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Clyde Nada scanned the haze from his home’s rooftop, trying to catch a glimpse of his bakery through the smoke trailing a line of fire marching toward Kauai’s southern shores. 

The 67-year-old lives in Hanapepe and his bakery, started 58 years ago by his father, stands in front of Kaumakani Village, a historical plantation camp dating back to the late 1940s. Former sugar plantation land sits in between, either fallow, under development or still farmed. 

The tightly packed camp of thin-walled homes are built to capitalize on the trade winds, open and breezy – but old and frail by today’s standards. 

Kaumakani Village is an example of an overlooked facet in the wildfire equation. Wildfire’s most devastating impacts are not only stoked by high winds and invasive grasses, as was documented in Lahaina last year, but by the houses and structures that themselves can feed the flames. 

The Lahaina fire woke up Hawaii to the reality that — like California, Oregon and Washington — the state must contend with wildfires. 

Wildfire’s footprint, proportional to landmass, is just as large in Hawaii as in Western states. The likelihood of wildfires in Hawaii is higher than 84% of U.S. states. The chance of those fires coming close to homes is greater than in 88% of states, . 

So another fire remains a distinct danger for communities throughout the islands.

Waianae, Nanakuli, Makaha, Helemano and Makakilo on Oahu.

Launiupoko, Olowalu and Makena on Maui.

Waikoloa Village, Waimea and Naalehu on the Big Island.

Kapaa, Anahola and Poipu on Kauai.

These towns, home to about 75,000 residents and 25,000 buildings, face among the greatest wildfire hazards in the state. 

And in these communities, as in Hawaii as a whole, the built environment – from the construction materials to the density of homes to green spaces – plays an integral role in their vulnerabilities. 

Nada knew that his bakery Aloha Sweet Delites was at risk, that the 1947 building he describes as “dried out” would be nothing more than kindling.  

So he called his staff from his home and told them: “Just lock the doors and leave.”

Three Bedrooms, One Bathroom, Chance Of Wildfire

Kaumakani Village is almost 80 years old. The development of 200 three-bedroom houses opened as a camp for Olokele Sugar Co. workers in mid-1947.  

It was built close to the sugar plantation and sugar mill along with its own amenities, akin to a military base. Everything was built to be walkable. Garages were shared in centralized locations.

The development cost $2 million at the time, about $30 million in today’s dollars. It boasted “modern sewage, hot water, all modern plumbing and electrical equipment,” with each house offering a “cozy kitchen, modern bathroom … as well as roomy closets and plenty of lawn and garden space,” the Honolulu Advertiser wrote in 1947.  

The homes were also snugly arranged, perched on wooden post-and-pier foundations, with single layers of redwood, fir, pine or cedar for walls. Just about everything was constructed from timber from foundation to roof — the least desirable material, if not treated, for resisting fire.

“They tried to make them breezy and comfortable because they’re all built in the days before air-conditioning,” said William Chapman, interim dean of the University of Hawaii’s School of Architecture.

It was affordable, practical and made sense at the time. But no one considered that the typical foundations, roofs, attics, walls and windows that kept the population cool would become a major hazard in the face of wildfires decades later. 

‘Think Of All The Maui People’

Kauai Fire Department Chief Michael Gibson knew well the risk facing Kaumakani Village. The department had installed 110 fire alarms in 60 village homes in February as part of a program with the American Red Cross.

For hours on July 18, firefighters had already been doing what they could to stop the flames between Hanapepe and the historic plantation camp, gaining access on roads made by the landowners — Gay & Robinson and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. But it kept moving.

Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke declared a state of emergency. National Guard air support was called in. Residents evacuated. The road remained closed. And Gibson directed firefighters between the houses and flames as soon as the wildfire’s course toward Kaumakani became clear.

Howard Greene, vice president of Gay & Robinson, caught a glimpse of the fire up close when he arrived at the village after it was evacuated. He went house to house to ensure they were empty. He saw that firefighters had planted themselves between one of the outer homes and the fire.

“I thought the house was gone and thought the whole village was starting to go,” Greene said.

Nada could only see the smoke and fire trickle southwest across the fields that once provided sugar to his bakery.

He finally got a call about nine hours after the fire started, after 9 p.m. The fire had jumped Kaumualii Highway but stopped short of the village, thanks to the firefighters and the slackening of the 25 mph winds. The building was OK, as was the rest of the village. The fire destroyed a single shed and hundreds of yards of water pipes and pumps on the farm it burned through. But no one was hurt.

“I just think of all the Maui people, what they went through,” Nada said the following day, sitting in front of his bakery. “I’m just thankful everybody got evacuated on time.”

The fire-charred power poles along the highway are being resurrected or replaced. Firefighters monitor the burn zone for flare-ups. Nada turns away customers because he cannot reopen until the water supply is restored.

Nada knows it could have been far worse considering the age of the building and his past experiences. In 1992, during Hurricane Iniki, he and his family huddled for safety in the bakery’s walk-in refrigerator as a squall tore the roof from the building. A fire could be even worse, Nada says.

“It wouldn’t take much to get this building going,” Nada says. “But this building survived two hurricanes, so I’m happy.”

Wildfire: Where The People Are

Academics, researchers and wildfire experts have started paying more attention to how wildfires converge with urban areas, analyzing how they spread through communities.

That’s largely because of the sheer devastation of several U.S. communities in the past five years. Lahaina last year, Colorado’s Superior and Louisville in 2021, Oregon’s Talent and Phoenix in 2020 and the California town of Paradise in 2018 — collectively, these fires destroyed almost 25,000 structures and killed 192 people.

In each case, a fire that began in the wild set off what amounted to an urban conflagration, several authors wrote in National Academy of Sciences’ journal late last year.

“These problem fires were defined as an issue of wildfires that involved houses. In reality, they are urban fires initiated by wildfires. That’s an important distinction – and one that has big repercussions for how we prepare for future fires,” they wrote.

With that in mind, Colorado State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo have begun paying attention to how fires spread between structures. 

Both universities are using computer modeling that considers organic and inorganic flammable materials around buildings, structural density and infrastructure, among other variables.

Researchers have fed into the models the conditions of the most destructive fires in recent U.S. history, such as Lahaina’s, and compared their results with what actually happened. Colorado State, for instance, modeled the Aug. 8, 2023 Lahaina fire and predicted the destruction of buildings with 74% accuracy.

The goal is to inform future prevention and mitigation efforts in fire-prone communities, engineering professor Hussam Mahmoud said. 

“There’s a lot of opportunities to save communities in the future,” Mahmoud said. 

For Negar Elhami-Khorasani of the University at Buffalo, one hurdle has been understanding the finer points of how houses are constructed. Data is hard to find or nonexistent.

That information is needed to truly understand the full vulnerability of structures and the spread of fire between them, Elhami-Khorasani said. 

Kapaa, the most populous part of Kauai, illustrates the complexities. On paper, because its homes are on average 35 years newer than those in Kaumakani Village and it’s on the rainier windward side of the island, it should be more resilient.

But a closer look shows hidden vulnerabilities.

The characteristics of the average Kapaa home can be found across the state, including in many houses that burned in Lahaina — a rectangular ranch-style home for a single family, with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, built 42 years ago.

Those are the broad outlines, but fire experts want more details — the materials that were used in walls, foundation and roofing, among other things. 

The average Kapaa home has walls made of two layers of plywood, often chemically treated to resist flames or embers more effectively than the single layers found in plantation-era homes. 

The typical home’s roof is tiled with somewhat fire-resistant composite shingles, also known as asphalt shingles, generally made up of tar, asphalt and fiberglass. 

Most homes have roofs shaped like a pyramid or a tent, with few recesses that might catch embers.

Just over 45% sit on concrete slabs. But another 35% stand on stilt-like foundations known as “tofu blocks,” built during the plantation era to let air flow under homes, making them more prone to spread fire.

The Kauai Community Wildfire Preparedness Plan, published eight years ago, places Kapaa’s built environment in the moderate-to-high hazard category. That plan is currently being updated.

That wildfire plan is created through on-the-ground research and involves heavy community input, identifying key details in building standards that county property records and modeling do not include. 

For instance, one factor the plan considers is the underside of roof awnings and if they are covered. If not, embers can accumulate. Another is whether vents on the outside of homes are sealed with ember-resistant mesh. Vents meant to expel or suck air into the home are a key vector for fire’s spread. 

For the 35% of homes sitting on stilts, the plan takes into account whether the underlying space is sealed with fire-resistant mesh. Many are not. Without that mesh, and especially if the space is used for storage, the foundation can spread flames.  

Like Kapaa, most of Kauai’s settlements are in the mid-to-high risk range because of factors like these.

Know Your Neighborhood, Know Your Risk

These variables are important even for houses that are not right next to unmanaged or densely vegetated lands where wildfires usually occur.

That’s because wind-driven wildfires can launch embers up to 2 miles and endanger structures that fall outside of what is known as the wildland-urban interface, where rural wildfire-prone areas meet communities.

Flying embers can create a cascading effect. Multiple fires, known as “spot fires,” occur simultaneously.  

Just over 86% of Lahaina’s buildings fell into the indirect exposure bracket in the U.S. Forest Service’s analysis — not on the wildland-urban interface, but close enough to be lit by embers. More than 60% of Kapaa sits in that category, as do 58% of Hawaii’s communities as a whole.

Paradoxically, it is not the areas at the highest wildfire risk that are most often devastated, said Joe Scott, a lead researcher in the U.S. Forest Service national analysis. One reason is that more people live in those lower-risk areas. And where there are people, there’s fire — especially in Hawaii, where more than 99% of fires are human-caused. 

“Zillions of people live where it’s moderate. That is the problem,” said Scott, who leads wildfire mitigation company Pyrologix. “These disasters happen where there’s moderate risk because that’s where all the people are.”

The characteristics of structures in those communities matter. Colorado State University’s research and modeling deemed those characteristics and the layout of communities critical to how fire will spread.

It’s hard to predict how a fire might play out in Kapaa. The average home was built in 1982, but 43% of its dwellings were built earlier, as far back as 1906.  

A single house or a block built to modern standards may be safer from fire. But adjacent homes will not necessarily be saved from burning, Colorado State University professor Mahmoud said.

Even the safer homes could go up if the older homes feed a hot enough fire, or if urban vegetation is unmanaged.

“The fire boundary is not going to change by the fact that you put a concrete building here or there,” Mahmoud says. “If you put a lot of them in, or you do a fire break in a certain way, or do mitigation in a certain way, then yes.”

Island Burning

In fact, Kapaa narrowly averted a scary test of its resilience.

Firefighters were deployed to the outskirts of Kapaa almost exactly 24 hours after the fire started in Hanapepe, threatening Kaumakani Village. They arrived to find guinea grass and haole koa aflame, burning an area about the size of a pickleball court.

Dense gray smoke could be seen from town as the fire burned inland, right next to Kapaa Bypass Road. It ate through 10 acres of former sugar plantation land but was extinguished before it reached the community.

It was the smallest of three fires that week, which scorched more than 2,700 acres in western, south and northeastern Kauai.

It was the most fire Stefanie Stauber had witnessed since August last year, when several fires broke out near her family’s property on the northern edge of Kapaa, next to Kuhio Highway.

Stauber saw fires burn in patches of invasive grasses along the coastal roadway and bicycle path several times in an area known for homeless encampments.

“Everybody jokes that this is the town of slumlords because all of the buildings are so old,” Stauber said. “Nobody does any sort of renovations or anything. But I don’t know how you’re going to address that because it’s not like you want to bulldoze all the historic buildings.”

One of her family’s homes was built in 1993, after Hurricane Iniki. The other was built by her great-grandfather in 1928, with all the hallmarks of a plantation-era home. The idea of retrofitting buildings, including her houses, seems impossibly expensive to Stauber, who was born and raised on Kauai, though it “could and should be done.” 

“The cost of materials is so crazy. If people were going to retrofit or do anything up to code, I can’t even imagine the cost,” Stauber said. “I can’t even imagine people being able to afford that.”

Stauber and her family are instead focused on something more easily and affordably controlled: vegetation.