Naka Nathaniel is an opinion columnist for Honolulu Civil Beat.
In Hawai’i this summer, we would glance at the news from the rest of the country and be grateful that we weren’t suffering under the extreme weather — heat domes, deluges or smoke-filled skies — that other parts of the world were experiencing. We remained sheltered in our corner of paradise.
But “paradise” was a marketing ploy, never the truth nor a guarantee.
Today, Hawai’i is reeling and in shock. The rising death toll — currently standing at 55 — from wildfires that are raging across Maui, is simply soul-crushing.
Maui County officials closed all roads to public use in the town of Lahaina as wildfires on the Hawaiian island burned out of control, driven by high winds that the Associated Press said gusted over 60 mph. Hurricane Dora has passed to the south of the islands at a distance of nearly 500 miles, but extreme conditions and violent winds across the islands resulted in numerous power outages late Tuesday; firefighters struggled to reach areas cut off by downed trees and powerlines.
The National Weather Service said Hurricane Dora’s winds knocked out power and grounded firefighting helicopters.
West Maui is closed off to all traffic, according to a CNN report from Maui County. Only emergency personnel are allowed access to that part of the island.
The BBC reported that some residents were forced to jump into the ocean ahead of racing flames; the Coast Guard said at least a dozen people were rescued from the water. Local media reported “apocalyptic scenes” in the historic town of Lahaina, parts of which were destroyed or severely damaged. The Lahaina fire is one of at least seven now burning in the state.
A local CBS affiliate reported that dozens of homes and businesses were destroyed on the western part of the island of Maui, the second largest and third most populated island in the state. HawaiiNewsNow reported that witnesses described apocalyptic scenes Tuesday. Residents say an overwhelmed fire force, fighting flames all day in powerful winds, could do little as flames ripped through Lahaina.
Videos from the island show the historic town’s main street and local businesses burning. “Buildings on both sides were engulfed,” local business owner Alan Dickar told CBS.
“Hawaii National Guardsmen have been activated and are currently on Maui assisting Maui Police Department at traffic control points,” said Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, Hawaii’s adjutant general. The overnight deployment was hastened by the dynamic fire conditions, and additional National Guard personnel are expected to arrive in Maui and Hawaii counties later Wednesday, Hara said.
Lt. Governor Sylvia Luke, who is acting while Gov. Josh Green is traveling out of state, issued an emergency proclamation Tuesday that activated the Guard. Updated road closures and other emergency notices are posted on the County of Maui facebook page.
A 215-acre wildfire in San Jacinto County was contained on August 2 according to a report by ABC-13 News. That afternoon, resources were requested from Texas A&M Forest Service (TAMFS) on the Snowhill Fire. Shortly after 1 p.m. crews on the fire reported moderate to high fire behavior with several structures threatened, evacuations under way, and road closures in place.
The agency also reported that two of its firefighters suffered burn injuries when fire behavior intensified at about 5 p.m.
The agency’s 24-hour report noted that fire behavior intensified on a part of the fire where a dozer crew was working. The two injured firefighters were not wearing PPE properly and both experienced first- and second-degree burns to the face, hands, and sides.
The two firefighters were transported to a hospital and both were treated and released.
Two days later the agency released its 72-hour report on an aircraft incident in Travis County.
On August 1 at about 10:30 p.m. an air tactical aircraft working a different fire was involved in an incident at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport — about 5 miles southeast of downtown Austin — after flying the Powder Keg Pine Fire near Bastrop, about 150 miles southwest of Lake Livingston near the location of the Snowhill Fire.
TAMFS resources were requested on August 1 on the Powder Keg Pine Fire in Bastrop County. Numerous aircraft were dispatched, including the Air Attack Platform at the Gillespie County Airport in Fredericksburg. The aircraft is a King Air C90A turboprop registered to Safford Aviation Service in Coolidge, Arizona (which had not yet replied to a request for comment when this was posted).
At about 8:40 p.m. the aircraft was released from the fire and made a 30-minute flight back to the Gillespie County Airport. On approach, though, the pilot and ATGS reported an issue with landing gear indicators; just two of the three indicated that the landing gear was down and locked. The pilot and ATGS attempted to fix the issue manually, and at about 9:30 p.m. they reported they had two hours of fuel left and intended to fly to Austin-Bergstrom, an FAA-controlled airport, where they’d do fly-bys so the control tower could see whether the landing gear was actually down. After two fly-bys, the tower told them it appeared to be down, and they approached for landing.
Upon landing the aircraft, though, the right landing gear collapsed, and the right propeller blades contacted the concrete and were damaged. The right gear appeared to have collapsed back into the aircraft gear hold, according to the report.
Neither the pilot nor the ATGS was injured and no civilians were injured. Both the pilot and ATGS were in constant radio communication with TAMFS dispatch in College Station, and the aircraft was tracked using the real-time map-based Automated Flight Following (AFF) system. The NTSB will investigate.
Spectrum News reported that Texas A&M Forest Service, the state’s lead agency for wildfire response, on Monday raised the state’s preparedness level to 4 — its second-highest level. The agency said over the past seven days it has responded to 80 wildfires burning 8,521 acres, with 41 fires since Friday.
The forecast for this week calls for more triple-digit temperatures with few chances for rain, and 164 Texas counties are now under burn bans.
THIS IS a temporary post,
in the aftermath of numerous fatalities on fires this season,
and considering the comments posted publicly on both sites and the piles of emails I’m getting privately from readers,
and I’d really like for all of our readers to review these two posts,
both written by Bill Gabbert and fully endorsed today by me.
A 21-year-old federal firefighter was killed in an on-duty vehicle accident on Friday, August 4, near Powers, Oregon. Benjamin Sapper from Boulder, Colorado was a handcrew member on the Gold Beach Ranger District of the Rogue River – Siskiyou National Forest in southwest Oregon.
“This is a devastating loss of one of our own Gold Beach firefighters,” District Ranger Kailey Guerrant told KATU-TV. “We have a tight-knit community on the Gold Beach and Powers Ranger Districts, and we stand together in grief and support for his family, friends, and fellow firefighters during this heartbreaking time.”
Benjamin Sapper photo courtesy USFS
Benjamin graduated from Boulder High School and the University of Colorado with a degree in Applied Mathematics.
KDRV-TV reported that Sapper was on duty and traveling with his crew when their rig was involved in a vehicle crash. Coquille Fire & Rescue said the vehicle left the roadway above the community of Powers.
Sapper was an avid baseball player, chess player, and skier who planned to attend grad school in earth sciences this fall at the University of British Columbia.
Our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to his co-workers on the Gold Beach crew.
Running Out of Time: Wildfires and Our Imperiled Forests David L. Auchterlonie and Jeffrey A. Lehman
When I was asked to review a new book, Running Out of Time, by David Auchterlonie and Jeffrey Lehman, I was underwhelmed. First, I had to set aside the book I was already reading, The Complete Works of P.G. Wodehouse, and then dive into something that looked like it was penned by the Government Accounting Office, something Congress orders when it wants to give one of the federal government’s agencies a good spanking.
Instead, it turned out to be a surprisingly thorough and readable book written by two high-level business troubleshooters who are genuinely concerned about climate change and the role of wildfires in making the planet considerably hotter than it used to be.
Wildfires have come to dominate the news in the past 30 or more years since they have become larger and harder to stop, and the destruction caused by them has reached epic proportions. And this is not just a Western United States problem. Wildfires have plagued the planet — in the U.S. from Alaska to Florida, in Australia and South Africa, southern Europe, and the northernmost forests of Canada and Russia. (If I’ve left anyone out, just wait; your turn is coming.)
Efforts have been made to stop the Big Wildfire problem by a number of agencies in the U.S. However, in the authors’ analysis, the money spent on the cure is way, way short of what is needed.
“A put-the-fire-out-first strategy should be fundamental.”
“[T]he DOI, USDA, Homeland Security, Defense/Energy and others will spend approximately $16.8 billion [in FY2021-22] on forest maintenance and wildfire management. This figure represents only 0.28 percent of the total federal budget. Despite $8.5 billion of increased allocations since 2000, the number of burned acres of forestland also increased by more than 75 percent during the same period. Even with the most recent ten-year funding from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the federal funding commitment is not keeping pace. It is, quite frankly, an embarrassment, considering the stated priorities of preserving our forests. Americans impacted by wildfires each year (212 million or nearly 65 percent of the country’s population) deserve better.”
Call me old-fashioned, but $22.6 billion sounds like a lot of money. But so does 65 percent of the United States’ population being affected by wildfire.
Scarier yet is the number of homes, subdivisions, even whole towns burned to cinders by wildfires. In the past 30-plus years, that number has skyrocketed. And it’s expected to get worse.
“Under current federal agencies’ practices,” say Auchterlonie and Lehman, “wildfires now place 46 million residences in 70,000 communities at risk. Two-thirds of the country face the threat of large, long-duration wildfires. As the wildland-urban interface (WUI) expands due to expected population growth in the next twenty-five years, some experts predict a 50 percent increase in wildfire acreage consumed by 2050.”
To which they add: “[T]he last update to federal interagency wildfire fighting was in 2009. It excludes any mention of prioritizing early wildfire extinguishment.” Instead it focuses on thinning and prescribed burning. The authors say, “A put-the-fire-out-first strategy should be fundamental.”
“Annual devastation from wildfires requires an immediate, laser-focused, and warlike response. Study after study shows aggressive wildfire initial response within the first few hours of ignition minimizes the likelihood of more devastating and intensive wildfires.”
Then there’s the smoke problem. Wildfires in the United States produce approximately 10 percent of the global wildfire greenhouse gas emissions each year, say the authors. “Wildfires across the globe produce twice the CO2 as all commercial airline flights in the world in 2019, and about 60 percent of emissions from automobiles. While the economic cost to the environment caused by wildfires has not been ‘quantified,’ it is substantial and ‘one more reason to expeditiously extinguish them.'”
Therein lies a very old problem: How to quickly and completely extinguish a wildfire after it has escaped initial attack and burned thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of acres of wildland. It soon emerges in Running Out of Time that the answer is to have more airtankers. A lot more. “[T]he government should purchase a fleet of 200 SEATs, 75 to 125 large airtankers (LATs), and 30 to 50 very large airtankers (VLATs).” And more helicopters and bulldozers, too.
Oh, and another thing: “Fight wildfire twenty-four hours a day.” While this poke in the eye is primarily for the U.S. Forest Service, the authors also note that quite a few state and municipal firefighting agencies engage fires quickly and work as productively as possible around the clock. Some even own night-flying helicopters — but they also have trouble with a small number of their fires, which too often become landscape-gobbling, home-wrecking wildfires.
While their airtanker buying recommendation is an alarming, blow-your-hair-back shopping list, Messrs. Auchterlonie and Lehman go into considerable detail to illustrate their position on how to pull this off. They propose a top-to-bottom reconfiguration of many (perhaps all) federal agencies to make them more efficient. The authors are, after all, business consultants who have helped large corporations with turnarounds and mergers, and were consultants to the likes of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. They have 80 years of combined experience in the private sector and government. They know how to strip large corporations down to the bone and build them back better.
An admirable amount of research went into this book, and it is notable that the focus is on finding a better way for keeping that small percentage of wildfires that escape initial attack from becoming destructive megafires. Granted, working firefighters and managers may not be the target audience — although many could benefit from reading the book. I suspect city planners, homebuilders, elected officials, and members of the news media could learn a great deal from Running out of Time. It’s also a good book for the public — the people who know or suspect that they live in a wildfire-prone area.
Wildfire remains a dizzying, frightening mystery to millions of people. This book may not assuage their fears, but at least they’ll understand considerably better what they’re up against — and maybe take away some small hope that two guys who have never dug an inch of fireline do know how to fix it.
