The Hawaiian islands volcano's are a vastly different sort of volcano, unlikely to do Vesuvius or Mt St. Helen's Stratovolcano style eruptions.
Those volcanos are caused by cracks and faults formed by enormous pressure caused by movement at the edge of a tectonic plate. They look like zits but they're more like what happens if you hit a boil on your face with a hammer.
The Hawaiian volcanoes are more like true zits even though they don't look quite like them, in that they just sit there usually, and ooze runny hot puss periodically down your face. There's another difference. If you zoom Hawaii out in Google Earth, you can see that it is almost at the center of the tectonic plate, and that plate is moving South East while rotating counter clockwise slightly. If you follow the arc of sea mounts and islands it's formed, you'll see that it started in what is now Eastern Siberia.
These volcanoes are still capable of spectacular eruptions, but whether or not they are explosive has more to do with the level of the magma chamber, and whether or not it drops below the water table. Then things get really interesting. A billion tons or so of water, cannot hope to cool a few hundred trillion tons of magma to any significant degree, before turning into high pressure steam.
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