After Lahaina fire, Hawaii residents address their risk by becoming 'Firewise'

KULA, Hawaii (AP) — The car tires, propane tanks, gas generators and rusty appliances heaped on the side of a dirt road waiting to be hauled away filled Desiree Graham with relief.

“That means all that stuff is not in people’s yards," she said on a blustery July day in Kahikinui, a remote Native Hawaiian homestead community in southeast Maui where wildfire is a top concern.

In June, neighbors and volunteers spent four weekends clearing rubbish from their properties in a community-wide effort to create "defensible space," or areas around homes free of ignitable vegetation and debris. They purged 12 tons of waste.

“It’s ugly, but it’s pretty beautiful to me,” said Graham, a member of Kahikinui's Firewise committee, part of a rapidly growing program from the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association that helps residents assess their communities' fire risk and create plans to mitigate it.

Kahikinui is one of dozens of Hawaii communities seeking ways to protect themselves as decades of climate change, urban development, and detrimental land use policies culminate to cause more destructive fires.

The state has 250,000 acres of unmanaged fallow agricultural land, nearly all of its buildings sit within the wildland-urban interface, and two-thirds of communities have only one road in and out.

But experts say that even with so many factors out of communities’ control, they can vastly improve their resilience — by transforming their own neighborhoods.

“Fire is not like other natural hazards, it can only move where there is fuel, and we have a lot of say in that,” said Nani Barretto, co-executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization (HWMO), a 25-year-old nonprofit at the forefront of the state’s fire-risk mitigation.

Neighborhoods all over the United States are wrestling with the same challenge, some in places that never worried about fire before. A recent Headwaters Economics analysis found 1,100 communities in 32 states shared similar risk profiles to places recently devastated by urban wildfires.

A ‘Firewise’ movement

HWMO helps communities like Kahikinui become Firewise. In the 10 years preceding the August 2023 Maui fires that destroyed Lahaina, 15 Hawaii communities joined Firewise USA. Since then, the number has more than doubled to 31, with a dozen more in the process of joining.

“Everyone was like, ’My God, what can we do?'” said Shelly Aina, former chair of the Firewise committee for Waikoloa Village, an 8,000-resident community on the west side of the Big Island, recalling the months after the Maui fires.

The development — heavily wind exposed, surrounded by dry invasive grasses and with just one main road in and out — had already experienced several close calls in the last two decades. It was first recognized as Firewise in 2016.

As HWMO-trained home assessors, Shelly and her husband Dana Aina have done over 60 free assessments for neighbors since 2022, evaluating their properties for ignition vulnerabilities. Volunteers removed kiawe trees last year along a fuel break bordering houses. Residents approved an extra HOA fee for vegetation removal on interior lots.

Measures like these can have outsized impact as people in fire-prone states adapt to more extreme wildfires, according to Dr. Jack Cohen, a retired U.S. Forest Service scientist.

“The solution is in the community, not out there with the fire breaks, because those don’t stop the fire in extreme conditions,” said Cohen.

Direct flames from a wildfire aren’t what typically initiate an urban conflagration, he said. Wind-blown embers can travel miles away from a fire, landing on combustible material like dry vegetation, or accumulating in corners like where a deck meets siding.

“They’re urban fires, not wildfires,” said Cohen.

The solutions don't always require expensive retrofits like a whole new roof, but targeting the specific places within 100 feet of the house where embers could ignite material. In dense neighborhoods, that requires residents work together, making community-wide efforts like Firewise important. “The house is only as ignition resistant as its neighbors,” said Cohen.

Communities can't transform alone

Even with renewed interest in fire resilience, community leaders face challenges in mobilizing their neighbors. Mitigation can take money, time and sacrifice. It’s not enough to cut the grass once, for example, vegetation has to be regularly maintained. Complacency sets in. Measures like removing hazardous trees can cost thousands of dollars.

“I don’t know how we deal with that, because those who have them can’t afford to take them down,” said Shelly Aina. The Ainas try offering low-cost measures, like installing metal screening behind vents and crawl spaces to keep out embers.

HWMO helps with costs where it can. It gave Kahikinui a $5,000 grant for a dumpster service to haul out its waste, and helped Waikoloa Village rent a chipper for the trees it removed. It’s been hard to keep up with the need, said Barretto, but even just a little bit of financial assistance can have an exponential impact.

“You give them money, they rally,” she said. “We can give them $1,000 and it turns into 1,000 man hours of doing the clearing.” HWMO was able to expand its grant program after the Maui fires with donations from organizations like the Bezos Earth Fund and the American Red Cross.

At a time when federal funding for climate mitigation is uncertain, communities need far more financial support to transform their neighborhoods, said Headwaters Economics' Kimi Barrett, who studies the costs of increasing fire risk. "If what we're trying to do is save people and communities, then we must significantly invest in people and communities," said Barrett.

Those investments are just a fraction of the billions of dollars in losses sustained after megafires, said Barrett. A recent study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Allstate found that $1 in resilience and preparation investment can save $13 in economic and property losses after a disaster.

Another hurdle is asking residents to do work and make sacrifices as they watch others neglect their role. “The neighbors will ask, ‘What about the county land?' There’s no routine maintenance,’” said Shelly Aina.

Her husband Dana Aina said he reminds people that it is everyone’s kuleana, or responsibility, to take care of land and people. “An island is a canoe, a canoe is an island,” he said, quoting a Hawaiian proverb. “We all have to paddle together.”

Bigger stakeholders are starting to make changes. Among them, Hawaii passed legislation to create a state fire marshal post, and its main utility, Hawaiian Electric, is undergrounding some power lines and installing AI-enabled cameras to detect ignitions earlier.

Meanwhile, Firewise communities have found that doing their own mitigation gives them more clout when asking for funding or for others to do their part.

After the 66-residence community of Kawaihae Village on Hawaii Island joined Firewise, they were finally able to get a neighboring private landowner and the state to create fuel breaks and clear grasses.

“Without that we wouldn’t have been on anyone’s radar,” said Brenda DuFresne, committee member of Kawaihae Firewise. “I think Firewise is a way to show people that you’re willing to help yourself.”

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