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If residents of Lahaina want to see something worthwhile rise from the ashes of their town, if they want to emerge from this tragedy with a stronger, safer and more equitable community, they have to band together and create a shared vision for the future. And they have to do it now. 

The fire that tore through the historic Maui town on Aug. 8 was unparalleled in modern Hawaii history. Yet it was not an isolated event in a nation grappling with the consequences of a changing climate and generations of poor land management. The people of Lahaina are the latest link in a chain of wildfire survivors that stretches from California to Canada and beyond.

Civil Beat spent 10 days in November visiting three towns in California that have rebuilt — or are in the process of rebuilding — after wildfires destroyed much of their communities. We found practical tips for how to address water contamination, get people back onto their land faster, clear permitting roadblocks and protect homeowners from unscrupulous contractors.

But the biggest lesson from California was this: Anything good that has come from these fires has been the result of people joining forces and advocating for their neighbors.

And something good needs to come out of the fire.

“For a community and for an individual to truly recover from a disaster, there needs to be some kind of transformation,” Allen Myers, a filmmaker and founding member of , said. “If we experience a disaster and we’re put exactly back to where we were before it, there’s no healing taking place.”

Not every wildfire-impacted community in the West faces the same economic pressures and historic injustices that are contributing to deep divisions on Maui about how to rebuild Lahaina.

Yet what Santa Rosa and Paradise and Greenville show is that there are many ways to begin building consensus in a disaster zone.

Creating a shared vision is essential — not only for people’s mental health and future well-being. The more Lahaina’s fire survivors can come together, the better positioned they will be to demand that government officials and agencies take creative and bold actions that will be needed to forge a path forward.

“There’s a creativity that needs to be put in place here,” points out Annie Barbour, who lost her California home in and now works as an advocate for other fire survivors. “It’s about figuring out how to navigate this way in a way that is beneficial for all.”

Here are some of the creative ways that fire-devastated communities in California have found to move forward.

Organize

Paradise, where , hired an outside consulting firm to help craft a shared community vision for rebuilding. The consultants conducted a series of public meetings and workshops starting just three and a half months after the fire.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people would come to these gatherings,” said Paradise Mayor Greg Bolin, who was a council member at the time. “People just wanted to be together, people wanted to talk.”

The consultants came up with a recovery plan that outlined more than three dozen goals. One big takeaway from the meetings was that residents wanted a walkable downtown, something town leaders have been working on through zoning changes and infrastructure upgrades. Nonprofit groups like Regenerating Paradise also helped facilitate separate workshops, online gatherings and an annual festival with an entire lineup of workshops and events aimed at sharing ideas and reimagining a shared future.

“People felt like they had buy-in. They felt like they had a say. It wasn’t just the government telling them, ‘here’s what you want,'” Bolin said. “That was very important. It was very crucial.”

In Greenville, a small mountain community that , much of the community-building work is done by the . The collaborative brings together representatives from different sectors of the community to address the unmet rebuilding needs. The group holds monthly meetings that are also broadcast over Zoom so residents can participate even if they are still displaced from the town.

Earlier this year, the collaborative helped facilitate a series of community meetings and published a book of design recommendations for rebuilding. The collaborative has also played a vital role in supporting the local Maidu tribe in its efforts to address inequities in the town and the lack of Indigenous history that had been prevalent before the fires. Getting groups from different backgrounds and sectors of the community to work together has been particularly helpful, said Shelby Leung, who sits on the collaborative and is a board member of the Roundhouse Council.

“We just don’t want people to fall through the cracks of this whole traumatic process,” Leung said.

Residents in Coffey Park, a suburban neighborhood in Northern California, were able to significantly speed up the rebuilding process in their community through a “block captain” system. Volunteers divided the community into smaller sections and met regularly with neighbors to find out what challenges they were experiencing. Then every two weeks they met with a city official to relay those issues and get clear answers that could be shared with the entire community. Block captains also volunteered to tackle specific issues like petitioning for zoning or tax changes.

“The real reason we were successful is because we overcommunicated and hammered the city, the county,” said Steve Rahmn, one of the block captains. “We had different people that took on different tasks and we empowered them to do that.”

Expedite Permitting

Before the fires, Paradise processed only a dozen or so new building permits a year. Faced with the possibility of thousands of permit applications in the same time period, the town opted to hire an outside firm to run its building department until it could staff up within the city.

Paradise also copied a strategy that had been successful in Santa Rosa and created a number of preapproved housing plans to expedite the permitting process. If a homeowner chose to rebuild using one of the plans, then permits could be issued in less than a day by just checking that the property had the correct setbacks and hookups.

The helped create a “master floorplans” library for residents to choose from. That effort has led to several hundred homes being constructed more quickly than they might have otherwise been.

“That program saves about $8,000 to $10,000 and six to 12 months of time,” said Jen Goodlin of Rebuild Paradise.

The nonprofit also provides grants to homeowners to help with the preconstruction costs that might not be covered by insurance companies, such as surveys, permitting and water hookup fees.

Get People Back On Their Land Quickly

When Lahaina’s air and soil is certified safe again, providing an easy pathway for homeowners to get back onto their land can go a long way in helping people stay in the community.

People started moving back onto their land in Paradise soon after soil remediation was completed by purchasing RVs or trailers. Initially, the town required that residents have a permit for the trailer, along with garbage service to the property and water — either a restored service line or tank system with potable water. The town quickly amended the rules to also require that homeowners have a septic system in place to prevent sewage issues.

Property owners who wanted to live on their land while overseeing construction were also aided by the water district’s decision to adopt a “checkerboard” approach to repairing the damaged water system. If testing shows that Lahaina can safely take a similar approach, prioritizing properties with building permits can keep water repairs from delaying the rebuilding process.

Provide A Clear Roadmap For Homeowners

One thing that Goodlin of Rebuild Paradise wishes her town had done is create an easier roadmap for people to follow in the rebuilding process. Few homeowners have any idea of what it takes to build a home from scratch and even with a good contractor the process can be overwhelming.

Not having a single website with a visual map for people to follow was “such a miss,” Goodlin said.

The most useful website, Goodlin said, would look almost like a family tree. People could select the path they are choosing such as not moving back or building a custom or a manufactured home. The site would then show each sequential step in that process.

“Now that you made that choice, you are going to need to know what’s septic capacity. Are you in a flood zone? And are you designing your own house? Are you getting master plans?” Goodlin said.

Ideally, each pathway could also be matched with information about existing grants or support programs to help overcome roadblocks along the way, Goodlin said.

“I didn’t know what the next step was,” Goodlin said of her own building experience. “Somebody over here is telling me something and somebody over there is telling me something else. It’s very confusing and it’s frustrating.”

Support Community Mental Health

Wildfires have dramatically reshaped people’s lives in California — whether or not they lost their home. Six years after the Tubbs Fire swept through multiple Santa Rosa neighborhoods, people say they still feel a sense of unease and anxiety during high-risk fire days.

It is likely that many people across Maui will continue to experience a heavy toll on their mental health from the fire. In Santa Rosa, one of the most-impacted school districts created a drop-in resource center staffed with counselors who were available to help anyone from the community.

Creating culturally appropriate and easily accessible resources is particularly critical in Lahaina, where a majority of the population is Filipino — a community that has historically had low rates of accessing mental health services in Hawaii.

One of the best mental health resources, California residents said, was the opportunity to gather with fellow survivors. During “Whine Wednesdays,” homeowners could sit in a vacant lot and swap stories about rebuilding, festivals, town halls, regular potluck dinners — any chance to feel camaraderie can be an opportunity for healing.

California’s experiences show that any opportunity Maui officials and nonprofit groups can use to communicate what’s happening in Lahaina and create spaces for community gathering will prove invaluable.

Even just grilling food for neighbors can provide an important mental health check-in, said .

“Just to check in. That’s so important,” Rahmn said. “Being alone is what’s scary.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.