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Kathy Baldwin has spent the past few days deciding what’s important in her life as crews continue to battle the Crater Road fire, a nearly 600-acre blaze that broke out high on Haleakala last Wednesday.

As the hospice nurse watched smoke rise in the hills behind her Upcountry Maui home and coordinated with neighbors, Baldwin loaded her car, making tough decisions about what to take and what to leave behind. She needed to be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice.

Should she take her Persian rugs? Yes. Her 42-year-old daughter’s childhood embroidery? Yes. Sentimental knickknacks? Maybe.

“I have this little wooden pig and I thought, ‘I want that,’” the Upper Kula resident said.

Baldwin’s anxiety about her home and belongings comes as crews work to extinguish the fire and determine its origin. It was 80% contained as of Monday at 574 acres but Kula residents should remain vigilant, according to county and state officials.

“This fire is not out. We’re not done with it and we will be up there continuing to work on hot spots,” Maui Fire Chief Brad Ventura said at a Monday morning news conference in Wailuku.

Crews are closely tracking wind speeds and direction, which could determine if evacuations become necessary. Amos Lonokailua-Hewett said he and the he directs are keeping a particular eye on gulches.

“If the fires got ahold of the gulch, those fires would travel directly down into residential areas, and so we’re paying attention to that,” he said.

An ‘Existential Exercise’

Baldwin’s house on Kekaulike Avenue is a five-minute walk from Hapapa Gulch, a steep ravine typically filled with dead leaves, tree branches and other flammables. While it’s reassuring that the Crater Road fire is almost fully contained, Baldwin said things could shift at any time, so she continues evaluating her stuff and planning for evacuation.

“It’s presented an existential exercise. What do I want? What’s important to me? What gives meaning to my life?” she said. “It’s been very anxiety-provoking.”

Baldwin’s not alone.

Several Upper Kula residents said in interviews last weekend that this latest wildfire has triggered “roller coasters of anxiety,” as one nervous resident who didn’t want to be identified put it.

It feels like they’re reliving aspects of what happened last August when Maui wildfires claimed 102 lives, destroyed most of Lahaina and burned some 20 Upcountry homes.

On Wednesday night when the Crater Road fire kicked up, Maui police went door to door in certain high-elevation neighborhoods telling residents to be prepared, according to Lonokailua-Hewett. The county’s emergency operations center went into partial activation at 8:02 p.m. Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke signed an on Thursday morning because, in an eerie similarity to Aug. 8, Gov. Josh Green was out of state.

Although an emergency advisory telling people to prepare for possible evacuation was lifted on Saturday, many residents remain on edge, clearing defensible spaces around houses, watering down their yards, preparing two weeks’ worth of food, water and supplies, gathering important documents and topping off gas tanks. Some, like Baldwin, are sleeping in shifts with neighbors, prepared to wake anyone up if it’s time to evacuate.

“I ordered fire-safe envelopes for all my important papers,” Hannah Faith Freed said Sunday afternoon. “I have a backpack ready with all my essentials.”

Support Is Available

The experience of last August when Freed had to evacuate Kula is still top of mind. Since the Crater Road fire erupted, whenever she has to leave Upcountry, she makes sure her sure her sons are staying with someone outside the potential evacuation zone.

With the anniversary of Aug. 8 less than a month away, anxiety is to be expected, something not lost on public officials.

At Monday’s news conference, Maui Mayor Richard Bissen addressed mental health in his opening statement.

“I just want to acknowledge the concern that our community is having right now, the anxiety, the stress, the reminders that … trigger people’s memories,” Bissen said.

Support is available by calling 988 or at mauirecovers.org, the mayor said.

Luke said Kula residents have her sympathy because many “have already experienced tremendous amount of trauma and for them to relive some of those prior experiences have been, you know, really difficult.”

Ventura described challenging conditions for crews because of steep gulches, burning eucalyptus groves with collapsing branches, soft soil that makes it hard for bulldozers to cut fire lines in or lava fields where the dozers can’t operate at all.

Because the fire is so high up on the flanks of Haleakala volcano at the 7,000-foot elevation, water has had to be flown in by helicopter, dropped by military aircraft or hauled in by truck.

“Since the fire started, we’ve shuttled over half a million gallons of water up the hill,” Ventura said.

The multi-agency firefighting effort involves the county, state, National Park Service and private entities including Goodfellow Bros., Alpha Inc., Haleakala Ranch, Mahi Pono, Vares Construction and C Hayes Excavation.

Bulldozers have cut fire breaks along about 4 miles or 70% of the perimeter with a contingency line about 3 miles long and 20 to 40 feet wide, Ventura said.

The county is using drones to do nighttime thermal imaging of the fire and underground hot spots, a new program created last year to provide situational awareness, Ventura said.

Lessons Learned?

Given last August’s catastrophe when thousands of people were trapped in traffic battling to evacuate as Lahaina burned down, officials emphasized how they’ve applied lessons learned from the tragedy to the fire on Haleakala.

Ventura said his department, MEMA and others have worked on improving the unified command structure.

“The more of our organizations we can put together on scene to create a unified command, the easier it is to communicate amongst agencies,” the fire chief said. “We’ve been working on that for over a year to kind of continue to polish it up and make it more routine.”

After-action reports released earlier this year cited massive communication problems among agencies battling the Aug. 8 wildfires. Examples included police and firefighter radios operating on separate channels so they didn’t know what the other agency was doing.

Instead of Bissen getting direct reports about the status of the fires, information was trickling in to him from social media and calls with Luke. And then-MEMA Director Herman Andaya, who was on Oahu at a conference during the fire, was getting information from administrative assistant Gaye Gabuat, rather than from the incident commander and the emergency operations center.

At the news conference, Bissen was asked what was different this time around with the Crater Road fire.

“The most obvious difference is we have a different team. We have a different set of skills running our EOC and directing that,” Bissen said.

“As far as lessons learned, I think we’re still trying to improve through each event,” he said. “And the specifics of that, the details of that, I’ll leave to the experts.”

What About Sirens?

Several residents interviewed said they’ve appreciated the more detailed and frequent text messages, social media postings and other forms of communication about the current fire that the county is pushing out.

Public information is something the county is prioritizing, Lonokailua-Hewett said.

But Freed, the Kula mother of two, wonders about the emergency siren system and if that would be used if residents needed to evacuate. There’s one near her house she hears go off monthly as part of routine testing.

Such sirens were not used to alert people in Lahaina of the impending danger.

“If I do need to evacuate, are we going to be told? Because last year, no one was told, right? So we were just left waiting and it was on my own decision. I was like, ‘Let’s get out of here.'”

Under Andaya, the county used its sirens for tsunami warnings but not wildfires. That approach changed after Aug. 8, with officials saying they would now sound the sirens for wildfires when necessary.

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