[ While the inferno spread shockingly fast, it didn’t come out
of nowhere.]
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LOCALS HAVE BEEN SOUNDING THE ALARM FOR YEARS ABOUT LAHAINA WILDFIRE
RISK  
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Anita Hofschneider
August 17, 2023
Grist
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_ While the inferno spread shockingly fast, it didn’t come out of
nowhere. _

, Courtesy of the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources

 

David woke suddenly in the mid-afternoon. The 56-year-old chef could
hear commotion outside and scrambled up from his nap, finding his
roommates on the roof of their shared home, holding garden hoses and
spraying water on a raging inferno licking closer by the minute. 

“No, brah, we got to go,” he yelled. He couldn’t believe they
hadn’t woken him up, or the dog who had been lounging in his room,
that they were attempting to hose down the fast-growing flames instead
of getting away from them as fast as possible. “We got to go!” He
ran into the street. It was Tuesday, Aug. 8, and in the town of
Lahaina in West Maui, people were screaming and running as the sky
rained embers. 

There was no warning from anyone about the fast-moving fire — no
text, no officials knocking on his door, no sirens. 

“It was just, boom!” he said later. “You saw a fire and you’re
going to die. That’s how fast it happened. Run for your life.”

That’s what he did. 

He jumped in a car with a panicked driver who drove the wrong
direction, straight into the flames, where she got stuck in
back-to-back traffic along the highway. David clutched the door handle
to get out but it was so hot that it burned his fingers. The flames
were 60 feet high and five feet away on either side of them. The cars
in front of them were on fire. He yelled that they should run but he
was the only one in the car who jumped out. Everyone else was frozen.
He threw open the door and ran until the flames were far behind.

[fires burn near an interesection]
Fires burn near the intersection of Hokiokio Place and Lahaina Bypass
in Maui, HAWAI'I, on Tuesday, August 8, 2023. The blaze would go on to
decimate the town of Lahaina, killing over 100 people.

 Photo: Zeke Kalua / County of Maui

In the days since, he hasn’t been able to stay still. Every day he
cries and keeps moving, sleeping along the road, by the park, at a
friend’s and in a shelter. He can’t stop thinking about what he
saw and questioning if he could’ve done more.

No one he was with that day survived — not his roommates, none of
the other passengers in the car, not even the dog with whom he had
been sleeping before waking up to a literal nightmare.

Just over a week later, the depth and breadth of the fire is still
only just growing clear. Dozens of cadaver-sniffing dogs have been
flown in from the continent to scour the fire zone. Less than half of
the burned area has been searched, and with more than 100 dead, the
fire is already the deadliest in modern U.S. history, yet 1,000 people
are still missing. Family members are submitting their saliva
[[link removed]] to
identify loved-ones’ remains, many of which are so badly burnt that
they crumble when touched. It may not even be possible to identify or
recover all bodies
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some drowned at sea trying to escape while others succumbed to the
flames.

[a person in protective medical gear and a dog walk on a burned
street]
A member of the search and rescue team walks with her cadaver dog near
Front Street on Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii, following
heavy damage caused by wildfires.

 Photo: Rick Bowmer / AP Photo

But while the inferno happened shockingly fast for the people of
Lahaina, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been building for
years, like the dry grasses that caught alight and fueled the blaze.
The enormity of the catastrophe speaks to both the challenges of
preparing for the unimaginable and the incredibly high stakes of
inaction.

Susanne Moser, a New England-based climate change resilience expert,
says communities and governments are going to have to confront that
reality as climate change makes disasters like Maui’s more likely
to occur
[[link removed]].
It may be expensive, but if people don’t pay for it upfront, they
may pay later in lives. 

“I think what’s happening now is that climate change is
essentially coming back at us with its bill much more ferociously and
rapidly and in a much more integrated, systematic sort of way than we
have tried to understand it,” Moser said.

Lahaina, in Hawaiian, translates to “cruel sun.” The area was once
home to 14 acres of wetland, including a large fishpond
[[link removed]] and a one-acre sandbar
where high chiefs, and, later, Hawaiian royalty lived.

Katie Kamelamela, an assistant professor at Arizona State University
who specializes in forest restoration and Indigenous practices, says
the tragedy in Lahaina can trace its origins to the privatization of
land in 1848, known as the Great Mahele
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that eventually led to huge swaths of land sold to large agricultural
companies.

Sugar became the dominant industry in Lahaina in the latter part of
the 19th century, and to irrigate their fields, plantation owners
diverted streams that once flowed from the mountains to the sea.
Lahaina’s royal fishpond devolved into a stagnant marsh, and
plantation owners filled it in with coral rubble. 

When Lahaina burned last week, the former fishpond had long been
buried under a baseball field and parking lot.

[an engraving of an island with small town and palm trees]
An engraving depicts Lahaina, Maui, in the 1880s.

The dominance of the sugar industry was cemented with the
1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom
[[link removed]].
American and European businessmen backed the removal of Queen
Liliʻuokalani and succeeded with the support of United States Marines
and Navy sailors. The last of Mauiʻs sugar plantations closed in
2016
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as tourism and real estate superseded agriculture as the state’s
most lucrative land uses. 

Water is still a finite resource. Firefighters battling the Lahaina
flames found themselves pulling from dry hydrants
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they were eventually overwhelmed. A state official has come under
scrutiny for delaying the release of water in West Maui,
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it’s not clear whether his decision actually affected the
hydrants. 

What is clear is that instead of a wetland cultivated by Indigenous
caretakers or a sugar plantation irrigated for crops, the Lahaina that
the fire met last week was dry and primed to burn. A third of Maui was
in drought and a hurricane passing south of the islands whipped up 80
mph winds. Non-native grasslands had proliferated after the closing of
the sugar and pineapple fields, but many thinly walled wooden
plantation homes still stood.

Local wildfire experts like Clay Trauernicht for years had been
sounding the alarm on the risks. When brush fires scorched 10,000
acres in Maui in 2019
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Trauernicht wrote articles, testified in public hearings, and held
meetings letting people know that fires were getting worse and
Hawaiʻi needed to be prepared.

It was difficult to get people to care about fires when the main
casualties were native forests and structures, Trauernicht told Grist
this week.

It didn’t help that the neighborhoods most likely to burn statewide
were communities like Oahu’s Waianae, drier west side communities
with lower property values and more Native Hawaiian residents, rather
than the lush, green wealthier enclaves on the windward coasts. 

What’s frustrating to Trauernicht is how easy it would have been to
prevent non-native grasslands from running rampant. “Almost anything
other than what we are doing — which is nothing — will reduce fire
risk,” he said.

[a burned out shell of a home]
The remnants of a home in Lahaina one week after the fire.

Photo: Gabriela Aoun Angueira / Grist

But much easier than pinpointing problematic land use decisions is
condemning whoever lit the spark. And so far, many are blaming the
Hawaiian Electric Company
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No official cause has yet been determined, but at least four lawsuits
have already been filed against the utility, sending its stock
value plunging by $1 billion
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casting doubt on the future of the company established in 1891 – two
years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Attorneys point out that the utility recognized in a public filing
last year that its risk of sparking a wildfire was “significant”
and argue that the company was too slow to implement reforms. “The
need to adapt to climate change is undeniable and urgent,”
the company acknowledged in a public filing.
[[link removed]]

[A downed power line hangs over grass on Maui.]
Power lines hangs over dry grasses and a sign that says “dry area
prevent fires” on Maui in the aftermath of the fire that has killed
over 100 people. Experts and community members had long raises the
alarm about the dangers of dry, invasive grasses.

Gabriela Aoun Angueira / Grist

Planning document after planning document suggests Hawaiʻi officials
both knew this tragedy could happen, and yet couldn’t imagine it
actually happening. A 2020 hazard mitigation plan identified Lahaina
as a high risk area for wildfires
[[link removed]].
Maui’s draft climate change action plan notes that wildfire burn
areas quadrupled in the last century
[[link removed]].
But in a state report on emergency planning, officials said wildfires
were considered a “low risk” to human life. 
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The more pressing concerns were hurricanes or tsunamis, so much so
that although the state had invested in a state-of-the-art siren
system — “the largest single integrated public safety outdoor
siren warning system in the world”
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turn it on even after learning that firefighters were being
overwhelmed by the blaze.

[a siren on a beach near a woman in the water]
A statewide outdoor warning siren system stands over Kamaole Beach
Park I on August 13, 2023 in Kihei, Hawai’i The system did not alert
thousands of Lahaina residents about a wind-driven wildfire that
killed over 100 people in August 2023.

On Wednesday, Herman Andaya, then Maui’s top emergency management
official, defended that call, saying the system would not have saved
lives because people would not have heard the sirens if they were
indoors, and that the sirens may have prompted people to flee inland,
toward the fire, as the blaring sound is intended to push people to
find higher ground. Andaya resigned Thursday.

Instead, county officials sent out emergency phone and social media
alerts – alerts that many, like David, never received.

The next day, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke told news media
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officials hadn’t anticipated that a hurricane that never made
landfall on the islands could have wrought such destruction. But five
years before Lahaina’s historic Front Street was incinerated
— almost to the date — the periphery of another hurricane
was stirring up strong winds
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Maui, fueling another conflagration that was stopped just yards away
from homes.
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“There was a very, very strong possibility that the entire Lahaina
town could have gone up in flames yesterday,” then-Mayor Alan
Arakawa told a local news crew
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rain poured down behind him on Aug. 26, 2018. The mayor said he’d
been on the phone with federal emergency officials trying to figure
out how to evacuate 20,000 people in the Lahaina area if needed. 

There was no guarantee such an evacuation was even possible. “If the
hurricane had generated the kinds of winds and surf that we had been
anticipating — 15 to 20 plus feet — it would’ve buried
Honoapiʻilani Highway and we would not have had access in and out of
Lahaina,” he said. 

Burned-out cars now line that same highway where people abandoned them
in desperation or were caught by the roaring flames.

[a burned car on the street]
Burned cars and homes are scattered even in neighborhoods outside of
the impact zone in Lahaina.

Photo: Gabriela Aoun Angueira / Grist

One cruel irony is Hawaiʻi has been a national leader in climate
change preparedness. While states like Montana have banned agencies
from considering climate change
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their decisions, Hawaiʻi was the first state to set a 100% renewable
energy goal
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the first to declare a climate emergency,
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climate commissions and offices and pledging to go net-carbon neutral
by 2045.
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But what local officials may have overlooked was the incredible risk
of what scientists call compound hazards, the intersection of multiple
disasters — such as how hurricane-fueled winds can combine with a
brush fire to erase an entire town. 

Even Trauernicht, the state’s Cassandra, describes what happened
last week as “unimaginable.” Moser from New England says she hears
that word over and over again when she works with emergency
preparedness officials in the wake of a disaster. 

“The strong takeaway for me is that if you want to get prepared, you
have to open the taboo, the unimaginable, to think about it,” said
Moser. “Everybody should be thinking about multiple system failures
at the same time and multiple hazards coinciding because that’s the
kind of world that we live in.”

On both its north and south sides, there is only one road leading out
of Lahaina, underscoring the importance of an emergency warning
system.

Photo: Gabriela Aoun Angueira / Grist

What has been heartening to her is seeing how on Maui, Native
Hawaiians and other locals have come together to help one another
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wreckage. She’s much more concerned about places where there’s not
as much social cohesion, where people may go hungry longer without
concerned neighbors knocking on their doors. 

But nothing can erase from David’s memory the scenes he keeps
replaying over and over. After he ran from the car, he joined a
caravan of survivors that walked south for miles until they hit the
next town of Olowalu. A friend of his eventually picked him up, and
they went to Costco where they drank alcohol, covered in soot, trying
to comprehend what had just happened. 

He also replays the scenes of the Lahaina he knew. The waves and the
harbor and the boats and the ocean. The chickens and birds he passed
when riding his bike down Front Street to make loco moco and pancakes
for patrons at the cafe where he worked.

“It was just the most beautiful place you’ve ever been,” he
said. “All of a sudden it looks like literally a nuclear bomb went
off.” 

He would give anything to go back. 

_Anita Hofschneider [[link removed]] is
Senior Staff Writer at Grist_

_Grist climate solutions writer Gabriela Aoun Angueira contributed
reporting to this story._

_Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to
telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Our goal is to
use the power of storytelling to illuminate the way toward a better
world, inspire millions of people to walk that path with us, and show
that the time for action is now.  Reader support helps sustain our
work. Donate today to keep our climate news free.  _

* Climate Change
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* wildfires
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* Hawaii
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