and businessman. Like Jaggar, Thurston believed that Kilauea was a prime site for a permanent volcano observatory and inquired of Jaggar, "Is it then a question of money?" Within a year of their conversation, Thurston and other businessmen raised financial backing for the Hawaii Volcano Research Association (HVRA). A small observing station was set up on the rim of Halemaumau crater (a pit crater inside Kilauea's summit caldera). In July 1909, Jaggar received funding of $25,000 () from the Whitney Estate through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for use in construction of the HVO; funding also came the HVRA and the people of Hilo. In 1912, construction of the HVO began: in February, prisoners sentenced to a term of hard labor by the Territory of Hawaii dug through Kilauea ash and pumice to a thick layer of pahoehoe lava on which to place concrete piers where seismometers would be mounted. In spring of that year, Jaggar left MIT to become the first director of the HVO. During his early years as director, Jaggar struggled to obtain private endowments with the hope of eventually securing sponsorship by the federal government. At one point, Jaggar raised pigs to fund the HVO. In 1919, Jaggar convinced the National Weather Service to provide funding for the HVO. The USGS took over its operation in 1924, with the exception of a brief hiatus during the Great Depression when HVO was run by the National Park Service. The USGS established a Section of Volcanology in 1926, with Jaggar named as its first chief. In 1922, he suggested using Kilauea's heat for geothermal energy: Volcano power for human use is a possibility, for heat is power, and volcanoes generate heat. ... Cracks near Halemaumau have opened from time to time which sometimes get hotter and hotter until they become glowing furnaces, emitting apparently merely hot air. If a boring will start such a furnace, then twenty holes at such a place will run a respectable engine. On February 3, 1923, when an 8.4-magnitude earthquake hit the southeastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Jaggar tried to warn the Hilo harbormaster about the possibility that a tsunami could have been generated. Jaggar's warning was not taken seriously and one fisherman was killed when the tsunami hit, with damage estimated at $1.5 million. According to authors Boris W. Levin and Mikhail Nosov, this was the first tsunami warning in the