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Tom Keus was one of the lucky ones: A member of the small fraternity of people whose homes were spared from Maui’s fiery furnace on Aug. 8, 2023. He thinks his two-story house in North Lahaina was saved thanks to its new asphalt roof and a freshly planted 100-foot row of hau bushes that acted like a fire break.

His neighbors, including his 92-year-old mother, Joanna Bergman, lost their homes entirely.

The houses are gone and also all the greenery, the lush and carefully tended landscaping and bright flowering bushes that contributed so much to Lahaina’s historic charm. Almost all the trees in the area, including the graceful 25-foot palms that once shaded Keus’ property, burned away. His home is marooned in a sea of gray ash in the searing, sweltering heat that has enveloped the town. Lahaina has been turned into a scorched desert.

“Lahaina has always been hot, ridiculously hot,” Keus said in a recent interview. “But now there is nowhere to hide. There’s no shade. The ground gets so hot. There are no shadows.”

But now Keus is becoming part of the effort to bring the greenery back. Thanks to the generosity of a new nonprofit, Treecovery Hawaii, he is one of the first beneficiaries of a gift of seven trees, a plumeria and six citrus, that were delivered to him free of charge to help start the replanting of Lahaina. They were delivered to Keus’ house in November and he will plant them soon.

“They actually came with tags with my name on them,” Keus said. “I was blown away.”

Raising Young Trees at ‘Grow Hubs’

Treecovery, a volunteer group founded by Duane Sparkman, chairman of the Maui County Arborist Committee and chief engineer at the Royal Lahaina Resort, was launched in November 2023. Its goal is to make Maui’s fire-stricken areas green again and return the island to its original forested state, ideally using native plants.

For the past year, the group’s volunteers have been laying the groundwork for their ambitious tree restoration efforts. They have purchased thousands of trees. They are tending them in pots until property owners like Keus are ready to receive them.

The extent of the devastation in Lahaina is hard to describe. Of the estimated 25,000 trees that were growing there on Aug. 7, only about 4,000 survived. First the flames burned the trees away, then soil toxicity poisoned those that had managed to survive. Next came boring bugs that attacked the surviving bark.

“We need to get trees growing again and to protect the ones that are left.”

Rep. Elle Cochrane

Even Lahaina’s landmark banyan tree, whose survival was an early bright spot amid the devastation, has been gravely damaged and is requiring round-the-clock care for its survival.

These new young trees cost from $22 to $150 each, Sparkman said. Keus estimates that the trees he received were worth $500.

They are being tended at 18 separate sites that Sparkman calls “grow hubs.” The group’s volunteers are using the Hawaiian term “hānai” which means to adopt or foster, to explain the process.

Many property owners with land to spare are joining the hanai effort. Some are local people who want to help, but resort owners are kicking in too. The Hyatt Regency Maui is hosting 200 trees, the Outrigger Kaanapali Beach Resort has 80, the Royal Lahaina Resort has 250 and Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club is raising 125, Sparkman said. The mix includes alahe‘e, koai‘a, wiliwili, avocado and citrus, kukui nut and ‘ulu, plumeria and shower trees.

Word of the tree replanting effort is spreading among property owners.

Treecovery has fielded requests for 290 trees from homeowners who were fire victims, Sparkman said, with many of them asking for fruit and flower trees.

State Rep. Elle Cochran, who represents Lahaina, has applauded the program. She said that although she is wary of all the new nonprofits that have proliferated since the fire, including some that seem more self-serving than genuinely helpful, this community venture to advance tree replanting is badly needed. She said she is glad that Treecovery is helping plant what she called “starters.”

“We need to get trees growing again and to protect the ones that are left,” she said.

An Islandwide Effort

Treecovery volunteers are also reaching out to homeowners in the island’s interior, in Kula, which was also the scene of an Aug. 8, 2023, fire. Linden Joesting’s family lost more than 20 trees, with others badly damaged. They were thrilled when Treecovery brought them about 60 replacement trees.

“I thought it was great,” Joesting said. “You don’t expect people to pop up like they did. They came up with a big crew and put in all the plants in a day.”

Joesting said she also valued the expert advice Treecovery provided about what her family needs to do to save the surviving trees on the property.

Indeed, for the past year, Sparkman has been going around looking at trees all over the island and inspecting them for damage. He said he has talked to 300 to 400 homeowners. In many cases, he has had to tell people that trees they thought had made it through the fire were actually doomed.

“I want to make my place as green as possible to give people hope.”

Tom Keus

“People see green and they believe it will survive,” he said. “For a couple years, it will look like it’s growing and then it just stops.”

He said that arborists at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had inspected trees and marked with a blue paint swab those that needed to be cut down, either because they were dying or posed too big a risk of falling on workers doing debris removal. He said some property owners didn’t want to believe the fatal diagnosis, and it has been painful but reassuring to them to have the verdict validated by local arborists.

Sparkman had to deliver the bad news to skateboarders at West Maui Skate Park, who have long cooled off under a large monkeypod tree while resting between tricks.

“They said ‘look at our beautiful tree,’ and I had to say no,” Sparkman recalled. “They said, ‘no?’ I had to tell them the tree is not going to survive.”

The trees that have turned out to be hardiest are sandalwood, banana, noni and moringa, which, he said, “come back almost immediately.”

Early reports that the famous banyan tree in downtown Lahaina was undamaged turned out to be overly rosy, he said.

The tree “was basically microwaved,” he said.

By the end of September 2023, arborists began to notice something that looked like sawdust on its limbs and realized that tiny bugs called twig borers were attacking its bark. The tree has required regular treatment for survival. In early 2024, arborists began trimming back the damaged parts of the tree. About 45% to 50% has had to be removed. That had to be done carefully, too, he said.

“If you trim too much, you can kill the tree,” he said.

Branches of the Lahaina tree are being fostered at hotel properties, too. One section, for example, is being housed in a pot in a pond near the reception desk at the Marriott Maui Ocean Club.

Keus hopes his home, with its new foliage, will inspire others to move quickly to replant the area. The hau bush that saved his home is already growing high, from 6 feet at the time of the fire to 8 feet now.

“I want to make my place as green as possible to give people hope,” he said. “It looks so terrible up there.”

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

Civil Beat’s coverage of environmental issues on Maui is supported by grants from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Hawai‘i Wildfires Recovery Fund, the Knight Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation.