Hawaii County is “arguably not” prepared for high-wind brush fires like the one that devastated Lahaina, county officials said Tuesday.
During a presentation before a County Council committee Tuesday, Civil Defense Administrator Talmadge Magno and Fire Chief Kazuo Todd discussed the impacts of the August wildfires and how Hawaii County might be able to avoid a disaster in the future.
“You see sometimes there’s times, incidents, that impact us and sometimes overwhelm everything we’ve put together to mitigate it,” Magno said, citing the 1946 and 1960 Hilo tsunamis. “Though it was tragic, we learned from it, and we see the results today — all this open space.”
Drawing parallels with those past disasters, Magno said that the Lahaina disaster is again an opportunity to reevaluate how the county alerts the public about future emergencies.
But Todd said that high-wind brush fires like the Aug. 8 Lahaina fire or the 2021 Mana Road fire might exceed the county’s ability to manage, explaining it spends about half as much for fire department staffing as the City and County of Honolulu does, despite the much greater size of the island.
Todd said that with rising temperatures over the last 40 years, weather patterns in the Pacific have changed to generate more energetic storms and wind. At the same time, however, more land on the Big Island has become unmanaged, either due to the end of the sugar plantations, absent landowners, or the general decline in agriculture on the island.
“You do have a lot of people from the rest of the United States buying land here, thinking it’ll appreciate in value over time, and then they just don’t touch it, don’t manage it, and it becomes a fire hazard,” Todd said. “We tore down all the native forests that weren’t really a fire hazard, and then we kinda just didn’t replace them once we moved out, and now it’s just grass that burns.”
Todd also noted that because of those factors, “the total amount of land burning in Hawaii has increased.”
“The percentage of land that burns every year in Hawaii is the largest in the United States,” he said. “… Part of that is because we don’t have a lot of land, and so one fire can drastically throw our numbers up there, but part of it is just because of the fact that we have so much land that used to be agriculture that just isn’t managed anymore.”
Those major fires could be just as dangerous in East Hawaii as West Hawaii, Todd said. Just because East Hawaii tends to get more rain, during periods of drought — which are also becoming more common — a fire could just as easily run rampant on the windward side as the leeward.
Todd said a key component in fire preparedness is building communities to be fire-resistant in the first place, using fire-resistant materials, building buffer zones between buildings, having adequate emergency access routes, and more — all of which were not generally factors considered during the construction of towns like Hilo or Pahoa.
That said, Todd told the committee Tuesday that the county can develop policies to mitigate the island’s vulnerabilities, including conducting islandwide risk assessments, bolstering public awareness, developing community-specific evacuation plans, investing in more advanced monitoring systems, financially incentivizing homeowners to implement fire-mitigation measures, or penalizing owners of unmanaged land.
Committee members urged Magno and Todd to take action sooner rather than later. Puna Councilman Matt Kaneali‘i-Kleinfelder told Todd to move forward with controlled burns around the island to reduce fuel and create firebreaks, which, he added, has been a talking point between the two men for years.
Hilo Councilwoman Sue Lee Loy also encouraged Magno to broaden the channels through which Civil Defense communicates with residents about disasters.
“My mom is 87 years old,” Lee Loy said, questioning how effective Civil Defense’s Everbridge notifications are at reaching residents. “She’s not going to pay attention to some ping on the phone. It’s going to be the siren for her to turn on the radio or the TV.”
Hamakua Councilwoman Heather Kimball added that the Everbridge app is bloated and dysfunctional, poorly optimized for mobile devices, and contains links to dead webpages.
Magno said that he would look into improving the app, but said residents will need access to a phone, radio or television if they are not within hearing range of the island’s emergency sirens.
He added that part of emergency preparedness involves knowing one’s community and being aware of who is the most vulnerable and will need help in case of disaster.
“They know their community better than us,” Magno said.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.