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The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a $159 million contract to Hawaii-based Hui Huliau Technology Services to demolish unsafe structures and clear debris and ash from 140 commercial and public buildings destroyed by the Aug. 8 fire in Lahaina.

Crews began work last week on the project, a key step toward restoring the mostly razed town’s economic heart. But less than a third of the commercial properties are registered for the program, a process complicated by generally needing signatures from all of the tenants in each building.

Nonethess, the Corps believes the project will be completed in less that a year, even before all the residential properties are cleared, and work on those started more than two months ago.

Lahaina resident Kirk Boes was surprised during his return to the burn zone earlier this month to find that almost no debris removal work had occurred in the business district that includes much of Front Street.

Boes, an artist who lost his home on Kuhua Street and sold many of his painting in this business district, said on March 5 it looked much as it did right after the fire. He wondered whether he would ever see the town restored.

The commercial contract was signed in late February. It’s the second contract the Army Corps has awarded to the , an umbrella entity of six subsidiaries. They include Pono Aina Management that recently completed a $53.7 million contract from the Corps to build a temporary school in West Maui for 600 students who had gone to the destroyed King Kamehameha III Elementary School.

While it is commonplace for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to handle and subsidize the cleanup of residential properties in disasters, this is the first time the agency has done so for private businesses — with the goal of speeding up economic recovery, said Bob Fenton, who is leading FEMA’s fire recovery efforts on Maui.

“We never have done businesses before because they typically have insurance and remove the debris on their own,” Fenton said in an interview last month. “But when you look at our authority and it talks about economic recovery, it was probably intended for a disaster like an earthquake where a whole city is destroyed and there’s comingled debris. I think this fits that.”

Fenton said FEMA authorized commercial debris removal for Lahaina because much of the town was destroyed, there is no final dump site to take the estimated 400,000 cubic yards of nonrecyclable debris — and with the proximity to the ocean and reefs, the cleanup needs to be done relatively quickly to prevent further environmental damage.

“Plus, we’re probably using most of the removal equipment available on the island right now,” he said.

As is the case with residential properties, FEMA will collect whatever insurance money is available for debris removal from an owner’s commercial policy and cover the remainder of the expense.

The Corps will be using the same safety protocol as it did with the residential program, including measures such as “burrito wrapping” the toxic debris during transportation. This debris should not be any more toxic than the residential debris, said Cory Koger, the Corps’ debris expert for the Maui wildfires.

The Corps also will be using cultural and archeological monitors, and it needs the permission of property owners to do the cleanup.

As of Monday, the agency had received 1,607 approvals for cleanup from residential and commercial properties. The Corps said it has assigned cleanup for 80% of the expected residential properties, but just 30% of the expected commercial properties.

“The message we want to get out is that there currently is no opt-out program in place,” said Clay Morgan, the Corps’ mission manager for the Maui debris planning and response team. “Until Maui County either builds another temporary debris site or the final permanent disposal site, there really is nowhere for that debris to go.”

Only debris collected by Corps contractors is allowed to be brought to the temporary debris site in Olowalu due to environmental reasons.

If at the end of the Corps’ commercial debris project there are commercial properties that are unsafe, Morgan said the county will have an obligation to do something about this as a “public nuisance” since it’s still considered a public health emergency.

“There is the potential for them to issue a condemnation letter, and then they would give us a right of entry under a condemned property,” he said. “But that’s a last resort and not in anybody’s best interest.”

The Corps began the Phase 2 residential debris removal in January, and as of Monday has cleared 348 properties and returned 88 rights of entry back to the county because the property was deemed safe after completed testing of the soil.

The contract for commercial properties calls for the removal of fire debris and ash from buildings that include multiple-unit condos and apartment complexes, some three stories tall. Perhaps the trickiest will be 505 Front St., which once housed a shopping complex and was home to Spanky’s Riptide restaurant and Feast at Lele luau.

“We have to do the demolition while still maintaining a surviving structure next door (Lahaina Shores Beach Resort),” Morgan said. “The garage below it flooded. And it’s in a culturally sensitive area.”

Working with subcontractor Goodfellow Bros. and others, Technology Services began with the mobilization of two crews to start in the Limahana block of Lahaina.

The work includes dealing with 95 “deferred properties” that were structurally unsafe for the Environmental Protection Agency to clear of hazardous materials and bulk asbestos in Phase 1. But most of the batteries for electric cars and solar systems were outside of the structures and already removed.

“They’re out knocking down fire-damaged structures,” Morgan said. “Part of their initial phase is to try to make those sites safe for the next crews to come along to do the soil sampling ash characterization.”

Once those deferred properties are made accessible, the hazardous material will be removed by EPA contractor and shipped off island to the same locations on the mainland as the other toxic debris. But this time the hazardous material will be staged in Lahaina on vacant property near the Pioneer Mill, Koger said.

The owners then will have the opportunity to reenter their properties for the first time to try to salvage anything or point out anything sensitive. When all these stages are completed, the recycling of concrete and metal and the debris removal can begin. So far, no private businesses have reached this stage yet.

Jon Hake, general manager of Hui Huliau Technology Services, said the company does a “360-walk-around” before putting equipment on the property to assess what are the challenges and dangers.

He said the crews work with the property owners, which recently involved a discussion about saving a unique piece of concrete that they had gotten from Fleetwoods on Front Street.

“Of course, we’re dealing with a lot of concrete removal,” Hake said. “But we will do our level best.”

Civil Beat reporter Marcel Honore contributed to this report.

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

Civil Beat’s coverage of environmental issues on Maui is supported by grants from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Hawaii Wildfires Recovery Fund, the Knight Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation.