Lahaina’s deadly wildfire could be a chance to rebuild safer. But will it?

Like so many other Lahaina residents, Shannon I’i realized it was time to leave when she saw embers of fire flying toward her house. She got into her car, but she didn’t make it very far.

“It was just gridlock traffic,” she says. “I looked behind, and there’s a cloud of smoke getting closer and closer. People started to get out of their cars and run because it was getting close.”

Driven by extreme winds, the wildfire that descended on Lahaina a year ago became the deadliest U.S. fire in a century. The loss of 102 lives was largely the result of an evacuation effort that fell short, authorities have found. When alerts to evacuate were sent out via text message, the cell phone network was already down. Some residents ran into the ocean to escape the flames. About half of the fatalities were found in one neighborhood with narrow streets and dead ends.

Now, officials are taking steps to improve evacuations on Maui. New fire sensors and technology could help emergency managers be more responsive. The government is also planning several road construction projects to create more escape routes for some neighborhoods.

Still, providing adequate evacuation in Lahaina will require a harder conversation – since it involves acquiring private property to create exits out of neighborhoods. In the densely developed town, widening roads and constructing new ones may need land from homeowners who are in the process of rebuilding what they lost. The cost of new road projects is also often far more than cities can afford, especially while recovering from a disaster.

With more than 2,000 homes and buildings destroyed, some see a chance to make Lahaina more resilient to future disasters. But as many communities hit by wildfires have found, a clean slate to start over isn’t actually a clean slate.

Some residents say that tough discussion about whether Lahaina should be rebuilt differently needs to be had, in order to feel safe again.

“One of my biggest fears is we’re going to just build back, and we’ll be in the same position,” I’i says. “I don’t want this to happen again. I don’t want to lose any more of my community.”

A chaotic evacuation

Life over the last year has been non-stop for I’i and her family. After losing their home, they had to find new temporary housing. I’i joined community meetings and local groups to advocate for Lahaina residents. Now, with the fire’s anniversary, she says the raw emotions are coming back.

“I continue to play back how everything happened that day,” she says. “In a blink of an eye, our lives changed forever. It’s still deep shock.”

The day of the fire, I’i made it through the evacuation traffic, but had no idea if her two daughters, both young adults, had made it out safely. They had evacuated ahead of her, but with cell service down, she couldn’t reach them. She sat in her car the whole night thinking of them, wide awake and watching the red glow of her town burning.

She eventually reunited with her daughters and her parents, who also lost their house in the fire. I’i’s family has ties in Lahaina for generations.

“I lost my childhood home, my high school home, the home where I went to visit my grandma,” she says. “All of my family lived in Lahaina. Basically, we lost our whole home, and I’m not talking about my house.”

As residents have started the long recovery process, many have raised questions at weekly community meetings about how Lahaina can be safer in the future. If the town is rebuilt from the ground up, will residents have a way out?

New evacuation technology

At the Maui Emergency Management Agency, administrator Amos Lonokailua-Hewett says their priority is finding new technology to address safer evacuations. He’s been on the job seven months, after a previous agency head resigned amid criticism that Lahaina’s network of warning sirens weren’t activated during the fire.

“We’re committed to improving,” Lonokailua-Hewett says. “Our county is working really, really hard collectively to improve all aspects of protecting our community.”

After consulting with emergency management experts, Lonokailua-Hewett says Maui will be switching to a zoned approach to evacuations, where residents are alerted sequentially so traffic can flow better. To detect wildfires earlier, a network of 80 wildfire sensors is being installed across the Hawaiian islands, which can sense fires through air chemistry. Hawaii’s electric utility, HECO, is also installing 78 wildfire cameras across the islands, which have 24-hour monitoring through AlertWest, a system also used by California.

Maui County is also in the process of getting technology to do real-time evacuation planning during an incident. The software evaluates how different zones should be evacuated and has a public-facing page, so residents can see their status.

Not enough evacuation routes

Still, even an efficient evacuation can fail if there aren’t enough roads to provide a way out. With Hawaii’s rugged mountains, many communities are only connected by a single highway or are surrounded by steep valleys.

“Close to 60 percent of our communities and subdivisions across the state only have one way in and out,” says Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a non-profit that has analyzed evacuation risk across Hawaii. “Our towns were built at a time when wildfire risk wasn’t front of mind.”

Many of the fatalities in Lahaina were found in Mill Camp (also known as Kuhua Camp), a neighborhood with narrow streets and few connections to main thoroughfares. It was originally constructed as worker housing for the main sugarcane producer in town, Pioneer Mill Company.

Maui officials have identified seven road connection projects that would help improve evacuation in Lahaina, several of which are in the Mill Camp neighborhood. Using modeling software from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an analysis found had they been in place during the August 8th fire, the evacuation time for 2,800 cars would have been cut in half.

New evacuation routes run into private property

One of the proposed road projects would go through private property, and Maui officials say they’re now in negotiations with the landowner. But for other evacuation improvements, there are tougher decisions still to come.

Some residents are eager to see a main thoroughfare out of Lahaina completed, known as the Lahaina Bypass. Currently, the bypass funnels traffic into downtown Lahaina, creating a bottleneck. The final $70 million section had been scheduled by state transportation officials, but has since been removed from their priority list due to funding constraints.

In Lahaina itself, many of the roads in Mill Camp are 20-feet wide, a minimum under the fire code for fire trucks to get access. But when cars are parked on the street, the road is too narrow. Widening the road could mean acquiring 8-foot sections of residents’ front yards. Many who lost homes in Mill Camp are already making plans to rebuild and given the smaller lot size in the neighborhood, losing land could affect the size of the home they're permitted to construct.

Maui county officials say there are no road widening projects currently in the works there, and discussions are being held with community members about what solutions they’d like to see.

“We’re not trying to take anybody’s property, but we could convince them that this would be in their benefit to be open to an exchange or a swap,” Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen told a community meeting. “If we’re ever going to have this discussion about improving the safety of Lahaina, now is the time to have that discussion. And these are tough discussions.”

Widening and redesigning roads can take years, potentially delaying when homeowners could rebuild on their properties. One question is whether the county government could provide housing for residents who are affected – and whether they’d be open to that.

“Many people want to get back to their house,” says Tamara Paltin, Maui councilmember. “But if we were able to give them a secure place to wait it out while we’re doing those things, would people feel differently?”

For some Lahaina residents, after the loss of their homes, efforts to improve evacuations so far are not enough.

“We have no evacuation spaces and even though they’re creating some, it’s still one way in and one way out,” I’i says. “Unfortunately, to me, there should be places where people shouldn’t be able to rebuild.”

Redrawing the map after a disaster

The challenges of improving evacuations in Lahaina are the same ones that many other disaster-struck communities have faced. With so much rebuilding to do, a disaster can be a crucial moment to re-envision how to keep residents safe. But while the buildings are gone, the property lines on the map are not.

After losing 90% of its structures in 2018, Paradise, California is still recovering from the Camp Fire. In the evacuation, roads in the mountainous town became congested. Many residents had harrowing escapes from the flames, and in all, 85 people died.

The town has spent the last six years rebuilding roads and infrastructure, and is now moving on to improving evacuation routes. One major project, the Roe Road extension, would create a new evacuation corridor at one end of town by connecting dead-end roads. The area is where many fatalities were found, especially those who died trying to escape in their cars.

The price tag is significant for a town that’s already stretched thin by a long recovery and lack of tax revenue, given how many residents had to relocate. The first two phases alone will cost $132 million, with three more phases of construction to follow.

“A lot of revenues are calculated through population, where communities are struggling just to provide day-to-day maintenance of their roads,” says Marc Mattox, public works director and town engineer of the town of Paradise. “The thought process of: are we going to build a brand new road, city-funded? That just was not even something in the realm of possibility, even pre-fire.”

Mattox says his staff has been working diligently to apply for federal and state grants. While some haven’t come through, the bulk of the funding for the first two phases has been secured, thanks to a federal grant for disaster recovery. The project is moving into the planning phase now.

Designing the new road will mean facing the next big challenge: determining what private property needs to be acquired. Mattox says through community workshops, they heard from residents loud and clear that evacuation is a priority. But that doesn’t mean every resident will be onboard.

“We are going to have to find willing, engaged property owners and go through the whole process of consultations and appraisals and fair market value,” Mattox says. “Ultimately, we depend on community engagement to release property, sell property to the town to build these projects for the benefit of overall community safety. So that is something that excites me, but it also is going to be a challenge.”

Mattox says the time post-disaster can be a powerful moment for the community to come together to heal and create a vision for the future. But that also can make it difficult to face some of the hardest decisions.

“It's extremely complex and almost maybe even more challenging, just because there's a lot of hurt,” he says. “There's a lot of sensitivity. There's a lot of displaced property owners that are hard to reach. That's taking a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of thought that goes into how to do it delicately and in the best interest of our town.”