Resident Stacy Welch inspects lava next to a destroyed home located 250-feet from her home, which remains standing, in the Leilani Estates neighborhood in the aftermath of eruptions from the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island on May 7, 2018 in Pahoa, Hawaii.

An ever-creeping wall of lava from Kilauea Volcano has engulfed two entire seaside housing tracts at the eastern tip of Hawaii's Big Island, government scientists reported on Wednesday, an area where civil defense officials said nearly 280 homes once stood.

The obliteration of the Kapoho Beach Lots and Vacationland subdivisions by a river of molten rock some 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.6 meters) tall brings to at least 400 the number of homes and other structures consumed by lava during the past month.

That latest toll of property losses from Kilauea's ongoing upheaval, which entered its 35th day on Wednesday, far surpasses the 215 structures destroyed by lava during all 35 years of the volcano's last eruption cycle, which began in 1983.

"Vacationland is gone, there's no evidence of any properties there at all," Wendy Stovall, a vulcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), told reporters on a conference call. At the adjacent Kapoho Beach Lots to the north. "Just a few homes" are left standing, she added.

County property tax records show a total of 279 homes existed in the two subdivisions combined, according to David Mace, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman currently assigned to the Hawaii County Civil Defense authority.