Live Like the World is Dying—S1E100

Report From Maui with Brooke

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke gives a report on how things have been going in Maui after the fire in Lahaina this summer.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I’m your host for today, Brooke Jackson, bringing you a special mini-episode of our podcast to share an update on Maui. 

Before I get into that, I have to celebrate our membership in the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by tossing to a little jingle from one of our friends…

(Jingle) 

And we’re back. 

I recently visited the Hawaiian island of Maui – mostly for vacation, but while I was there I also wanted to see how things were going after the wildfires that had captured the headlines a few months ago.

In case you missed it, we talked about the fires on our September 4th episode - that’s episode number 85 – when we did our monthly apocalyptic news review. 

To briefly recap: on August 8th of this year several wildfires erupted on the island of Maui. The fire in the Lahaina district got the most media attention, but there were also fires in central and south Maui, including Upper Kula and East Kihei. The cause of the Lahaiia fire was a spark from a downed power line. This was probably the cause of the other fires on Maui, but that hasn’t been officially declared.

In either case, the power lines were knocked down by the 60-to-90 mile per hour winds ripping through the island from a nearby hurricane. The winds helped grow and spread the fires quickly.

About 7,000 acres across the island were burned. It was the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, with 99 people confirmed dead. Even as of today there are still four people unaccounted for. The fire victims were all in the Lahaina district; they ranged in age from seven years old to 97, and while there were a few children who were lost to the fire, most of the people were older adults. The average age of the victims is 65 years old.

The pictures and video from Maui after the fires showed the immense destruction to the city of Lahaina. Before I visited, I was under the impression that basically the entire town had been lost. But when I drove there to see things in person, I was surprised by how much is still standing, at least how much is still standing in contrast to the pictures that came out immediately after the fires.

I don’t say that to downplay the destruction – there are residential blocks that are completely gone. But there are also areas where the fire seems to have skipped around, or perhaps where some of the structures were better built to withstand the conditions. And there was more greenery than I expected. 

Now, a note on geography and names in Maui: There is a town called Lahaina, and it resides in a broader geographical area that is called the district of Lahaina. The size of the district varies by government agency - there’s school districts, water districts, political boundaries, that kind of thing - so for my purposes I when I refer to the Lahaina district, I’m referring to the geographic and social boundaries around Lahaina town.

For the first two months immediately after the fire in Lahaina, the whole of West Maui was closed – this includes a large resort area north of Lahaina. It’s where a lot of the really fancy, high-end hotels are located. Even people who lived in Lahaina were unable to return to the area until six weeks after the fires. As of right now, the town is still closed to everyone but residents. The road entrances are blocked off and monitored, and there is temporary privacy fencing around most of the town. There are also clear signs hanging on the fencing and at the entrances that say “Residents Only,” “Keep Out,” “Let Lahaina Heal,” and so forth. 

When you drive to Lahaina from the south or east of the island, the highway splits around the town of Lahaina. The original highway went through the town into the flat area near the ocean. Ten years ago the state completed a bypass highway that goes around the east side of the town, and it’s on a hillside so you can look over much of the town as you drive and see some of what’s going on there without violating the local requests for privacy.

There are shocking pockets of normalcy as you drive the edge of the town. For instance, there is a functioning, seemingly untouched, gas station right next to the highway, and just beyond it is a grocery store. I parked at the grocery store to buy a few things and try to talk with some people. The store seemed to be just fine and business-as-usual, as did the gas station, with people working, customers coming and going. 

Yet the temporary fencing started at the end of the store’s parking lot because the next building over from the grocery store wasn’t a building anymore, it was just a twisted mess of blackened metal beams and piles of rubbish. Beyond it there was a huge block of red-and-black dirt where only the foundation stones of houses remain. Then further out still, there was a set of apartments or condos that appear to be entirely untouched by fire, with newer cars parked in the lot as though it might be occupied with residents. 

All over the town, the pattern repeats. There is a Safeway grocery store right on the ocean – it was humming along; again, cars coming and going, busy parking lot. And immediately to the north of it the residential neighborhoods are wiped out. Gone. 

You can see various trees popping up over the privacy fencing all around town, some trees in good health and others half-burned, looking worse for the wear. There are homes that look fine right next to houses where only the chimney remains. On the far side of the bypass highway, there’s a newer neighborhood of homes that is completely untouched overlooking some of the worst of the scorched earth.

It’s a head trip to see this in person. And if you want to get a sense of it, Google maps satellite view is updated over Lahaina to show what this looks like. So you can take a look at that and you can see a single solid roof standing out in the middle of a bunch of burned buildings. You can look at that Safeway, for instance, see how it’s there and fine, and the neighborhoods beyond it are gone. Again, it’s a real head trip. 

In the central and upcountry parts of the island, the story repeats. On a different day I was driving down the mountain, Haleakala, after a sunrise hike, and I was driving toward the south coast. I passed through the areas of Upper Kula and Olinda, where about 1,300 acres burned, at least 20 homes were destroyed, and hundreds of other structures were damaged at the same time as the Lahaina fire. 

I was coming up on a hairpin turn in the road, and I noticed that in the crook of this hairpin there was a huge pile of landscape debris – dirt, tree stumps and branches and brush – and the pile was at least twice as high as my vehicle, which struck me as odd. But as soon as I came around this turn, I saw ahead of me a section of houses that were completely gone. There were one or two houses on the right side of the road, solid and normal, and then a massive gap that exposed a valley area where the fire had clearly burned its way down the mountain, taking down homes and trees along with it.

Unlike in Lahaina, where the is still a ton of rubble and wreckage everywhere, the area in Upper Kula was nearly done being cleared. The total devastation in the upcountry is valued at about half a billion dollars, versus the devastation in the Lahaina district is closer to five-and-a-half or six billion dollars.

Work to clear the upcountry is progressing much faster than in Lahaina. For me, this raised question of bias: is FEMA or the EPA or the local government or private contractors favoring Kula because it is more affluent and/or because it is one of the whitest residential neighborhoods on the island?

But what it really comes down to is a matter of scale and complexity. The Lahaina fires decimated major infrastructure and utilities, and many more structures in total, than the upcountry fires.

It only took the EPA one month in Kula to complete what they call “Phase I” removal, which is taking out and disposing of hazardous materials like pesticides, batteries, and gas cylinders. The assessment for “Phase II” removal in the region is also finished, and the Phase II work might even be underway by the time you listen to this episode. In the second phase, the rest of the fire damage is removed – ash, debris, and so forth. Once completed, control of the land will fully return to its residents and they can start planning and rebuilding.

Meanwhile in Lahaina, the EPA has only just barely finished Phase I. In fact, they announced at the end of November, just after I got home from my trip, that they have finished Phase I removal. The initial expectation for the work was that it would take several months or even a year to do that work, but thankfully it progressed much faster. It was definitely aided by the federal government – the Biden administration – declaring they would cover all the costs of the cleanup. That cut out huge logistical and financial hurdles to getting the work started and completed.

Now Lahaina had – and still has – a lot of factors complicating the cleanup and rebuilding. Perhaps the most emotionally significant component is the consideration that there were still human remains of fire victims in Lahaina while the EPA completed the Phase I work. There’s a difficult balance of wanting to respect those remains, of course, and also the risk of hazardous contamination. You would, of course, want to have your grandfather’s remains returned to you, but if those remains are contaminated, toxic, hazardous, you don’t want to risk cancer, illness or even death from receiving those remains. So again, there is a real emotionally complex balance there. 

In addition, Lahaina is a place of cultural and historical significance. Before the Hawaiian islands were united under a single ruler, each island had its own leader or set of leaders – these are called the ali’i. The capital of the island of Maui was Lahaina town. One of the people I talked with on my trip was an older resident of the island who said that many of Maui’s ali’i from before unification were buried in the hillside above Lahaina town – they were laid to rest at the foot of the mountain.

After all of the islands were united, Lahaina became the capital of the entire Hawaiian kingdom. There is a graveyard in Lahaina town where the first kings and queens of Hawaii were buried. 

To the native people of the island, Lahaina represents a melting pot of sorts of all the islands, a place where cultural confrontations and changes took place; and you could literally see the evolution of Maui - and all of Hawaii - in the different buildings and architecture of Lahaina before the fires. 

So there’s an additional layer of tragedy and loss due to the fires, and it complicates the restoration process. I’m really impressed with how the EPA has managed this concern: They created a monitoring program which included cultural awareness training for all of the EPA staff, all of their sub-contractors, and all other federal workers doing the Phase I work and now the Phase II work. The EPA also hired a couple dozen local residents to work strictly as cultural monitors, working on site directly with the cleanup teams. So each cleanup team working in various parts of Lahaina has a local resident on the team to help watch out for cultural and historical sites and artifacts. 

Another factor that complicated both Phase I removal, and will complicate Phase II removal, in Lahaina is the risk of toxic runoff, particularly into the town’s western neighbor, the Pacific ocean. In the edges of the town I was able to visit, I noticed they installed a sheet of filtering membrane over the storm drains and surrounded them with sandbags, of a sort. It wasn’t really a sandbag, but it was of similar size and filled with materials that would help catch and filter debris to keep it out of the storm drain.

in the waters around Maui – and all of the islands - there is a tremendous amount of biodiversity. There are turtles, dolphins, whales, sea lions, sharks; there are a lot of places with coral; there is abundant aquatic plant life; and all kinds of fish and crustaceans – just a ton of living entities in and around the waters that would be affected by contamination into the ocean.

I like to snorkel, and I visited beaches in several places along Maui’s west coast during my trip, from the northwestern tip in Honolua, to Kapalua and Napili bays, out to Molokini crater, and down to Kihei, Wailua and Makena on the south coast. From the northwestern tip down to at least Kihei, you can see the ash in the water. The ash was washing up on the beaches, leaving black lines and debris in the sand. If you’ve ever been to a beach after an oil spill, you can see a similar kind of thing were the waves washing up on the beach leave these black lines.

The visibility in the water was quite low almost everywhere. The one spot I visited on the whole western coast that didn’t appear to be affected by ash and debris was Little Beach, which is down toward the southwestern end of the island.

After it cleared each property in Lahaina of hazardous waste, the EPA applied a soil stabilizer to try and keep more of that ash from getting whipped into the air or washed into the ocean. Oh, and there’s a fun fact: Maui does not have a landfill that is certified to handle hazardous waste; it’s all being shipped to the West Coast. So the electronics, paint, flammable liquids, batteries – from AAA to electric vehicles to solar powerwalls – the asbestos, lead, pesticides, acids etc… all that toxic shit is on barges crossing the ocean, headed for disposal at places here on turtle island.

The next phase of cleanup will involve taking out all of the big items from Lahaina. The work will have to be done carefully to keep more ash and smaller debris from getting into the air and water.

Something like 2,000 structures were damaged by the fire, so we’re talking about really big items from a big number of properties on a fairly small island. The rubble that needs to get hauled away includes concrete foundations and burned timber framing; blackened car carcasses, and the mangled leftovers of household furnishings and belongings.

So the local government has decided to build a new landfill on Maui specifically and exclusively for Phase II debris removal from Lahaina. The landfill is very urgently needed, so the typical many-year process of citing and permitting a landfill is being expedited. (I can’t imagine that expediting that will cause a problem down the road…) The decision to build a new landfill was and is very contentious. If you want to learn more about this, you can look up news articles. One local resident said to me that she’s glad the debris will remain on Maui because it belongs to the island. 

Let’s look ahead now, to the future: There is and will be a lot of contention about how Maui and Lahaina should move forward in healing and rebuilding. Initially after the fires, Hawaii asked people not to visit Maui, and all of West Maui was closed. The early sentiment was, “Stay Away: Let Maui Heal.”

That attitude has shifted for some, with the governor and state travel agency practically begging people to come visit. Their attitude now is, “Help Maui Heal: Come Visit!” And there’s good reason they feel this way: The island’s economy is painfully  dependent on tourism. Something like 70 percent of every dollar of revenue is generated by visitors to the island. But travel to Maui is only about two-thirds normal levels right now. 

Lahaina was a huge part of the draw to Maui. But Lahaina town is basically gone. What little remains is closed and will remain closed for an indefinite period.

Although the cleanup is moving faster than expected so far, the road to rebuilding will still be quite long. As I mentioned earlier, the fire damaged critical infrastructure, not the least of which is the electrical system. 

After a disaster like this which disrupts powerlines, it’s not uncommon for electrical companies to go through quickly and install temporary measures to restore power, and then come back later to tidy things up.

There was evidence of this outside of Lahaina: Driving through Central Maui and East Kihei, where the other fires took place, you can see a lot of power poles that have been temporarily propped up, and the power lines themselves - some of them are very low hanging, here and there are big bundles of extra line that are looped up, waiting for the electric company to return and straighten things out. 

In Lahaina, there aren’t even power poles to prop up. They’re gone. So the town has some serious rebuilding to do, and they have some options: for instance, they can bury the power lines, which would reduce both the risk of power loss in a future windstorm or hurricane, and the risk of a downed line sparking a fire. But rising sea levels due to climate change could eventually cause problems to underground lines – like erosion. 

Another piece of basic infrastructure is access to potable water. The city’s main water line is intact, but it was heavily polluted during the fires. As you can imagine, the household and business water lines – both metal and plastic – burned and melted, and leached toxic chemicals into the water main. So that mainline needs to be flushed and tested, flushed and tested, many times until they get all of those chemicals out of it. 

Thankfully the mainline is buried deeply enough that it seems to be structurally sound. But all the branches off of it that provided water to homes and businesses were damaged. Some can be renovated, but most need to be replaced. And then there’s still a bigger question looming: “How much potable water should be diverted to Lahaina?” 

Let’s talk about the topography of most of the Hawaiian islands -it’s very similar on most islands, which results in nearly identical weather patterns. The eastern side of each island tends to be colder with a lot more stormy weather and heavy rainfall. Those stormfronts are dissipated as they break on the mountains, leaving the western side of the islands sunnier and drier. Those western sides then draw more of the tourism and development dollars - people want to go to the place that’s warm and sunny - but it often means water has to be diverted from the eastern side of the island to the west.

One of Maui’s residents said to me this way: “All of the fresh water that’s on Maui is all of the fresh water that’s available to Maui.” In other words, there’s a finite water supply on the island. That’s true for all of Hawaii: there is not a single, commercial-scale desalination plant on any of the islands. So they’re relying on the fresh water that comes via rain, or water shipped to those tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific ocean from places far away. Maui has been in historically severe drought conditions for the last couple of years, after more than a decade of declining average rainfall. 

So Lahaina faces these two fundamental infrastructure issues: water and power. Rebuilding both of them is complex and contentious in the face of climate change. 

If and when Maui is able to work through these issues and rebuild infrastructure, there will be another major hurdle: the availability of raw materials. By which I mean concrete, lumber, piping, insulations, fixtures, furnishings, and more. There will be a significant spike in demand for all of these things, which will need to be shipped to the tiny islands. Maybe I shouldn’t call them tiny, but then again, they are small. Maui is the size of Delewar, smaller than Rhode Island. They’re not massive islands, and they are very remote. I think some of the most remote islands in the world, if memory serves.

So, -iIf something like 2,000 buildings were damaged in Lahaina, and they are all going to be replaced, we can conservatively estimate that 2,000 new bathrooms and kitchens will need to be built. Maui will need to import 2,000 toilets, for instance.

It’s not just the raw materials that will be in high demand: Maui will also need skilled laborers like carpenters and plumbers and electricians. So that’s another point of bottleneck which will slow down rebuilding by months or even years. 

That’s… a long road.

Back to the here and now: the people who lived in Lahaina are displaced, most of them still without permanent housing. About 7,000 people are in temporary residences like hotels. Immediately after the fire, hotels across the island welcomed the displaced residents and gave them shelter. As the island re-opened to tourism, hotels began reducing the number of rooms available for survivors, with some, like the Ritz Carlton in Maui, ending their temporary shelter arrangements entirely.

Housing is outrageously expensive in Maui – the prices there are something like double the average cost of housing in the continental U.S. which (as we all know) is already unaffordable and overpriced. It’s twice as bad in Maui. The housing supply has only gotten tighter and prices have increased more since the fires – there’s that classic capitalistic response to an increase in demand: price gouging. 

FEMA seems to be working very hard on the housing problem. They have distributed funds to victims to help them with relocation and ongoing rent costs; they are working with hotels and other short-term rentals like Air BnB to expand housing options for the next 1-2 years. They’ve expanded their current programs and they’ve added new programs to help with the fact that this situation is different from some of the other disasters they’ve faced. There’s another program – I think it’s a state program – offering monthly support to homeowners who allow Lahaina’s survivors to live with them. So if a couple someone has a spare room, or something like that, they could invite a single person or a couple, etc., to live with them, and they would get a small stipend for doing that.

What I hope is that we’re not doomed to repeat in Maui the problems we saw in the years after the Camp fire destroyed Paradise, California. The nearby towns first welcomed and later resented the survivors who moved in. Five years later, only 20 percent of the structures in Paradise have been rebuilt and only a third of the population has returned.

I’d like to think we learned something from that, but I’m not so sure. 

For my part, I chose to visit Maui on my vacation hoping that my few tourism dollars could help the economy, and that while I was there I could find some other ways to help, too. 

More than anything, I wanted to show solidarity and support for Lahaina town. I took along a small vial of moon water that I made at home, on the west coast of Turtle Island. I wanted to give that water to the roots of the magnificent banyan tree in Lahaina town, with a prayer from one displaced Indigenous nation to another. It was not meant to be, and that’s ok. I did take my moon water from the lands of the Kalapuya to a grove of banyan trees farther north, and gave it to the roots there, and talked with those trees awhile about the pain on their island.

Now that I’m home, I’m researching ways to help from afar. In addition to financial support, there are organizations in Maui accepting donations of supplies, and there are autonomous efforts to help homeowners keep their property. For instance, there is at least one group tracking and cataloging realtor attempts at land-grabbing. 

If you’re interested in helping out, please do a search for “how to help Lahaina” and you will find more information on the various initiatives. Your contribution could be as simple as writing a letter to the governor of Hawaii, encouraging a moratorium on foreclosures in Maui during this time. 

The road of recovery is long. May we contribute to the healing. Mahalo and migwetch.

If you would like to know more about the work of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness – the publishing collective behind this podcast – please check out our website at tangled wilderness dot org. You can also interact with us on Instagram and what use-to-be Twitter. You can reach me directly on Mastodon at Ogemakwe Brooke. that’s Brooke with an E.

Live Like the World is Dying is one of several podcasts we produce, in addition publishing books, essays, short stories, art, games, and more.

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SOURCES

www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a44794650/lahaina-hawaii-royal-history

www.civilbeat.org/2023/11/epa-completes-fire-related-cleanup-on-maui

www.epa.gov/newsreleases/us-epa-begins-hazardous-material-removal-work-lahaina-today

www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/travel/maui-tourism-open-lahaina-wildfire.html

www.civilbeat.org/2023/11/it-will-be-years-before-clean-water-is-restored-in-lahaina

www.vox.com/2023/10/6/23898399/maui-reopening-wildfires-hawaii-tourism-displaced-residents