Investigators in Hawaii have found a series of failures that contributed to last year’s deadly wildfire in the town of Lahaina, but the state attorney general’s office said on Friday that it did not expect to file criminal charges against anyone involved in the response.
The attorney general, Anne Lopez, released a report identifying a range of problems in the response to the fire, including a statewide culture of minimizing the risks posed by wildfires, a lack of preparedness on the island of Maui even when conditions were forecast to be dangerous, and a series of flawed decisions during the fire that delayed evacuating people who were in danger. The fire ultimately left more than 100 people dead.
But a spokeswoman for the attorney general said that based on the information gathered thus far, no criminal charges would be filed. “This report makes it clear that no one event, person or action caused the result or outcomes of this fire,” Ms. Lopez said at a news conference in Honolulu.
Several agencies have now released a series of lengthy reports about the inferno — Friday’s was more than 500 pages — but none of them have answered some of the key remaining questions, including the reason for delays in sending evacuation alerts to cellphones and a conclusive determination of how the fire started and spread.
Residents on the hillside more than a mile above the town’s waterfront reported seeing fire emerge next to a downed power line in the morning and start to spread in the same area in the afternoon, but the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has yet to release a final determination.
From wherever it started, the fire raced rapidly through town. Evacuation routes were blocked, cell towers went down, and fire hydrants ran dry.
Investigators concluded that government agencies appeared to have done little to identify or heed the lessons of a 2018 fire in Lahaina that occurred under circumstances similar to those of last year. Few steps had been taken to manage the kind of parched vegetation that fueled both wildfires, they found. Even as the 2023 fire grew to extraordinary size, fire and police managers failed to establish a unified command to share information.
That contributed to a series of breakdowns, the report found: At one point, a police captain recalled many of the department’s on-duty officers to the station instead of leaving them out to help speed up the evacuations. When an injured fire captain was being transported to the hospital, three other chief officers left their posts to accompany him, leaving a single battalion commander to manage the fire. The county’s emergency operations center became so crowded that some people had to work out of the kitchen.
“The conditions that made this tragedy possible were years in the making,” said Steve Kerber, executive director of the nonprofit Fire Safety Research Institute, which produced the attorney general’s report.
Many people have left the island, and Maui is still in the early stages of rebuilding for thousands of others who lived in Lahaina and hope to stay. Officials have cleared debris from the 1,390 residential properties that were destroyed, but few of those properties are under construction yet.
Gov. Josh Green has spoken about the need to move some residents to new neighborhoods in order to reduce crowding in Lahaina. Community leaders have yet to determine whether or how to rebuild businesses along the famed Front Street waterfront, some of which had been constructed above the water, that have long been a magnet for tourists. Some residents have said they hope to use the reconstruction to restore Native Hawaiians’ history there, including a wetlands area where King Kamehameha III once had a private residence.
Already, though, there have been changes in the island’s plans for handling wildfires in the future. Hawaiian Electric has announced it plans to impose pre-emptive power shut-offs in areas that could be a wildfire risk during storms. The state has made new investments in managing vegetation.
Governor Green has said that more needs to be done, but that it all comes at a cost. He said he hoped lawmakers would approve new funding next year.
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