Search “is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park open” today and the top results are already out of date before you finish reading them. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park has been through three distinct disruptions in the last nine days: a hurricane, a second storm, and now a forecasted volcanic eruption. Each one lives in a different corner of the internet. The hurricane coverage is a week old. The storm closure barely made it past local news. The eruption forecast is sitting in a USGS technical bulletin that most travel sites never check. Nobody’s put the three together, so here it is.

Here’s what’s actually true, in order, as of today.

Quick Verdict: Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, Aug. 24, 2026

Question	Answer
Can you enter the park right now?	No. Closed since 5 p.m. Aug. 21 ahead of a second storm.
Was any part of it open before that?	Yes. Crater Rim Drive West, Crater Rim Trail West, and Steam Vents, Aug. 17–21.
Does the park have power, phone, or internet?	No. Out since Hurricane Lala hit Aug. 15, no restoration date given.
Is Kīlauea erupting right now?	No. Paused, but USGS forecasts the next episode (54) for Aug. 24–28.
Is there a federal disaster declaration yet?	Requested Aug. 22 by Gov. Josh Green, not yet approved

In one sentence: The park is closed for storm safety, still has no power a week and a half after Hurricane Lala, and USGS is forecasting Kīlauea’s next lava fountaining episode for this exact window — three separate problems, stacking on top of each other, that no single source has walked through together.

What Hurricane Lala Actually Did

Lala passed south of the Big Island as a Category 1 hurricane on August 15, weakening to a tropical storm by the next morning. It never made a direct landfall. It didn’t need to. Rain bands sat over the island for three days, and totals topped out at 43.55 inches at Laupāhoehoe on the Hāmākua coast, with other parts of the island seeing well over 20 inches.

The worst structural damage landed in the Kaʻū District, the region that forms the park’s southern flank, where the Kahuku Unit sits. Six bridges were destroyed or severely damaged there, including the Pāhala Bridge, cutting off road access to Kaʻū Hospital for days. More than 100 homes were damaged or destroyed island-wide, and one person died — a 90-year-old woman found in Nāʻālehu after floodwaters swept through her neighborhood.

Power took the hardest hit. Statewide outages peaked above 220,000 customers the day after landfall; Hawaiian Electric was still reporting tens of thousands out on the Big Island alone nearly a week later, and the utility warned that some rural outages could last weeks or even months while crews hike into areas the roads can’t reach yet. That warning matters for the park, because Hawaiʻi Volcanoes runs on the same grid.

Is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park Open Right Now?

1. No, not as of today. The park closed at 5 p.m. Friday, August 21, ahead of a second storm system (later identified as Tropical Storm Moke), and it hasn’t reopened.
2. It was partially open for four days before that. NPS reopened Crater Rim Drive West (from the entrance to Uēkahuna at the Kīlauea summit) along with Crater Rim Trail West and Steam Vents, around 10 a.m. on August 17.
3. Most of the park stayed closed even during that window. Chain of Craters Road, Halemaʻumaʻu Trail, the Kahuku Unit, campgrounds, backcountry, Volcano House, and the Volcano Art Center Gallery were never reopened before the second storm hit.
4. No, the park has no power, phones, or internet, and hasn’t since Hurricane Lala knocked them out on August 15. NPS hasn’t given a restoration date.
5. Emergency services inside the park are limited, and its air quality monitoring system, which normally tracks volcanic gas for visitor safety, is down.

If you’re checking this the week you fly, the park’s alert page is the only source worth trusting over a news article, even a good one written three days ago.

The Timeline Nobody’s Connected

Each stage of this got covered somewhere. Almost nobody’s covered the sequence.

• Aug. 13: NPS preemptively closes most of the park ahead of Hurricane Lala.
• Aug. 15–17: Lala passes the Big Island, dumping over 40 inches of rain in spots, destroying six bridges in Kaʻū, damaging 100+ homes, and killing one person.
• Aug. 17, ~10 a.m.: NPS reopens Crater Rim Drive West, Crater Rim Trail West, and Steam Vents. Still no power, phones, or internet anywhere in the park.
• Aug. 19: The Welcome Center reopens with limited hours, 9 a.m.–4:45 p.m., cash-only concessions.
• Aug. 21, 5 p.m.: The park closes again, this time ahead of a new tropical system, with the Kahuku Unit closing too. Overnight guests at Kīlauea Military Camp and Volcano House with existing reservations are told to shelter in place.
• Aug. 22: Gov. Josh Green signs a formal request for a presidential emergency declaration covering Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Honolulu counties.
• Aug. 23: USGS narrows its forecast for Kīlauea’s next lava fountaining episode (Episode 54) to August 24 through 28. Two days earlier, the same forecast window had been Aug. 22–26. It’s still moving.

That last line is worth sitting with. Kīlauea has been erupting episodically from Halemaʻumaʻu since December 2024, with fountaining episodes lasting under 12 hours, separated by pauses of two-plus weeks. USGS tracks the buildup through summit tiltmeters, and the forecast window tightens as deflation-then-inflation patterns play out — which means the “when” keeps shifting even inside the same week. Right now, that window overlaps exactly with the park’s storm closure. If Episode 54 fires while the park is shut for weather, most visitors checking a week-old hurricane story will have no idea either event is happening.

Why the Full Picture Is So Hard to Find

This isn’t one outlet getting it wrong. It’s three separate stories, each accurate when it was written, none of them updated to account for the others.

The Hurricane Lala coverage (the dramatic version, with washed-out bridges and flooded homes) ran hard on August 16 and 17 and then moved on, because national news moves on. It’s still the top search result for anything Hawaii-and-storm related, and it makes the park sound like it might reopen any day, which was true for exactly four days and isn’t true right now.

The second closure barely registered outside Hawaiʻi. A park operations notice about a storm that hadn’t caused damage yet doesn’t compete with hurricane footage for headlines, so most people never see it.

And the eruption forecast lives in a USGS technical bulletin written for volcanologists, not travelers. It’s accurate and specific, but essentially invisible to anyone not already checking HVO’s notice page directly. It shares no audience with the storm coverage, even though this week is the one week all three problems are true simultaneously.

What This Means If You’re Actually Planning a Visit

A few things worth doing before you commit to a date:

• Check the park’s own conditions page the week you travel, not a news story from any point in the last two weeks. Status here has changed four times in nine days.
• Assume no cell service and no card payments inside the park even once it reopens. Power, phone, and internet were all still down as of the most recent NPS update, and that’s a planning problem as much as an inconvenience: bring cash, download offline maps, tell someone your itinerary before you lose signal.
• Don’t book around Chain of Craters Road, the Kahuku Unit, or Volcano House. Those were the slowest to reopen after the first closure and are closed again now. The day-use loop near Uēkahuna and Steam Vents has been the most resilient part of the park so far. Plan around that, not the parts that take longest to come back.
• If Episode 54 lines up with your trip, treat it as a bonus, not a plan. Lava fountaining from a safe, designated viewing area is a genuinely rare thing to see. It’s also exactly the kind of event that triggers its own access restrictions: Highway 11 near the park can be limited to residents if fountaining happens during active storm response, so the same week that might deliver a spectacular eruption is also the week least likely to have unrestricted access.
• This is the same lesson as Acatenango’s post-eruption status earlier this month: the trekking route reopened fast, but the story that actually mattered (a permanent rule change) got buried under disaster coverage. Here it’s reversed: the disaster coverage is old news, and the two things that matter right now (a second storm closure, an active eruption forecast) are the parts nobody’s linking to the hurricane story.

If you’ve been through a national park reopening after major damage before, this will feel familiar. The Grand Canyon’s North Rim came back in May 2026 without its lodge, gas station, or visitor center — open on paper, sharply limited in practice. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes is following the same pattern: open doesn’t mean normal, and “reopened” is a snapshot, not a guarantee.

Is This Worth Planning Around Right Now?

Probably not this exact week, and probably yes soon after.

The park’s national significance isn’t going anywhere. It’s still one of the National Park Service’s flagship sites, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the only place in the country where you can watch an active shield volcano from a maintained overlook when conditions allow it. None of the current disruptions are permanent. The bridges will get rebuilt, the power will come back, and Episode 54 will end the way the last 53 did — inside half a day, followed by a pause of two-plus weeks before the next one.

Probably wait if: your trip is in the next week, or you need lodging inside the park and aren’t comfortable checking a status page yourself rather than trusting whatever article you found first.

Probably still book if: you’re planning for a few weeks out, you’re flexible about which sections of the park you’ll get to see, and you’re going to check current conditions close to your travel date regardless of what any single article (including this one) tells you today.

Hawaiʻi Island itself is open for business outside the park boundary. Hotels, restaurants, and most attractions on the west side of the island were never affected. If you’re weighing the cost side of a Hawaii trip on top of the access questions, the state’s stacked hotel taxes are worth budgeting for regardless of which week you go.

The Bottom Line

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is closed right now, not because of the hurricane you’ve probably read about, but because of a second storm that got a fraction of the coverage. It has no power, phone, or internet, and hasn’t since August 15. And this exact week, USGS is forecasting Kīlauea’s next eruption, a story that lives in a completely different part of the internet than the storm coverage, timed to overlap it by coincidence, not design. Check the park’s own conditions page before you book anything, expect limited services even once it reopens, and don’t mistake a week-old hurricane article for today’s status. All three problems are real. None of them is the whole story on its own.

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Storm damage figures per NASA Earth Observatory, CNN, Engineering News-Record, and Honolulu Civil Beat. Park status per official NPS closure and reopening notices. Kīlauea forecast per USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Emergency declaration request per the Office of Governor Josh Green. Information current as of Aug. 24, 2026. Confirm status against the park’s own alert page before booking.