A year ago Pahoa residents offered cautious thanks that the threat of being overrun by lava appeared to be over.

This holiday season, even as Kilauea Volcano continues to gurgle and spurt, barely anyone talks about lava anymore in Pahoa, said state Sen. Russell Ruderman (D-Puna), who also owns the Island Naturals food store in the heart of Pahoa town.

“There’s been a remarkable return to normal,” Ruderman said. “But what’s normal for Pahoa might not look normal in Honolulu. Everyone thinks of Puna (the vast district that’s bigger than Oahu and encompasses Pahoa) as being the Wild West or hippie-ville or an alternative society. But it’s wonderful that we’re no longer under that stress.”

As it has for 32 years, Kilauea continues to erupt. And no one says that Pahoa will never again be at risk.

At the height of the panic in 2014, a river of 2,100-degree lava crossed Apaa Street in October, overran Cemetery Road, destroyed a Buddhist cemetery, burned a farmer’s shed and set a stack of tires and an open-air cattle shed on fire.

The national media and lookie-loo visitors poured into Pahoa — a rural community of 8,200 people — for what appeared to be imminent disaster.

The east side of Hawaii island had just been battered by Tropical Storm Iselle, the first tropical storm to make landfall on the island since 1958, and then escaped a subsequent brush with Hurricane Ana.

In response to the threat from lava, panicked residents fled, schools and businesses closed and home sales plummeted as some homeowners were told they could no longer get insurance.

“Everybody was just psychologically tired,” said the Rev. Alan Tamashiro, pastor of Puna Baptist Church. “With Iselle there was quite a bit of work; then came the lava threat. Some people moved. You couldn’t get any storage. Some people evacuated. There was a lot of concern about the unknown. People were pretty worn. It was hard.”

At the start of 2015, the original head of the so-called June 27 lava flow remained stalled just 480 feet from Pahoa Village Road, Pahoa’s main street; 400 yards from Pahoa Marketplace, a critical center of commerce; and about 600 yards from the police and fire stations.

The flow was about 13.5 miles long, the longest since Kilauea started erupting again in 1983.

Weeks passed. Businesses slowly reopened, and panic was replaced with a new hope that the worst was over.

“The lava’s still flowing, but it’s not going anywhere or organized enough to be threatening,” Tamashiro said. “It’s pretty much in the rearview mirror.”

Tamashiro has been at Puna Baptist since 1998 and called the lava threat “the biggest thing that has happened to Pahoa in the 17 years that I have been pastor here. We prayed for it to stop. I guess it’s over. I don’t know.”

For months residents and county, state and federal officials prepared for the possibility that lava could cut off access to Pahoa, forcing people to make circuitous routes in and out through emergency roads.

There was daily talk that people trapped behind lava would have to learn to live even further off the grid and become responsible for their own sustenance.

The potential upside, Ruderman said, was that Pahoa could have become a model for sustainability in the islands.

“It was going to be a good thing to show how a corner of an island can be more self-sustaining, which would be a good thing for everybody,” Ruderman said. “We were going to grow our own and make all the preparations to really be sustainable if we were cut off. Most of that has evaporated. It was a missed opportunity. The alarm went off and we went back to sleep. But the threat’s still out there.”

Steve Schaefle, one of two pastors at the Grassroots Church of Puna, said, “It’s a lot more calm now. In a lot of ways it’s back to life as usual. People are thankful that we’re out of the woods, at least for the time being.”

But now there’s a new threat.

The state Health Department considers Pahoa residents to be at “moderate risk” of contracting mosquito-born dengue fever, which is ravaging the west side of Hawaii island.

The state Department of Health reported Friday that the number of confirmed dengue fever cases is now 181 on the Big Island.

Eighteen of the cases involve visitors. The remaining 163 involve Big Isle residents.

The most recent date of illness onset is Dec. 20. The first known date of illness onset is Sept. 11.

“It’s started to spread over here,” Schaefle said. “It’s starting to be taken seriously over here.”

As worries about lava have receded, only to be replaced by fears of dengue fever, Schaefle said the people of Pahoa long ago learned to move from one crisis to the next.

“Natural disasters,” Schaefle said, “are our business over here.”