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State, county and community inaction including years of ignoring the dangers posed by wildfire made the Aug. 8 fire that destroyed Lahaina worse than it should have been.

That is the overwhelming message of the Hawaii Attorney General’s the second of a three-part investigation into the Lahaina fires that killed 102 people and destroyed more than 2,200 buildings last year. 

The 518-page report, released on Friday, scrutinizes infrastructure and building standards, the perception of risk and the emergency response, and how each fed the conflagration and its fallout. It follows the “Lahaina Fire Comprehensive Timeline Report,” released in April, which offered a play-by-play account of the fire’s spread and the emergency response.  

The AG’s office commissioned the Fire Safety Research Institute as part of its investigation, which makes 140 recommendations to state and Maui County agencies to address more than 80 findings intended to make sure the situation doesn’t happen again. 

Gov. Josh Green wants the AG’s office to list its top 10 priorities from the 140 recommendations in the report, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said at a press conference on Friday. Those recommendations could cover any number of issues that would require policy changes or investment, Lopez added.  

The report is accompanied by approximately 850 gigabytes of source material, including audiovisual files and documents that fed into the findings and analysis. The state had to subpoena information from Maui County which resisted turning over records and making people available for interviews with investigators.

Still, the report recommends implementing stronger codes and regulations for the built environment, improving emergency response procedures, advance plans and training for evacuations, and injecting a consistent source of funding for the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization. 

“The conditions that made this tragedy possible were years in the making,” FSRI executive director Steve Kerber said at the press conference on Friday. 

Officials and the reports’ authors were hesitant to assign blame in their investigation, deferring to a federal investigation that has not been released, but say that the risk from wildfire was well-documented.

Despite the warning signs, Maui County’s officials and emergency responders were underprepared and overwhelmed. Communication lines frayed, evacuation routes choked and even Maui’s emergency operations center was overcrowded and spilling over.

Wildfire meanwhile continues to pose an increasing risk for communities across the state, with fire departments called out for more than 1,500 ignitions since August last year, Lopez said. Seven of those fires covered more than 500 acres. 

A Difficult Evacuation Situation Made Worse

The AG’s report, which echoes after-action reports already produced by Maui police and fire departments, found that Lahaina’s densely packed areas and limited road options to get in and out of town would have made made any effort to evacuate community members and visitors there enormously challenging.

But it also found that the lack of any advance plans by the Maui Police Department on how to get Lahaina’s 13,000 residents plus its several thousand additional visitors out of the area during an emergency made those Aug. 8 evacuation efforts even harder.

MPD struggled to mount a coordinated response to the disaster as cellular service failed and officers tried to communicate over a single radio channel, the report said. Officers couldn’t hear each other over the radio amid the deafening winds. The winds also drowned out many of the officers’ attempts to warn residents to evacuate as they drove through neighborhoods with PA systems mounted to their cars, the report stated.  

A police captain deviated from federal emergency best practices after 6 p.m. that evening when he had all officers not already helping to direct traffic return to the Lahaina police station to regain command and control of the situation, it found.

That captain did not coordinate his officers’ return to the station with fire crews and other emergency personnel, and that represented a “missed opportunity” at a better response, the report stated.

“The County remains committed to a transparent and thorough investigation that will help us identify and implement best practices—many that have already been established to protect the health and safety of our community,” Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said in a statement Friday.

“This investigation, paired with the finding of our County Police, Fire and MEMA After Action Reports, will be leveraged to enhance our ability to respond to future disasters and save lives.”

However, the report also lauded police officers’ efforts to help create emergency evacuation routes on the fly by breaking through several locked gates as the fire descended on some of the town’s densest neighborhoods off Lahainaluna Road.

It recommended that Maui’s police, fire and other emergency responders develop a shared evacuation plan and conduct regular joint training exercises to help ensure future evacuations go better. 

The report called on emergency crews to be able to unlock the gates they had to break down, and that their vehicles be equipped with tools to break down gates and other barriers where necessary.

Protecting Homes And Communities

The phase 2 report includes a long list of findings and recommendations related to how Lahaina was built, laid out and how it evolved over time.

Ad-hoc expansions of homes and buildings, narrow streets, dense vegetation and construction materials were all touched upon in the report’s findings, as they fueled the fire once it had entered the community.

Structures, cars, fencing and vegetation helped spread the fire as it was fanned by more than 60-mile-an-hour winds, catching embers that created their own fires in turn.

Those factors made the urban conflagration, which was started by the wildfire, that much harder to contain, the report states.

To better address those fire transmission points, the report recommends strengthening regulation of the wildland-urban interface — where wildfire-prone landscapes meet urban areas — through regulations and codes, as well as planning.

The State Fire Code does include provisions for vegetation management but enforcement before Aug. 8 was rare and is now increasing, at least on Maui.

But there is still room for code improvements, particularly when it comes to the wildland-urban interface and certain fire-related provisions with the State Building Code, building professionals and fire analysts say.

FSRI Research Institute Research Program Manager Derek Alkonis says it is difficult to say how such regulation might have helped on Aug. 8.

“But would it have been better? Absolutely. That’s why everyone’s doing it on the mainland,” Alkonis said.

Buildings themselves were also prone to ignition from flying embers. To address the homes’ propensity to fire would require reviewing building codes, as well as considering implementing a stronger code over the wildland-urban interface, which several other wildfire-affected U.S. states and communities have adopted in recent years.

The counties and state should not wait to install any WUI codes that could protect homes, Kerber of FSRI said.

Missing Piece

The AG’s report is missing some crucial information that was intended to help give better context for its level of preparedness because the county blocked the AG’s requests for an interview with current Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator Amos Lonokailua-Hewett.

Lonokailua-Hewett was the incident commander for a fire that caused more than $4 million in damage near Lahaina in 2018, a wind-fanned fire associated with Hurricane Lane. The county argued that was irrelevant to the AG’s investigation.

The county fought a subpoena from the AG before relenting and allowing FSRI to interview the MEMA administrator. That interview is now slated for next week.

It was one example of several subpoenas that the AG served on Maui County, and the fight to get information delayed the publication of the first report by several months.

In a statement Friday, Maui County officials said that the AG compelled the interviews of its employees and that they were not offered immunity from subsequent civil or criminal prosecution in exchange for their testimony.

The county added that the AG’s office did not notify its employees that their recorded interviews would be made public by FSRI.

The interview’s findings will be included in the final report from the AG’s investigation, Alkonis of FSRI said.

The final report will focus on systematic changes that can be made to avoid another conflagration such as Lahaina’s by proposing changes to policies and investments that are made at the state and county level, Kerber of FSRI said.

“Collectively we’re trying to answer that question,” Kerber said. “How do we keep this from happening again?”

Boost The Nonprofit

Most of the fire-mitigation efforts for Hawaii, one of the nation’s most wildfire-prone states, has fallen to Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, an often-overlooked nonprofit based on the Big Island.

The organization’s data, plans and prevention efforts have informed much of the state’s current understanding of its wildfire issue. The nonprofit was created by former firefighters to fill critical gaps in state wildfire mitigation efforts more than 20 years ago.

In other states, that work is typically handled by a public agency with larger staff and more resources, the report’s authors stated. Instead, county and state agencies have placed their resources and focus on firefighting.

HWMO co-executive director Elizabeth Pickett says she is heartened by the AG’s recognition of its role in mitigating wildfires alongside the state Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

“I feel less patient and more hopeful that it won’t just be us going forward. It can’t be,” Pickett said in an interview. “As the report informed us, it requires everyone in the system.”

The state has since revived its state fire marshal’s office, which lawmakers dissolved in the 1970s, an agency lawmakers have pinned much of the future’s fire mitigation responsibility on.

But lawmakers ignored HWMO’s request for grant funding to help it continue its work.  

Lopez said that she hoped the fire marshal would consider implementing the report’s recommendations and would not allow the state to become complacent in the future.

“The findings and recommendations in this report provide a lot of data points for the fire marshal to start being that person who reminds us of the urgency,” Lopez said.

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