Hawaii town residents take on wildfire protection

By Brittany Peterson
Associated Press

MAUI, Hawaii — In the days after a wildfire ripped through a rural neighborhood in the Maui mountain town of Kula, residents were determined to do what they could to prevent a repeat. With donated hoses and some impromptu training, some even learned how to open a standpipe to attack flames themselves if needed.

It’s part of a self-reliance mindset that took hold after the blaze last August, when the Upcountry fire destroyed 19 homes. Since that blaze, which had firefighters trucking in water from elsewhere because of a loss in system pressure, the people of Kula are determined to do all they can to be ready for next time.

“Anyone around who sees something, you’re on duty,” said Mark Ross, who lost a rental property where he had planned to retire with his wife. Ross, who is among residents who learned how to tap the standpipe from a retired fireman using donated hoses to stamp out hot spots for months after the fire, called the training “kind of a lifeline for everybody who still lives in that neighborhood.”

The fire that hit Kula was far smaller than the one that devastated the historic town of Lahaina, about 24 miles (about 38 kilometers) away. At least 102 people died in Lahaina, the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century, and thousands of homes burned.

But what’s happened in Kula in the year since has been a lesson in community-led recovery. Residents stood watch for months to protect their homes from flare-ups as roots smoldered underground. They cleared debris. They installed cameras to watch for signs of future fires. And they’re working to restore burned forests, including launching a nursery for native plants aimed at reintroducing a native ecosystem to an area that had been overtaken by thirsty invasive trees.

“They’re building infrastructure, but the beautiful thing is at the same time, they’re building social infrastructure,” said Rebecca Solnit, author of “A Paradise Built in Hell,” about the aftermath of disasters. “They’re deepening community and that is a major source of safety in a disaster.”

Kyle Ellison started a nonprofit after the fire, Malama Kula, that organizes volunteers to meet Kula fire victims’ immediate needs like clearing debris. It also bought and installed two advanced smoke detection cameras to watch over the town — a tool that Hawaiian Electric began installing across the entire island around the same time, and is widely used in California.

“We’re not going to wait for people to say it’s OK for us to do things,” said Ellison, who watched flames last year come within 10 feet of the home he was renting. “The community is just going to take action to protect ourselves.”

Residents are also urging officials to safeguard their water system and its pressure. Kula’s pipes ran dry last year because key pumps had no backup power when they lost electricity — a common vulnerability for towns across the United States. After last August’s fire, the Maui Department of Water Supply rented three generators for the Kula system. They kicked in during an outage last month to maintain water pressure, said department director John Stufflebean. The department is in a lengthy process of purchasing seven generators that will be distributed across the island, still about a year away, he said.

Residents have also been quick to flag any apparent weaknesses in the system. Scott Martin said he discovered a small pipe leaking on Pulehuiki, a narrow country road that slices through the heart of Kula, five months ago and reported it multiple times. He’s dismayed the leak only just got fixed last week.

The Upcountry water system, where Kula is located, leaks about 21% of its total supply, the agency said, above the national average of 14%. Stufflebean called that level “unremarkable” given the steep terrain, rocky soil and aging infrastructure, and said they had to wait on parts to fix the leak Martin reported.

“Welcome to Maui,” Stufflebean quipped when asked about the parts delay.

For Sara Tekula, executive director of the Kula Community Watershed Alliance, such stories reinforce why Kula residents need to be proactive: “We have to link arms, and sometimes they need us to remind them and hold them accountable,” she said.

She helps lead a nonprofit that formed weeks after the fire to restore about 100 acres of native forest where invasive black wattle and eucalyptus trees burned across dozens of private properties in Kula. Restoring private forests falls outside the scope of responsibility for local, state or federal agencies, although individual landowners can apply for grants through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The charred trees will soon be cleared and replanted with species that thrived on Maui more than a century ago — koa, mamane, a’ali’i and ohi’a— before newcomers introduced thirsty trees from drier climates.

By the time federal officials arrived to determine how they could help, the nonprofit had held community meetings and worked out a strategy and a budget. Todd Ellsworth, a U.S. Forest Service post-fire and disaster recovery coordinator who met with the group, called their work “pretty remarkable.”

After raising $1.6 million in federal funds and private grants, the nonprofit is ready to break ground on a nursery for native plants and bought fencing to keep invasive deer from noshing seedlings in the young forest. They expect to begin planting during this winter’s rainy season, and Tekula hopes Kula residents will feel some relief in the coming months as they see the land begin to heal.

It will take years and additional funding to manually remove invasive seedlings as they grow, said Joe Imhoff, who is Tekula’s husband and, with more than a decade of experience restoring a 42-acre native forest near last year’s burn site, is serving as project advisor. Volunteers can do some of the weeding, but trained contractors will be needed to handle some dangerous work that requires rappelling into steep terrain.

But after a few years, the leaf canopy will begin to fill out and block light from invasive seedlings, which then won’t require as much manpower to suppress, Imhoff said. The native plants more effectively capture rainwater and moisture from fog than invasives, and they return more of the moisture to the environment, too — an aid in reducing fire risk.

Imhoff said hoping someone else will fix the problem doesn’t feel like an option.

“In the face of climate change and ecological collapse, the time is now to take care of our backyards around the whole country,” Imhoff said.