Near the bottom of a color-coded chart, the state emergency management agency described the risk of wildfires to human life with a single word: “low.”
A year and a half later, the catastrophic fires that engulfed Maui and the historic town of Lahaina this week have already become the state’s deadliest natural disaster in more than six decades, with a fatality count of at least 80.
Other reports over the past five years show authorities knew the risk of fires was increasing and could be exacerbated by hurricane-force winds – like the Lahaina blaze was. “Fires occurring as a result of and concurrent with another major threat or disaster, such as a hurricane, are particularly challenging,”
While fires were historically sparked by volcanic eruptions and lightning strikes, the area burned in the state each year has dramatically increased over recent decades, according to aIn August 2018, brush fires broke out as Hurricane Lane neared Maui. The fires engulfed more than 2,000 acres and forced dozens to flee their homes.
“Hawaii has a big wildfire problem. We are on par with the most fire-prone states in the western continental US,” Nani Barretto, an executive director for the group, said during a webinar in May. “The impacts of fire are broad and long-lasting … There is a lot we can do to prevent them.” “When we are preparing for the hurricane, we expect rain, sometimes we expect floods,” Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke said at a press conference Wednesday. “We never anticipated that in this state that a hurricane which did not make impact on our islands would cause this type of wildfires.”
Maui’s geography, with towns hugging the coast surrounded by sparsely populated mountains and grasslands, also increases the risk from fires. In a foreshadowing of the difficulty residents faced evacuating from Lahaina, the Maui County report noted that “island communities are particularly vulnerable” to wildfires “because populations tend to be clustered and dependent on single highways, often located on the island edge.
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