disparity, according to federal data.

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After authorities had warned for several days of an impending eruption, Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano delivered Thursday: White clouds of steam and volcanic gases rose high in the sky above the southeastern part of the Big Island.

A river of destructive lava flowing underground was released around 4:30 p.m. local time into a residential subdivision, prompting people in the area to pack their belongings and abandon their homes, witnesses told The Washington Post. Shortly after 5 p.m., “spatter began erupting,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

On some streets the bright red-orange lava could be seen spurting out of cracks in the ground. The deafening sound of grinding rocks filled the air and “white, hot vapor and blue fume emanated” from the cracking, USGS reported.

“It sounded like there were rocks in a dryer that were being tumbled around,” said Jeremiah Osuna, who lives near Leilani Estates, one of two subdivisions evacuated. “You could hear the power it of it pushing out of the ground.”

As the lava began to spread, the mandatory evacuation zone widened to all residents, several hundred to a thousand, living in Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens, according to an alert from the Hawaii County Civil Defense Agency. The subdivisions are located in the district of Puna, about 25 miles from Kilauea itself.

Early Friday morning, the Civil Defense Agency warned that “active volcanic fountaining is occurring in Leilani Estates Subdivision” and reiterated the mandatory evacuation order.

Less than an hour after the eruption began, wailing warning sirens joined the cacophony, Maija Stenback, a resident of Leilani Estates, told The Washington Post. A state of emergency was also issued by the County of Hawaii’s acting mayor, and Gov. David Ige activated Hawaii’s National Guard to help with evacuations, Hawaii News Now reported.

As dramatic as the sights and sounds were, the eruption and lava flow pose little threat to peoples’ lives, thanks to a monitoring and alert system in place for years.

“It’s been handled very well,” Stenback said. “Civil Defense has been saying they can’t predict it, but there’s a good possibility, so they made everybody very aware that this could happen. You know, pack a bag and be ready to leave.”

“Please be safe,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said on Twitter.

The eruption came hours after a 5.0-magnitude earthquake jolted the Big Island on Thursday morning. Since Monday, the area has been rattled by at least 600 smaller quakes generated by magma flow from Kilauea, Janet Babb, a geologist with the Hawaiian Volcanoes Observatory, told The Washington Post. Kilauea is the youngest and most active volcano on the island, according to USGS.

“Earthquakes were happening every 10 minutes, it seems like. That was kind of unsettling,” Osuna told The Washington Post, adding that it was “nerve-racking” not knowing exactly where the eruption would occur.

The event has been building for several days, Babb said, and the tremors were a sign that magma could break through the surface at any time.

Thursday’s strong earthquake, which struck at about 10:30 a.m. local time, caused “rockfalls and possibly additional collapse into the Pu’u Oo crater on Kilauea,” and sent a large plume of ash into the air, the USGS reported.

The collapse began Monday as magma, which supported the crater, moved out and down the rift zone, triggering the quakes, Babb said.

“Eruption was possible, and that’s now what has happened,” she said. “Magma has made its way to the surface, and eruption has commenced.”

When Stenback got a call from her son that the volcano had started erupting, it felt “unreal,” she said.

It wasn’t until she and her daughter saw lava coming up through the ground that she believed it.

“Once you see it, then you know it’s really happening,” said Stenback. She added that she even hesitated to pack because she didn’t think the eruption would occur.

But after seeing and filming the lava, Stenback said she and her daughter high-tailed it home to prepare to evacuate.

“We were trying to figure out what’s the most important thing to grab,” she said. 

In addition to collecting legal documents and medication, Stenback said she quickly grabbed sentimental pieces from her jewelry box and stuffed the items into the pockets of her shorts because she didn’t have time to properly pack her suitcase. She said her family will stay with friends in Hilo, about 25 miles away, until it is safe for them to return.

Many residents took to social media to share photos and videos of the eruption.

On Twitter, one person wrote, “OMG my island is on fire” and included a video of lava gushing from the middle of a road.

Others also expressed worry, with a user tweeting, “Friends on the mainland asked me if I am OK. I am, not my island.”

Since 1983, Kilauea has erupted almost continuously, many times forcing nearby communities to evacuate.

Geologists said the current seismic activities around Puna most closely resemble the events that precipitated a 1955 eruption, according to Hawaii News Now. That eruption lasted about three months and left almost 4,000 acres of land covered in lava, the news site reported.

More recently in 2014, lava again threatened the Puna district, specifically the town of Pahoa and its surrounding area, The Post reported. During that event, lava flowed as quickly as 20 yards per hour and up to 60 structures were at risk.

In comparison, Thursday’s eruption seems much more tame, as the USGS reported that lava spatter and gas bursts only erupted for about two hours and the lava spread less than 33 feet from the fissure.

“At this time, the fissure is not erupting lava and no other fissures have erupted,” according to a statement from the service released shortly after 10 p.m. local time.

However, Babb said the inactivity doesn’t mean the event is over and there is no way to forecast how long the eruption could last. Early Friday morning, Civil Defense also said that the fire department had detected “extremely high levels of dangerous Sulfur Dioxide gas in evac area.”

Besides, the USGS noted, “the opening phases of fissure eruptions are dynamic and uncertain. Additional erupting fissures and new lava outbreaks may occur. It is not possible at this time to say when and where new vents may occur.”

Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim tweeted that the civil defense agency “is on high alert on a 24-hour basis for possibility of eruption in lower Puna.” The areas bordering the eastern part of the rift zone, Kim said, are “at high risk for eruption.”

For now, residents are left without any idea of when it might be safe for them to return to home.

“This stuff could go on for a couple days, weeks or months,” Stenback said. “Just the thought of everything now being gone — it’s just not real yet. Maybe the next time we go there the house might be under 30 feet of lava.”

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PORT WENTWORTH, Ga. — An Air National Guard C-130 cargo plane crashed Wednesday onto a busy highway moments after taking off from a Georgia airport, killing nine National Guard members from Puerto Rico, authorities said. The top official of the Puerto Rico Air National Guard, Adjutant Gen. Isabelo Rivero confirmed there were no survivors. The plane narrowly missed people on the ground.

Black smoke rose into the sky after the plane crashed into a median on the road outside Savannah, Georgia, around 11:30 a.m. local time. Firefighters later put out the blaze.

A driver on a nearby road saw the plane plummet to the ground, CBS News correspondent Laura Podesta reports.

“Right when it came over a set of trees there, I saw it do a roll upside down,” Jimmy Livingston said. “When it rolled upside down, it did a complete straight turn into the ground.”

CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reports that this particular C-130 was one of the oldest still flying. The pilot was heading to Tucson, Arizona, to retire the aircraft. After take off earlier Wednesday, it was in the air for about two miles before it crashed.

The one involved in Wednesday’s crash was more than 60 years old.

“The planes that we have in Puerto Rico — it’s not news today that they are the oldest planes on inventory” of all National Guard planes nationwide, Rivera said. Puerto Rico’s National Guard has five other similar planes, two of which need maintenance and aren’t being used, he said.

It’s too early to say what might have caused the accident, he said. The plane last received maintenance at the base in Savannah in April.

All nine crew members had helped with hurricane recovery efforts as part of the 198th Fighter Squadron, nicknamed the Bucaneros, which flies out of Base Muniz in the northern coastal city of Carolina, Rivera said.

“This pains us,” Rivera said of the deaths. They aren’t releasing names until all the families have been contacted, but “most of them already know and have come to the base.”

Rivero said in a Wednesday evening press conference that the C-130 has been used in the past to rescue U.S. citizens stranded in the British Virgin Islands following Hurricane Irma and to ferry supplies to the territory of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last year.

The huge plane’s fuselage appeared to have struck the median, and pieces of its 132-foot wingspan were scattered across lanes in both directions. The only part still intact was the tail section, said Chris Hanks, a spokesman for the Savannah Professional Firefighters Association.

“It miraculously did not hit any cars, any homes,” Effingham County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Gena Bilbo said. “This is a very busy roadway.”

Eight hours after the crash, she added: “To our knowledge there are no survivors.”

Senior Master Sgt. Roger Parsons of the Georgia Air National Guard told reporters the cause of the crash was unknown and authorities were still working to make the crash site safe for investigators.

“Any information about what caused this or any facts about the aircraft will come out in the investigation,” he said.

The plane had just taken off from the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport when it crashed, Parsons said.

The Air Force said the plane belonged to the 156th Air Wing out of Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico National Guard spokesman Maj. Paul Dahlen told The Associated Press that all those aboard were Puerto Ricans who had recently left the U.S. territory for a training mission on the U.S. mainland.

Surveillance video obtained by CBS News from Meadowbrook Leasing LLC shows the plane falling from the sky.

Dahlen said initial information indicated there were five to nine people aboard the plane, which was heading to Arizona. He did not have details on the mission.

“We are saddened by the plane accident that occurred today in Georgia,” Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello said in a tweet. “Our prayers are with the families of the Puerto Rican crew.”

President Trump tweeted that he had been briefed on the crash, sending “thoughts and prayers for the victims, their families and the great men and women of the National Guard.”

I have been briefed on the U.S. C-130 “Hercules” cargo plane from the Puerto Rico National Guard that crashed near Savannah Hilton Head International Airport. Please join me in thoughts and prayers for the victims, their families and the great men and women of the National Guard.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2018

The plane crashed onto state highway Georgia 21, about a mile from the airport, said Gena Bilbo, a spokeswoman for the Effingham County Sherriff’s Office.

“It miraculously did not hit any cars, any homes,” Bilbo said. “This is a very busy roadway.”

The crash caused a big orange and black fireball and scattered debris over a large area, Bilbo said.

Motorist Mark Jones told the Savannah Morning News that he saw the plane hit the ground right in front of him.

“It didn’t look like it nosedived, but it almost looked like it stalled and just went almost flat right there in the middle of the highway,” Jones said, describing how people stopped and got out of their cars following the explosion.

“I’m still shook up and shaking. My stomach is in knots because I know they’re people just like me. I wasn’t that far from it and I could have just kept going and it would have been me and we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Jones said.

A photo tweeted by the Savannah Professional Firefighters Association shows the tail end of a plane and a field of flames and black smoke as an ambulance stood nearby.

Savannah’s Air National Guard base has been heavily involved in hurricane recovery efforts in Puerto Rico. In September 2017, it was designated by the Air National Guard as the hub of operations to the island in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria, the base announced at the time.

By early afternoon, Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport said on social media that flights were arriving and departing with minimal delays. It advised motorists that they may need to seek an alternate route to the airport.

Flights are arriving and departing at this time with minimal delays. If you’re traveling to the airport via Highway 21 and Gulfstream Road from Savannah you will need to seek an alternate route.

— SAV Airport (@fly_SAV) May 2, 2018

A standoff between law enforcement and a barricaded man led to a series of explosions that set a property ablaze Wednesday night in a quiet, residential suburb near New Haven, Conn.

For several days, the barricaded man had been holding his wife hostage in their home in North Haven, about five miles from the Yale University campus, according to a town official, North Haven First Selectman Michael Freda. When authorities learned of a domestic disturbance at the home, police officers and a SWAT team spent hours trying to “coax very gently and compassionately” the man out of the house, Freda said.

Police did not release the names of the couple.

While the SWAT team negotiated with the suspect, police officers searched the surrounding areas of the property, including a barn behind the house. Their entry into the barn set off a loud explosion that shook the neighborhood and could be felt from several blocks away. Other explosions followed, leading authorities to conclude the barn could have been outfitted with booby traps.

As many as eight officers were injured, Jonathan R. Mulhern, deputy chief of the North Haven Police Department, told reporters. The injuries included cuts, abrasions and concussions, but none were life-threatening, Freda said. Several officers were transported to Yale New Haven Hospital, which confirmed on Twitter it received seven patients involved in the explosions.

The explosions caused the barn to erupt into flames. The blaze soon enveloped the house itself and sent smoke billowing into the night sky.

“North Haven shook. I mean everyone heard it,” Nancy Sundwall, who could see the flames from a nearby road, told the New Haven Register. “The whole sky turned pitch black with smoke.”

Freda said he believed the wife managed to escape from the house before the fire, but he could not confirm her condition. It was unclear whether the man was inside the barn or house when the fire spread, but Connecticut State Police Trooper Kelly Grant told reporters the man was not in police custody as of about 2 a.m. Thursday. She urged residents to stay in their homes while authorities attempted to locate the suspect.

Law enforcement sources told the Hartford Courant the man’s wife had been severely beaten, and was being treated at a hospital. She filed for divorce last month, the Courant reported. Authorities could not say if there were children in the house.

A neighbor told WTNH police officers could be heard negotiating with the man over a loudspeaker, saying “John, please come to the window, please show yourself, we are here to help.”

At about 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, hours before the standoff, a woman arrived at the North Haven Police Department complaining about a domestic disturbance at the home on Quinnipiac Ave. The complaint spurred authorities to descend on the home and attempt to negotiate with the man, who was barricading himself and his wife inside the house.

“I don’t really know much about the suspect,” Freda said. “We’ve never really had any issues from what I understand.” He added that “something triggered the event today,” which he called a “chaotic tragedy.”

The massive fire, along with the dozens of firefighters and police officers on the street, disrupted an otherwise quiet neighborhood. Footage from local news stations shows officers lying in stretchers being loaded into ambulances. The fire continued to burn early Thursday, and fire officials told the Associated Press that power was out in the area. A local firehouse had been set up as a “refuge” for residents without power.

“We don’t usually see these situations here in town,” Freda told reporters, saying the most chaotic scenes he’s witnessed in his nearly nine years in office occur during hurricanes and storms.

But, he said, “wherever there are people there seems to be a high level of tension out there in today’s society, maybe a degree of mental illness, and sometimes the manifestation of that turns into what we saw here today.”

“I’m tremendously grateful that there were no fatalities,” Freda also said.

Concerned residents in the surrounding area took to the North Haven Police Department’s Facebook page, asking one another what the loud boom might have been.

“Did anyone just hear a loud explosion?” Kristina Canning wrote. “My whole house just shook.”

One local said “our house shook all the way across town.” Another said she thought her house “was going to fall apart … windows shook … pups scared to death and now 2 more explosions!”

Neighbor John Marotto told the Hartford Courant that after the blast, he saw a group of people get “blown away” from the barn, “and then the roof was gone.”

“I heard them screaming,” Marotto said. “The side facing our house was totally gone. It was unbelievable — the noise, unbelievable. I thought I was in a war zone.”

Another neighbor told WTNH his family had just finished eating dinner when they heard the explosion.

“It knocked my wife to the floor,” the neighbor told the news station. “I huddled my family into the bedroom, locked the door, and came out to see what was going on. You could see the house was fully engulfed.”

From her home a mile away, North Haven resident Joan Mazurek thought she heard a train. It was the blast.

“Then we heard all the, oh my God, all the ambulances and fire engines. The noise from all the emergency vehicles was unbelievable,” she told the AP. “It’s a shock. Nothing ever happens like this in North Haven.”

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