Maui Is a Warning

Brianna Sacks of the Washington Post has gotten used to covering climate disasters. But even she has been shocked by what’s happened on Maui over the past couple of weeks. “Most everyone—even emergency preparedness and disaster experts—I talked to didn’t think it would be this bad,” she said.

Just a few days back, Sacks was keeping an eye on Maui by monitoring “fire Twitter,” digitally listening in as emergency responders worried over wind speeds and drought conditions. “And then we woke up and the death toll went from six to 36,” she said. There are more than 100 people reported dead now. That makes Maui’s fires the deadliest in the past century. The historic downtown of Lahaina is all but destroyed.

“It’s such a cliché to say ‘It looks like a bomb went off.’ But that is truly what it looks like,” Sacks said. “These palm trees are black and charred. The cars are just left with doors ajar.”

It’s not that Maui has never experienced fires. There was a big fire just a few years back. But not like this. For me, it’s hard to imagine the scale of Maui’s loss. But Sacks has the opposite problem. She’s seen this kind of devastation again and again in California. In Colorado. She’s already asking: Who’s to blame?

On Thursday’s episode of What Next, we tried to answer the question: Did Maui have to burn? Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: The story of the disaster in Maui is really the story of multiple, overlapping disasters. First, the dry conditions on the island. Then, a hurricane offshore that whipped up the wind. All of these things came together late at night on Monday, Aug. 7, when the first fire was sparked in northern Maui. 

There’s actually security camera footage of what happened here, because this fire started at a bird sanctuary. The people running the place were watching carefully to protect the wildlife. That flash of light? It’s called an “arc flash.” It’s what happens when a power line comes into contact with vegetation, causing an electrical explosion called a “fault.”

The thing Brianna Sacks and others have chronicled over the past week is how often this pattern got repeated all over Maui, seeming to cause one conflagration after another. The details are always the same: a flash, the power going off briefly, and then fire. South of the bird sanctuary, in Lahaina, Sacks met with a woman who saw the same thing hours later.

Brianna Sacks: She said, “I woke up at 3 a.m. to this bright light and then went back to sleep. And then the power went out around 5 a.m.” It turns out that was also another arc flash. In Lahaina, starting at 11:38, and to 5 a.m., there were 34 faults. A fault means that vegetation comes in contact with a line—a line can fall down, the equipment could have a problem. Any of those faults could be an ignition source. So, you have 34 that maybe could have started something. I had them look around 3 a.m. to see if there was a fault at that time. And there were two, 2:44 and 3:30. So that kind of fits with her story.

Already, multiple lawsuits have been filed against Hawaiian Electric, alleging that with the high winds, they should have just shut off power in Maui to protect people. Reporters are asking questions, too.

Your reporting actually shows that the power company in Hawaii seemed to understand that the grid was in a dangerous place way before these fires broke out. They even reviewed what happened in 2018 with California’s Camp Fire—the one that killed 85 people—and they basically said, “OK, part of what might be successful in a wildfire situation is shutting off the power.”

Right. And to their defense, these public power shut-off programs, they’re brutal. It is a big trade-off. It is aggressive. It incurs a lot of blowback from people. Think about everything power runs.

Like, if you have a machine that helps you stay alive in some way that you need to plug in, that’s a big deal.

Right. You need to get a generator. I live in L.A., and California started doing these. And they are not fun. But when you think about the number of lives that they probably save, I think it’s a world we’re going to live in now, especially after this. We are going to be used to living without power for a day, two days.

As a protective measure.

It’s for the greater good, right? And the way that these winds keep increasing due to climate change, it’s not going away.

You’re saying Maui’s a warning?

Maui’s a big warning. And it shouldn’t have been, because there were all these reports that Maui and Hawaii were increasingly fire-prone. They have a wildfire organization. That organization had been putting reports out. The federal government noted it as a high-risk zone. There were all these pieces there. And I do think it’s going to be a warning for utility companies that we have to start putting infrastructure underground. It’s expensive. Nobody wants to do it. But the number of fires now that have been started by electrical equipment that have killed people, it’s just something that they’re going to have to eat and start doing.

To be clear, there’s no proof yet that a power line caused the fire that’s currently so deadly in Maui. 

Correct.

It’s just that there’s a lot of indications that that is probably the case, partially because there weren’t lightning strikes. So your question is: What would be setting things on fire in the first place?

Arson still could happen. But just the way and the times that the fires started and the fact that multiple fires started around a similar time near power lines—again, we don’t know for sure, but it’s the closest we have come to definitively saying that there was this problem with the grid. Something happened to a line, and then a fire started exactly in that spot shortly after.

It’s not just the electric company that’s getting tough questions after these fires. There are also questions about Hawaii’s emergency response: Like, why was the fire department spread so thin? And why weren’t more people told to evacuate? Maui actually has a siren system meant to alert people during emergencies, but for some reason, it never sounded. Which means that many people had little warning as fires spread across the island last Tuesday.

So, it’s chaos. There’s three fires burning. There’s electrical lines down, some of which are live. There’s downed trees, there’s downed power lines. Power is out, by this time, everywhere. And at this point, the black smoke is so thick people are having trouble seeing. There is no alarm system. There’s no siren going off. The police are driving around trying to get people out of their homes using megaphones in wind that you can’t hear anything in anyway. People don’t know where to go. People are running into the ocean. They’re trying to get out on one road. It’s just chaos.

There was also an early report that the fire in Lahaina was contained, right? And then later it was definitely not contained.

Yes. That’s a big issue for people because at this time, there are now three fires burning at the same time. I don’t know historically when Maui’s fire department—which is not a wildland fire department, it’s a city fire department, and city fire is much different than a wildfire. They’re used to responding to one structure fire, helping people out in emergencies. So, they’re trying to canvass three different fires, and they only have 10 fire stations on the island, spread out, and they’re already thinly resourced.

Are they even able to declare a fire contained? Do they even know?

So, contained is different than put out. The fact that they said it was contained and then they left, that’s an area that people are upset about, because if a fire is contained, it’s not out. So, there should still be people there making sure it’s contained. There weren’t. I’ve gotten conflicting reports. People said that they put it out, and they watched it for a little bit, and then they left, and they were like, “OK we’re good.” So yes, they left. And it was 100 percent contained. They went to fight the Kula Fire, which is moving quickly. They ran out of water because they were putting so much on these fires. And by the next morning, early Wednesday, Aug. 9, it becomes clear how devastating and how widespread this fire got.

Now, we’re speaking about a week after this. What’s the situation today?

There is still so much shock and trauma. Obviously, people are still in response mode. It’s still an active search.

Are things still burning? 

Things are still burning, yeah. Firefighters are still fighting the Kula Fire.

That’s in the northern part of the island.

Correct, that’s the northern part of the island. And the terrain is what we think about normally for wildfire. It’s rugged. It’s a bit harder to access. It’s up in the hills. In two separate locations, residents had to run and put out spot fires near their homes. In Lahaina, I was talking to a group of people, and all of a sudden they start running. And I’m like, “Why are we all running?” I follow them. And there’s a spot fire that popped up in these dry grasses which the firefighters had bulldozed to bury what could be embers or anything. And one of them had caught back on fire again. So, they’re taking rakes and putting them out themselves. The same thing’s happening up in Kula.

It’s still a very active situation here. They’re still looking for bodies. They haven’t finished even remotely close to searching all the rest of the homes and area that burned. The Kula Fire is 75 percent contained, and the Lahaina Fire is 85 percent contained. So, there’s firefighters still on the ground. They probably haven’t slept. It’s difficult. People don’t know where their family members are, and they probably won’t for weeks.

It sounds like so many things went wrong when it came to fighting these fires. But there is, of course, other stuff happening that was out of human control, like the winds were over 70 miles an hour from that hurricane offshore. 

Yes.

I guess what I’m asking is: Was this a confluence of disasters? Could things have gone better?

It definitely was a confluence of disasters. People have told me it’s the “perfect storm” of things all at the same time that went together. And Hawaii has been invaded by these grasses that are very fire-prone.

Are they native?

They are not native. No. So, there’s an undercurrent of this that goes back to colonization. This was their land, and we came in and brought all these invasive things, and that has taken over their land, and it’s caused this.

And we haven’t even gotten into climate change.

And we haven’t even gone into climate change. And, they’re worried about land-grabbing because that’s something they’ve had to fend off for years and years. This land is theirs. It’s sacred. Their families have owned it for generations. A lot of the homes were multigenerational, and that’s how they could afford to be here. And now they’re so concerned that these developers, which does happen—we’re seeing it in Florida after Ian—they swoop in, and they put down big money, and they buy up all this land, and they put resorts up, and they don’t want this beautiful historical area, Lahaina. And Kula! Kula is not a tourist town. There’s no resorts there. It’s like this beautiful special little community that is off the beaten path. And they don’t want it to become this place that just caters to tourists. So, there’s a lot of tension here. There’s a lot of grief. There are a lot of complicated historical experiences that kind of set them up for this.

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You’ve written about how there was actually a fire in Maui just a few years back, but that for some reason it doesn’t seem to have been a warning sign. Or maybe not enough of a warning sign. Do you think that this fire will be different from that one?

How could it not? When you think about just the loss of life, I think that this is going to be a massive pivot. I talked to the national fire administrator, and these conversations are already happening, she said. They’re already talking about how, from a firefighting perspective at least, they can be better prepared. And I want to know: How were these Maui Fire Department firefighters trained? In conditions like this in California, we have learned to pre-station crews in high-risk areas. Had that been a conversation? Was there ever a thought about, like, Hey, this is happening, this is really dry? Like, Should we wet the grasses down? Should we go cut these grasses? Should we put firefighters there just to watch in case anything pops up? I want to know: Did any of these conversations occur?