Latest About the Maui Wildfires: Toxic Chemicals From Fires Threaten the Ocean (2024)

The latest:

• With rain forecast over Maui early this week, federal and local officials said Saturday that they were trying to keep toxic chemicals from the Lahaina fire from spreading to the ocean. They will use a gluelike substance to bind ash and debris in place while building silt fences near the coast and putting hay bales around storm drains to reduce the spread of pollution.

• The official death toll has reached 114 people and is expected to climb. So far, Maui County has publicly identified only six of the individuals, all of whom were over the age of 70. Children are believed to be among the dead, according to the Maui County police chief, but their names have not been released and may not have been determined yet.

• More than 175 people and 45 cadaver dogs are conducting searches, Gov. Josh Green said on Thursday. About 78 percent of the burn area — 3.5 square miles — had been searched as of Friday evening.

• The chief of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, Herman Andaya, resigned on Thursday a day after he defended not using outdoor alert sirens during the wildfires. Mr. Andaya cited health reasons in announcing his departure. Mayor Richard Bissen said Friday that Maui would replace him as quickly as possible.

Officials are coming under increasing scrutiny for how they handled the crisis on Maui, where a brush fire near the historic town of Lahaina exploded on Aug. 8 into the country’s deadliest wildfire in more than 100 years. Some people who were in the area said they were unaware that their lives were in danger until they saw the fast-moving flames bearing down on them.

Maui emergency officials did not use a system of 80 outdoor alert sirens to warn residents and tourists, and many people said that they did not receive cellphone alerts telling them to evacuate. By the time they realized they had to flee, the main highway connecting the town with the rest of the island was choked with traffic.

A day before Mr. Andaya resigned, he defended his agency’s decision not to use the sirens the afternoon of Aug. 8. He said on Wednesday that the outdoor alert system along the coastline has been used to direct people toward the hills to escape a tsunami, and that he feared that sounding the sirens this time would send many residents heading toward the flames.

With very little time to leave, some people never escaped their homes, and others died in their cars as they tried to flee. A number of desperate residents felt their best option was to jump into the ocean, where they clung to rocks and huddled together to survive.

If the first identifications of dead victims are an indication, the town’s older residents were at particular risk. Five of the six victims who have been publicly identified by officials were in their 70s; the sixth was 90 years old.

“Did mistakes happen? Absolutely,” Governor Green said of the official response at a news conference on Wednesday.

He said he ordered the state attorney general to begin a civil inquiry into the response, and defended the decision not to sound sirens. “The most important thing we can do at this point is to learn how to keep ourselves safer going forward,” he said.

The death toll seems certain to keep rising.

The toll of at least 114 deaths makes the fires on Maui one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history, and the nation’s deadliest wildfires since 1918, when blazes in northeast Minnesota killed hundreds of people.

Mr. Green has cautioned that the official death toll could go up significantly.

Dozens of people have also been injured, some critically.

The slow pace of identifying victims has been dictated, officials said, by the large-scale destruction and by Maui’s remoteness, which complicated the arrival of out-of-state search dog teams.

Displaced residents are being moved into hotels.

Emergency shelters, which housed more than 2,000 people the day after the fires broke out, now hold a few hundred. Officials are aiming by the end of next week to move everyone in the shelters to hotels, where they will be housed and fed through at least the spring. Governor Green said Friday evening that 2,000 housing units on Maui had been secured for people who had been displaced.

“We will be able to keep folks in hotels for as long as it takes to find housing solutions,” said Brad Kieserman, vice president for disaster operations and logistics at the American Red Cross.

County and federal aid efforts gathered pace over the last week, after frustrated residents in West Maui initially said that they were receiving far more help from an ad hoc network of charitable organizations and volunteers than they were from the government.

As of Friday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had approved more than $5.6 million in assistance to nearly 2,000 households on Maui and a one-time payment of $700 per household for clothing, food or transportation. The agency said that about 4,400 Hawaii fire survivors had applied for critical-need assistance as of Wednesday.

Kiilani Kalawe, 19, said that she was relieved to land a hotel room with her boyfriend and former Lahaina roommates. “It helps to distract our brains from everything,” she said. “At least we know we’ll be safe.”

What caused the fires?

No single cause has been determined, but experts said one possibility was that active power lines that fell in high winds had ignited a wildfire that ultimately consumed Lahaina.

Brush fires were already burning on Maui and the island of Hawaii on Aug. 8. Maui County officials informed residents that morning that a small brush fire in Lahaina had been completely contained, but they then issued an alert several hours later that described “an afternoon flare-up” that forced evacuations.

The fires on the islands were stoked by a combination of low humidity and strong mountain winds, brought by Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm hundreds of miles away.

Worsening drought conditions in recent weeks probably also contributed. Nearly 16 percent of Maui County was in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Law firms have begun filing lawsuits on behalf of victims, claiming that Hawaiian Electric, the state’s largest utility and the parent company of the power provider on Maui, is at fault for having power equipment that could not withstand heavy winds and keeping power lines electrified despite warnings of high winds.

At a news conference on Monday, Shelee Kimura, the chief executive of Hawaiian Electric, said the company did not have a shut-off program and contended that cutting the power could have created problems for people using medical equipment that runs on electricity. She also said turning off the power would have required coordination with emergency workers.

What’s next?

There are widespread fears that rebuilding will be difficult or impossible for many residents. State and local officials on Monday said that they would consider a moratorium on sales of damaged or destroyed properties, to prevent outsiders from taking advantage of the tragedy.

And the Hawaii Tourism Authority said visitors planning to travel to West Maui within the next several months should delay their trips or find another destination. Most of the 1,000 rooms in the area have been set aside for evacuees and rescue workers.

The hit to the tourism industry presents a major challenge to rebuilding the island’s economy.

A longer-term worry is the changing climate.

The area burned by wildfires in Hawaii each year has quadrupled in recent decades. Invasive grasses that leave the islands increasingly susceptible to wildfires and climate change have worsened dry and hot conditions in the state, allowing wildfires to spread more quickly, climatologists say.