Deadly fire in Hawaii ‘years in the making’
Report flags up failings in emergency response and infrastructure decades out of date
The scale of a fire that swept through a Hawaiian island last year, killing more than 100 people, was the result of a complex interaction of factors “years in the making”, an official report said.
Downed power lines are believed to have set fire to vegetation on Maui on August 8, with the rapidly spreading blaze levelling the historic town of Lahaina.
Fast-moving flames caught islanders unaware, with some only learning there was a fire when they saw it for themselves, leading to criticism that authorities had mishandled the disaster.
Days later and amid fierce criticism that the island’s warning sirens had not been sounded, the head of Maui’s emergency management agency resigned.
The second phase of a report ordered by the state’s attorney general concluded a confluence of factors and institutional failings had contributed to the heavy toll in both life and property.
“The devastation caused by the Lahaina fire cannot be connected to one specific organisation, individual, action or event,” said Steve Kerber of the Fire Safety Research Institute, an independent agency appointed by the state to examine the disaster. “The conditions that made this tragedy possible were years in the making.”
The report said local governments, businesses and the population at large did not sufficiently understand the risk from fire, often ignoring “red-flag” days when wind conditions allow a blaze to spread rapidly.
Infrastructure standards were decades out of date, and insufficient attention was paid to keeping populated areas free of combustible vegetation that feeds fires. And it said the emergency response to the blaze once it broke out was uncoordinated.
“Maui county incident management operations … consisted of a siloed command structure that contributed to a lack of communication both to the public and responding agencies.”
The report, which was published online alongside more than 850 gigabytes of material collected during the investigation, comes just over a year after the blaze, the deadliest in the United States in at least a century.
A legal settlement announced last month between victims’ representatives and a coalition of the state of Hawaii, Maui county, and Hawaiian Electric will see US$4 billion paid out for losses.
Hawaii Governor Josh Green has previously said recovery from the devastation would cost US$12 billion and could take years.
Attorney General Anne Lopez said the report was not intended to lay blame, but instead to improve the way that Hawaii as a whole prepared for extreme events.