For the past three months, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been running computer models that gauge how quickly people might have escaped the deadly Aug. 8 wildfire in Lahaina if alternate routes were available.
That federal work aims to support Maui County leaders, including its fire chief and public works director, as they grapple with how to best prevent the traffic gridlock that trapped so many people fleeing the fast-moving blaze from ever happening again.
Corps officials expect their Lahaina computer modeling, which uses software called LifeSim, to be done sometime in the next two months. Their goal is to help the county prioritize which roads it should widen or extend first for emergency access, as part of the larger rebuilding process.
County leaders are striving to strike a balance that can make Lahaina safer and more resilient after the fire without preventing its residents in older, working-class and largely multigenerational neighborhoods from rebuilding and resuming their lives.
Corps officials say their report will include recommendations to improve safety conditions for residents and drivers on Kuhua Street, where about a third of the wildfire’s 101 known victims were found.
Kuhua currently dead-ends to the north, near the Kahoma Stream. To the west, drivers are blocked in by a gated fence. On Aug. 8, those fleeing had no choice but to head into the path of the fire. They were still boxed in, however, by a downed mango tree blocking the street and stalled traffic on Lahainaluna Road.
Many of the victims discovered on narrow Kuhua Street, part of Lahaina’s Kuhua Camp neighborhood, were found in vehicles. That includes the youngest person known to perish in the fire, 7-year-old Tony Takafua.
“Obviously we’re going to try and identify some routes that would increase evacuation on that road,” said Tony Krause, an infrastructure system field coordinator with the Corps who’s currently working on Maui.
If a similar disaster occurs, he said, “I would be very surprised if that didn’t save some lives.”
Meanwhile, Maui fire personnel say they’re doing their own analysis using satellite imagery and site visits to flag any Lahaina roadways they deem too narrow.
The homeowners along those roads would not be eligible to obtain a building permit under a proposed 15-day process that’s currently before the Maui County Council for final approval, according to Jared Molina, the county’s public works director.
County planning and public works officials say they hope the expedited building permit will enable many homeowners who lost their properties in the Aug. 8 fire to rebuild more quickly. It would only be available for single-family homes that were damaged or destroyed, and it would not necessarily be available to homes that lie in special coastal, flood or historic zones.
It’s not clear when Maui fire officials’ work to identify the areas that need road-widening for proper emergency access and evacuation will be done, but that effort, similar to that of the Corps, will likely flag Kuhua Street and older areas with narrow roads.
The Maui Fire Department needs local roads to be at least 20 feet wide for its trucks to navigate and deploy their ladders, Fire Chief Brad Ventura told the council.
The roadways in Kelawea Mauka, an area just east and uphill of the Kuhua Camp neighborhood, are only about 20 feet wide and lack shoulders to accommodate the cars that park on the street there, Molina told council members last week.
At the very least, the county might have to enforce against on-street parking in some older, crowded areas — particularly where the roads are 20 feet wide and don’t have shoulders. Many residents in those areas have depended on the street parking.
Tamara Paltin, who represents Kuhua Camp and the greater West Maui area on the County Council, said a lot more outreach and input is needed from residents on what street improvements they might support for the sake of better evacuation.
Some of those residents, she said, might support proposals that they weren’t open to before the fire now that they’ve experienced the danger firsthand and want to feel safe.
“I know a lot of people get triggered every time it gets windy,” Paltin said. “It’s difficult because we need to be having these targeted conversations right now. People are thinking about redesigning their homes. They need to know the dimensions of their lot, what the frontage is going to be.”
Gates Instead Of Access Roads
Maui County pursued a project over a decade ago that would have extended Kuhua Street past its current dead end and connected it to Keawe Street, a major Lahaina thoroughfare.
The “Kuhua Street Extension” would have connected that narrow, residential road to Honoapiilani Highway with new access roads that cut south through the old Pioneer Mill property and adjacent industrial sites.
The project got its final environmental assessment in 2015 but then appears to have stalled. Maui County communications officials, including its new public affairs director, Laksmi Abraham, did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week on what happened to the proposed extension.
Kirk Boes, who’s lived at the end of Kuhua for nearly a decade, said the project mainly aimed to serve as an alternative route for whenever there was a bad traffic accident on Honoapiilani.
Had the full two-mile extension actually been built it would have led to far more traffic on Kuhua — which many residents there didn’t want to see. But the project also would have led to the installation of curbs, gutters, sidewalks and a divider between the two lanes, Boes said.
On Aug. 8, as the fire spread, a fire access gate that separated Kuhua from the Kaanapali Land Management Corp.-owned industrial property to the west remained locked, Boes said. Some people trapped on Kuhua in their cars and trucks attempted to ram through that gate to flee west through the industrial zone, but they weren’t successful, Boes said.
It’s not clear who controlled the fire gate. Kaanapali Land Management Corp. did not return requests for comment Monday.
‘Everything Is A Very Difficult Conversation’
Krause said the Corps’ LifeSim software was designed for flooding hazards but could be used to simulate wildfires.
The program aims to model people’s behavior once they’re informed of a hazard and decide that they need to evacuate, he said.
A two-person crew in the Corps’ Davis, California, risk management center is conducting the modeling, Krause said. LifeSim doesn’t specifically design a new road or where it would go, he added. Instead, the model provides more of a general exit from one point to another, in which dots representing people can get to a safe area.
Paltin, meanwhile, said she’s heard some Lahaina community members propose land swaps with either the state or county to ease some of the strain of the crowded neighborhoods such as Kuhua Camp. Under that idea, maybe five or six willing owners from the neighborhood would get a transfer of rights to build on land currently owned by the state or county.
That idea hasn’t been weighed by any government enitities yet though, she said.
“Everything is a very difficult conversation,” Paltin said. “We want to build back more resilient and not have another disaster like this.”
Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.
