THE Hawaii community hardest hit by the Kilauea Volcano has been ordered sealed off under a strict new mandatory evacuation as the eruption marked its fourth week with no end in sight.

The Big Island’s mayor, Harry Kim, declared a 17-block swathe of the lava- stricken Leilani Estates subdivision off-limits indefinitely and gave any residents remaining there 24 hours to leave or face possible arrest. The mandatory evacuation zone lies within a slightly larger area that was already under a voluntary evacuation and curfew.

The latest order was announced a day after police arrested a 62-year-old Leilani Estates resident who fired a handgun over the head of a younger man from the same community, apparently believing his neighbour was an intruder or looter. The confrontation was recorded on mobile phone video that later went viral.

But the mandatory evacuation was “decided prior to that incident”, said David Mace, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency assigned to the Hawaii County Civil Defense authority.

Civil defence officials have previously said about 2000 residents in and around Leilani Estates were displaced at the outset of the eruption, which began on May 3.

But the total number of evacuees was estimated to have risen to about 2500 after authorities ushered residents from the nearby Kapoho area as a precaution on Wednesday, as a lava flow threatened to cut off a key access road. At least 75 homes have been devoured by streams of red-hot molten rock creeping from about two dozen large volcanic vents that have opened in the ground since Kilauea rumbled back to life four weeks ago.

After a month of continual eruptions at Kilauea’s summit and along its eastern flank, geologists say they have no idea how much longer it will last. The month-old eruption of Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, followed an eruption cycle that had continued almost non-stop for 35 years.