HONOLULU– More than half a year after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century devastated a historic Maui town, authorities are still trying to determine exactly what went wrong and how to avoid similar catastrophes in the future. But two reports released this week are filling in some of the gaps.
The latest is a detailed timeline of the fire that ripped through the heart of Lahaina on August 8, 2023, killing 101 people. Released Wednesday by Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez, it is the first phase of a comprehensive three-part investigation led by the Fire Safety Research Institute, or FSRI, with more to come in the coming months.
The day before, the Maui Fire Department released an after-action report produced by the Western Fire Chiefs Association. It detailed the challenges facing the department, as well as more than 100 recommendations for improvements.
Here are the key findings from the reports:
A large wind storm downed power lines and utility poles in Lahaina, and the first fire of the day started when an energized power line broke and hit dry brush. But firefighters and police received mixed messages about whether Hawaiian Electric had de-energized the lines, according to the FSRI report.
In the early afternoon – before the initial fire returned and began to engulf the city – a utility employee told firefighters that he could not confirm whether the lines were de-energized. It wasn’t until the homes began to catch fire that dispatchers arrived at Hawaiian Electric and got confirmation that the power was out.
The report also described a breakdown in communications between police, firefighters and other emergency officials. Cellular networks were down, and police and firefighters used separate channels that public officials and others could not hear. Overloaded dispatchers had single operators trying to monitor five or six channels at once.
Residents and tourists had no way to receive emergency alerts or communicate with loved ones, and 911 operators were inundated with calls. One of the operators was off the island and did not receive geographic location information on calls and therefore did not know where to send people fleeing the flames.
Meanwhile, the head of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, Herman Andaya, was off the island at a work conference and was regularly receiving texts and calls from officials about the rapidly changing fires. After a series of evacuations in Lahaina, he asked his assistant if he should return home but was told that “it may look like everything is fine,” according to the report. A few hours later, after much of the city had been burned, Andaya said he would return home the next morning.
A police after-action report earlier this year also identified communications challenges and recommended that a senior officer be placed in the island’s communications center during future emergencies.
Firefighters thought they had put out the early morning blaze, which started near a part of the city far from the ocean. But less than 40 minutes after they left the scene, the flames reignited, quickly spreading from house to house in a nearby neighborhood.
Wind gusts that still downed power lines pushed burning embers and debris toward Lahaina.
As firefighters and other emergency personnel struggled to evacuate homes and get people to safety, dark smoke at times reduced visibility to nearly zero. Roads that were not blocked by trees, poles or power lines were jammed with traffic that sometimes came to a standstill.
But the time people would have had to escape would likely have been short, even if the roads had been all clear: Within 90 minutes, spot fires were burning all the way to the ocean, according to the FSRI report, and spreading north and south. .
Some people died in their cars. Others jumped into the ocean to escape the flames. Still others abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot.
Firefighters risked their lives repeatedly — putting survivors into fire trucks to take them to safety, physically transporting victims away from danger and taking shelter behind their own disabled vehicles — according to Tuesday’s report -fair.
Many of the department’s crews and engines were already mobilized to fight other wildfires elsewhere on the island when Lahaina began to burn. Reserve fire engines used in emergencies were not fully stocked with equipment and valuable minutes were lost refueling them before they could be pressed into action.
The report also highlighted the lack of mutual aid agreements between Hawaii’s counties, which meant there was no standard way to request aid from neighboring islands. Agencies also didn’t have a plan for evacuating tourists and residents who didn’t speak English — and language barriers made it difficult for firefighters to warn some people about the need to flee.
FSRI investigators are still trying to obtain some records from the Maui Emergency Management Agency. Research program manager Derek Alkonis said Wednesday that he has requested incident activity logs and other records from MEMA on several occasions but has not yet received all the data.
Alkonis did not elaborate on what he called the agency’s “difficulty in obtaining information,” but said the reason “will be analyzed in subsequent reports.”
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is working on a report on the origin and cause of the fire on behalf of the Maui Fire Department. This report is not yet complete, but should be released in the coming months.
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Boone reported from Boise, Idaho; Keller of Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Lauer of Philadelphia. Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, Hallie Golden in Seattle, Anita Snow in Phoenix, and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed.
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