������Ƶ

He talked and laughed with survivors, residents, politicians, Hawaiian cultural practitioners and volunteers who had gathered for community healing after much heartache and sadness from the Aug. 8 wildfire that destroyed much of the historic town and killed at least 102 people.  

Four months earlier, President Biden had flown to Maui to personally tell the people of Lahaina that the federal government was supporting the response and recovery — and to publicly appoint Fenton as the chief federal response coordinator for the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

FEMA — including severe floods, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons and winter storms — but the wildfires on Maui would garner especially high level attention from the U.S. government due in part to the high profile of the tragedy that made global news.

Biden said he chose Fenton because he was one of the nation’s leading emergency managers, asserting that it was “not hyperbole.”

In 2022, Biden had named Fenton as coordinator of the nation’s monkeypox response when three states had declared health emergencies due to the surging epidemic. Fenton also had helped the Biden administration oversee the creation of coronavirus vaccination sites and the resettlement of Afghans in the United States.

Few can match Fenton’s long resume of work in disasters, especially the past few years with the proliferation of megafires.

“It’s definitely one of the most complex events I’ve worked, just because there’s so many unique things about Maui and so many things that we need to overcome,” Fenton said last week. “You need to understand the culture. There’s also limited infrastructure on the west side.”

The California-based Fenton was coincidentally in Hawaii when the fires began. Due to his job as FEMA’s Region 9 administrator that includes Hawaii, he began working from day one with the county, state, other federal agencies and private partners to provide federal assistance to Maui for a wide variety of missions that have included finding and identifying remains, land and marine debris removal, housing the displaced, crisis counseling, infrastructure repair and resiliency building.

While reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of the Maui wildfires, which also burned Kula, Olinda and Pulehu, Fenton said his job also entails empathizing with individuals of disasters and trying to understand what they need. He has attended countless community meetings and events. Marching with the people was one more chance to listen and learn.

“I got in this business to help Americans on their worst day,” said Fenton, who joined FEMA in 1996.

He said while he focused early in his life on going to college, sports and playing football, he also saw people in tough situations. He said his mother “really pressed upon us to help others in time of need,” encouraging him “to pursue a career that allowed me to deliver that help.”

Fenton acknowledges that all has not gone smoothly or quick enough in the response and recovery. He has heard the pleas and complaints from some survivors that FEMA is not providing the help they need.

“It always takes longer than what people want and unfortunately, we could never go back to before that day,” Fenton said. “But we’re committed to stay and really help Maui recover and help all those that have had significant losses from that event.”

A major challenge has been providing housing to many of the approximately 12,000 displaced people on an island that already had a severe affordable housing crisis. As of early July, FEMA has spent $30.6 million for housing assistance to fire survivors.

The temporary housing program went fairly well with about 7,000 people being quickly moved from emergency shelters and into rooms at resort hotels and condos on the west side. But FEMA’s direct-lease program, one of the longer-term housing options, struggled at first to get enough units and then to match households with the available units.

Many people turned down leases because they were too far from their work, schools and community. It led to many units sitting empty for months while taxpayers picked up the tab, but now the program is housing more than 1,000 families and more people will move into the temporary group site Kilohana with 169 modular homes that is being built by the Army Corps of Engineers.

FEMA also has identified 60 homeowners who could be eligible to have a modular home put on their cleaned up property in the burn zone.

Beyond housing, FEMA over the past year has led or assisted in the removal of toxic and hazardous materials from burned properties, pulled about 50 sunken vessels out of the harbor and more than 3,000 burned vehicles off of streets, constructed a needed but controversial temporary debris site in Olowalu, cleaned up 26 burned properties in Kula and about 70% of the 5-square-mile burn zone in Lahaina, and built a temporary elementary school in West Maui.

Among the first big efforts was finding the remains of the fire victims. FEMA brought in search and rescue teams, including K9 dogs who required booties on their feet because of the hot ground, and a deployable mortuary unit. The FBI helped with the identification of the badly burned remains and tracking down thousands who had been put on lists of the missing.

Another challenge was dealing with the potentially dangerous batteries from the large number of solar power walls and electric cars.

Fenton said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set national standards by working with experts and manufacturers to come up with solutions on how to remove them from the burn zone and safely transport them to the mainland for recycling and disposal because there is no place to do so on Maui.

Fenton came to Maui to help a community that includes many people distrustful of the federal government, dating to the years of colonialism and loss of water and land. Some lined up along the route of Biden’s presidential motorcade in August, expressing their anger with signs while waving the Kanaka Maoli flag of Hawaii. Lahaina was the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Native Hawaiian waterman Archie Kalepa, a member of Mayor Richard Bissen’s Lahaina Advisory Committee, said Fenton came in open-minded, has been available and listened.

“He allowed cultural practices to be honored and take precedence over process, and that was huge,” Kalepa said.

FEMA spent millions of dollars on cultural monitors during aspects of the recovery and provided cultural training to its employees and other federal workers who came to Maui. Although Fenton had experience dealing with tribal nations in District 9, the level of the cultural monitoring and training for the Maui fire was unprecedented, he said.

While he is not sure if it established trust, Bissen said it was a good thing for the federal government to have done because of Lahaina’s cultural and historic significance.

“I wanted to make sure that we don’t destroy or damage something or remove something forever that we wanted to remain there,” the mayor said.

Jennifer Gray Thompson, president of the nonprofit , said last month that FEMA’s experience on Maui will likely benefit communities in the future that experience their own tragedies.

“I’ve never seen the federal government sort of bend to the will of the community like I have for yours,” she said.

Bissen said some of the decisions FEMA made for Maui “are out of the ordinary and not by the book.”

He cited the costly clearing of the commercial properties, which FEMA said it was doing to help with the island’s economic recovery. FEMA usually only does cleanup for residential areas. And Bissen said FEMA’s decision to clear more than 3,000 burned vehicles was a task usually left to the county.

Since 2015, Fenton has been the regional administrator for District 9, which also includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and 150 tribal nations.

Thompson said Fenton has gained lot of experience in responding to megafires, which began cropping up in 2015 with a small one in Lake County, California, and have become more frequent and getting bigger due to climate change.

And as a result, she said FEMA continues to evolve in its response. Damaged trees are being removed as part of the fire debris cleanup on Maui, for instance, which was not the case for the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California.

“They have been waiting for six years because that rule did not exist,” she said.

Fenton said FEMA also focused on mental health, which he said was “really important when we have an incident that causes so much damage, destruction and fatalities.”

FEMA’s crisis counseling program has funded grants for those services, brought in personnel from Health and Human Services to assist with children’s mental needs and provided funding to the state for case managers.

Fenton said there are a lot of resources still available to fire survivors but acknowledged it can be complex to navigate them.

As of early July, FEMA has provided $22.2 million for “other needs assistance” to survivors and approved $377 million in Small Business Administration loans for affect Maui homeowners, renters and businesses.

While Fenton said much has been accomplished, FEMA will continue to help with the recovery for years. He’s hiring a staff of 129 people on Maui to continue working with those displaced by the fires.

He said a “misnomer out there” is that FEMA’s individual assistance program that helps individuals displaced by fires only lasts 18 months. He said it starts as 18 months, then it’s extended based on need.

He said some people from the Paradise fire had FEMA housing assistance for more than four years, although that’s also partly due to the Covid pandemic.

FEMA also will be involved in funding projects to rebuild damaged infrastructure.

Kalepa said Fenton did his best to work with the resources he had to make things happen.

“I think in the beginning, it was really tough,” Kalepa said. “But if we were to grade them today because of Bob Fenton from the beginning, I’ll tell you right now, they’re top-notch.”

Fenton said he loves Maui, which is a special place to him. He was married at the Grand Wailea 21 years ago.

“I feel a sense of obligation,” he said. “A lot of really good people I’ve been able to meet in Maui will probably be lifelong friends. … The one-year anniversary is a chance for us now to remember to take a step, one more step toward recovery.”

Civil Beat reporter Paula Dobbyn contributed to this story.

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