NFPA Journal - Summer 2024 - 30

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30 | NFPA JOURNAL * SUMMER 2024
n December, I traveled to Hawaii with an
NFPA team that spent a week conducting
wildfire preparation trainings, as well
as informational meetings for elected
leaders and fire officials. The events
were held on Maui and the big island of
Hawaii, and I was especially interested
to see how the devastating fires on Maui
last August were affecting the island's
residents, thousands of whom remained
displaced and living out of hotel rooms.
It didn't take long to get an introduction.
I flew into Kahului Airport on
Maui's north coast and arranged an Uber to my hotel
in Wailea, a community roughly 20 minutes south
down the Pi'ilani Highway. My driver, Rey, arrived
in his black SUV, and I found myself apologizing to
him almost immediately-I wouldn't be much of a
conversationalist, I warned him, considering that
the trip, my first-ever to Hawaii, had taken about
17 hours from Boston and had left me exhausted.
" Don't worry about it, " he replied with a grin.
Rey was 40-ish with a laid-back manner and an
easy smile. He seemed to enjoy the role of tour guide.
We pulled out of the airport and he pointed out
Haleakal, the dormant volcano that towers over the
eastern side of the island at an elevation of more
than 10,000 feet. Rey told me he'd lived on Maui
for over 30 years, arriving with his family from their
native Philippines during a particularly chaotic
period in that country in the 1980s.
Just south of the airport, the landscape was broad
and open, dominated by expanses of tall driedbrown
grasses. Rey gestured to a stretch of grass and
explained that the land had once been part of a sugar
cane operation that had closed over a decade ago.
The land, now untended, was overgrown with dry
vegetation that swayed beneath the bright blue sky.
I was relatively new to NFPA, but I already knew that
vegetation like this was euphemistically referred to
as " fuel " in fire-service terminology. I also knew that
grasses similar to these had helped feed and propel
the wildfire that blew out of the hills above the Maui
town of Lahaina in August, destroying much of the
community and killing at least 100 people.
Almost directly across the road was a contrasting
scene: lush, well-tended rows of trees that
stretched well beyond the highway. This land had
also once been part of a large-scale growing operation- " pineapples, "
Rey said-but, like the former
sugar cane land, had been shut down and allowed to
go dormant. Recently, though, Rey said, it had been
reclaimed as an organic citrus farm.
As I would learn during my week in Hawaii, challenges
around land management underlie wildfire
concerns throughout the islands, many of which face
significant wildfire risk. The trainings I was here to
observe-NFPA's two-day Assessing Structural Ignition
Potential for Wildfire (ASIP) course, which would
be conducted on both Maui and Hawaii-focused on
preventing structure loss to wildfire, but the backdrop
was a landscape that proportionately sees as much
or more acreage burned by wildfire as many western
U.S. states. The week's events were the brainchild of
two progressive young fire chiefs: Maui County's Brad
Ventura, whose firefighters were in the eye of the
storm during those gut-wrenching days in August,
and Hawaii County's Kazuo Todd, whose department
was fighting six wildfires of its own as the Maui wildfires
raged. Both chiefs wanted to be more proactive
about protecting their communities and firefighters
and had invited NFPA to assist. NFPA provided the
Hawaii training at no cost to participants.
This critical preparation took place alongside
ongoing recovery efforts on Maui. In addition to the
questions of how to begin rebuilding Lahaina and
what to do with its thousands of displaced residents,
there was an ongoing investigation by the state's
attorney general into the response to the wildfire by
three public agencies, as well as a flood of television
advertisements from personal injury lawyers offering
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