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The fire sent Chinatown into a frenzy. Residents and business owners scrambled to save what little they could as fire rapidly consumed the district, building by building. 

Citizens, firemen and visiting sailors struggled to slow the fire’s spread as it ate through Chinatown’s densely packed, rickety wooden structures. The conflagration rendered thousands homeless within just a few hours. The following day, on Apr. 19, 1886, the Honolulu Daily Press dubbed it a “Baptism of Fire!” The Hawaiian Gazette called it “Honolulu’s Holocaust.”

Officials swiftly made plans to widen roads and lanes within the charred district. They plastered Chinatown with posters declaring that no wooden buildings would be erected in the burn zone. Only fireproof materials could be used. The Daily Bulletin threw its support behind a plan formulated by Minister for Interior Charles Thomas Gulick to keep it all from happening again. 

The plan to give the district a facelift and safeguard it from future fires was “the plain duty of the day, and nothing but stupidity and wretched narrow-mindedness will ignore its claims,” the newspaper wrote. 

King Kalakaua – among the firefighters in Chinatown – signed at least six bills in the following months, all intended to mitigate future fires in the district. They were the state’s first building codes. 

Almost 140 years later, in the wake of the Aug. 8, 2023, destruction of Lahaina, calls are once more being made for the updating, or at least reassessment, of fire safety codes for buildings. 

But it’s no sure bet — natural disasters in Hawaii have not always led to necessary overhauls to avoid or minimize the impacts of future events. After hurricanes and fires, the pressure to let people rebuild has often overridden the need to build back stronger. 

The way houses and neighborhoods are constructed, and the codes that dictate that, are part of a complex mix of factors in fire risk. Invasive species, declining land management and climate change are among the others. 

The characteristics of Lahaina’s buildings were identified among several causes of the rapid spread of fire on the evening of Aug. 8, which eventually destroyed more than 2,200 structures and killed 102 people.

To stop another large-scale conflagration, many have focused on regulating fallow agricultural lands that harbor fire-fueling grasses, increasing emergency resources and staff and forecasting wildfire conditions. 

Less emphasis has been placed on the built environment. Yet its role in the Aug. 8 fires was key.  

Winds drove sheets of fire directly over the town. But wind-driven embers extended the fire’s reach dramatically, starting their own fires in the recesses of buildings and on vegetation within neighborhoods.

The Lahaina fire illustrated the value of updated codes. The waterfront “Miracle House” and three pockets of homes farther north survived largely intact. They were swiftly singled out by a nonprofit scientific research organization as examples of how newer building techniques increase homes’ chances of survival.

Each was built more recently than the standard home, to stricter specifications, according to the 2023 report by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. Many were damaged but not destroyed.

By contrast, the typical homes in Lahaina were built between 1960 and 1980 close together. Many had fire-prone roofs and sat on stilt-like foundations known as post-and-pier construction.

They shared traits with homes throughout Hawaii, where the .

Employing the latest building and wildfire-specific codes would undeniably bolster the state’s defenses against natural disaster.

But if Hawaii’s track record is any indication, that lesson might need to be learned more than once. 

Even as far back as 1886, in the fallout of the Chinatown fire, residents shirked the newly implemented fire safety regulations. One wooden building was already constructed within Chinatown by June. The Hawaiian Gazette reprimanded interior minister Gulick for not enforcing a law he masterminded.

“The minister has already shown laxity,” the Gazette wrote. “What assurance have we that he may not do so again?”

Fourteen years later, cramped wooden buildings fueled a 35-acre fire as it ripped through Chinatown again.

‘Everything Behind Us Just Burned Down’

The Villages of Leiali‘i was one of few sections to largely survive the fires in Lahaina last year. Many residents attributed its survival to dying winds and firefighters’ valiant defense of the subdivision. But the construction of the houses was likely an overlooked factor. 

Leiali‘i residents evacuated their homes much like the rest of Lahaina, dropping everything as the fires and evacuees advanced north toward them.

Most evacuated before midnight without any idea of what would happen to their homes. It would be awhile before they found out.

“We were just hearing ‘The homestead is OK. Only a couple of houses burned.’ But we didn’t know whose,” resident Allen Haia said.

Haia prayed as he drove around the corner onto his street the next morning. He wondered if his home was one of the two destroyed in the 104-home Department of Hawaiian Home Lands development. Everything around the development was scorched. 

Haia’s house, like his community, was spared but not unscathed.  

Many residents lost sheds or fences. Windows cracked in the heat. Walls were charred. Attics were filled with ash. But the fire stalled. 

“It was amazing. It was a matter of feet. Just 10 feet. Everything behind us just burned down,” Haia said.

The 22-acre DHHL development was built in 2006, as the cornerstone of a project intended eventually to include up to 4,000 homes covering 1,128 acres. The homes were built to a more recent, higher standard, among almost 1,000 dwellings built in Lahaina from 2000 to 2020. 

The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety noted that the types of vents used in more modern buildings, installed to mitigate the impact of high winds on roofs, may have helped reduce the number of embers that took hold. And more of the contemporary homes were constructed on concrete foundations that are resilient in fires. 

The DHHL homes were 40 to 60 years newer than the typical Lahaina dwelling and therefore subject to the 1997 Uniform Building Code. Older houses, by contrast, were constructed according to myriad codes and regulations at the time they were built.

By the time of the fire, many of those older houses were deemed “nonconforming,” no longer meeting regulations. They might be too close to the property line. Or they were built before density limits were imposed and altered.

Combining those dense structures with wind-driven embers spraying across Lahaina led to “spot fires” ahead of the main line of flames. Spot fires would likely be a smaller problem with newer codes and better maintained lots.

New structures in Lahaina will have to be built to the most current Maui building code, adopted in October, based on the state’s building codes. The county fire code, due to be updated this month, is also based on state standards.

“They’re not going to be the ones to have a massive fire. Some other place is going to have it,” said Ian Robertson, an engineering professor at the University of Hawaii.

Many settlements around the state share characteristics with Lahaina before the fire, raising the question of how counties can retrofit or arrange existing communities to protect them from future fires.

The problem is that 420,000 structures already exist in Hawaii, each grandfathered into compliance, exempt from meeting the most up-to-date codes.

So it will take house maintenance, yard work and recognizing vulnerabilities house-by-house and community-by-community, said Pat Durland, a board member of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization.

The focus cannot just be on evacuation routes or spending more on firetrucks, but making the homes themselves a bulwark to prevent communities from burning, Durland, , said.

“Your community needs to be your firebreak,” he said.

Hawaii’s houses were historically designed to promote the flow of air. But while that makes sense for keeping them cool, greater airflow generally means more entry-points for fire and embers. Embers, along with direct fire contact and radiant heat, are the three key ignition types.

“We’re just inviting embers into our homes,” Robertson said.

Some modern characteristics of Lahaina’s houses would have stood up to embers, but other traits were outdated and vulnerable, even within the same structure, said Steve Hawks, senior wildfire director at IBHS.

“We think of the whole building as a system of components that have to work together in order to give the home the highest level of resilience to these fires. And that’s all the components from the roof to the eaves,” Hawks said. 

Homes, in turn, act as individual components within their neighborhoods, with each property exerting an influence on the community’s resilience. That includes vegetation, vehicles and hazardous materials around homes.

And that brings up another conundrum: Not everyone on the block will have the same sensitivities about protecting against fire. Some may not even live full time in the islands.

That’s where governments come in — they can impose wildfire mitigation with codes or ordinances.

Governments, in turn, must balance competing pressures. Yes, stricter codes may be more protective. But they also drive up costs in a state already struggling with unaffordable housing.

Communities need to buy into building code reform soon if counties or even the state is going to adopt codes to better protect against wildfire, according to Western Fire Chiefs Association CEO Bob Roper. WFCA recommended that Maui update its building codes in its after-action report for the Aug. 8 fires, published in April.

“The longer it takes to make change, the harder it is, because we as humans forget the pain we’ve endured,” Roper said.

‘Political Dynamite’

Residents clamored to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Iwa, which whipped through Kauai in late 1982 and left 500 homeless.  

Thousands of residents were evacuated from Kauai’s shoreline communities. Iwa sent 30-foot waves crashing onto the island’s southern coast, sinking boats in Port Allen. Gusting winds of up to 143 mph lifted airlines off the tarmac at Lihue Airport. 

Iwa destroyed or damaged about 2,000 homes and some 500 other buildings.

In the following days, Lihue’s business district “was like a morgue,” power poles were “snapped like twigs” and some of the homes were so badly damaged that “it almost looked like a giant hand had reached out and ripped the house apart,” KITV reporter Kelly Dean said in a segment at the time.

Inflicting about $312 million in damage – almost $581 million in today’s dollars – Iwa was the first significant hurricane to hit Hawaii since statehood.

Afterward, Kauai County let residents rebuild with little oversight or attention to making communities more resilient.

Then, on Sept. 11, 1992, Iniki destroyed more than 1,400 homes and severely damaged more than 5,000 on Kauai, rendering 7,000 homeless and leaving the entire island cut off and in shambles. 

The Category 4 hurricane hit the Garden Island at its strongest, bringing torrential rains and 145 mile per hour winds that gusted up to 225 mph. The gales tore trees from the ground, downed power lines, flung roofs from homes. Coastal flooding lifted homes from their foundations and, in some cases, bashed them against each other.

Kauai sustained about $3.2 billion in damage, approximately $7.17 billion today.

A team of engineers surveyed building damage for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That report was “political dynamite,” according to UH meteorologist Thomas Schroeder. 

FEMA’s team of local and mainland engineers found “overwhelming” evidence of shoddy construction standards being partly to blame for the devastation.

Engineer and then-emeritus UH professor Arthur Chiu had lobbied for changes after Iwa, like adding straps, known as hurricane clips, to lash roofs to foundations. But his calls were ignored. 

Instead, the county waived building permits for a year and retroactively granted them.

“It was sad, sadder for me to see the same type of familiar problems,” Chiu told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin two weeks after Iniki hit. “How much yelling can one man do?”

Some residents did “really illegal” things and ignored regulations entirely, former mayor JoAnn Yukimura said in an interview.

“Because there was no oversight, people just went back and built. There were a lot of issues and problems that came out of that. Not the least of which was that the houses were not built back stronger,” Yukimura said.

Residents built closer to the shoreline using outdated and noncompliant building techniques. In some cases, nails were all that held homes to their foundations, she said. 

At last, within a couple of months of Iniki, Kauai’s administration set about updating the building codes.

It faced a political struggle, though. The council wanted to expedite the rebuild, as did newly homeless residents, but the mayor’s office and planning department were resolute, former Kauai planning director Jeff Lacey says.

“We got impassioned pleas from residents. We had councilors going ‘Just let them build’,” Lacey, who now lives in Massachusetts, said.

Eventually the notion that insufficient building regulations might compromise FEMA recovery funds got the updates across the line, Yukimura says.  

Lacey and Yukimura did not get everything that they wanted out of the revisions to the building codes, but they were able to have hurricane clips included. The changes went into effect in October 1992.

In the following years, every one of the counties included hurricane clips into their codes, though that rule only applies to new buildings and many older ones still do not have them.

Ultimately, it will be up to Hawaii’s counties and state government to decide whether to codify fire protections to avoid another Lahaina. 

Unlike the situation on Kauai after Iniki, most of Hawaii’s vulnerable buildings are still standing. 

“We had this opportunity because 60% of the structures needed to be re-permitted. The hurricane clips could be introduced,” former Kauai planner Lacey said. “We took it.”