Lack of communication prevented help for people trapped in Hawaii fire: report

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The Attorney General's much-anticipated report provides new insight into the fire response but does not address the cause of the fire.

As fires spread in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Aug. 8, Maui firefighters reported troubling news to their commander. At 4:25 p.m., the advancing fire was engulfing homes and businesses near the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Ulupono Street and nearby Kahoma Stream was unlikely to stop the flames.

“We might have to write this whole subdivision and industrial area off,” firefighters said. “I cannot see us stopping anything.”

Maui’s top emergency management official apparently didn’t get the news. More than an hour later Herman Andaya, who was at the time head of the Maui Emergency Management Agency and on Oahu at a conference, asked an administrative assistant in his office whether any buildings on Maui’s West Side had been lost.

Gaye Gabuat’s answer: She didn’t know.

Attorney General Anne Lopez said the state’s timeline of the Maui wildfires, conducted by the Fire Safety Research Institute, was based on thousands of pieces of data. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024)

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez released the details of those exchanges, and thousands of other data points, in a sweeping timeline of government responses to the fire that destroyed much of Lahaina and killed 101 people on Aug. 8. The exchanges show in detail how communication breakdowns between emergency response officials and first responders interfered with decision making.

The “Lahaina Fire Comprehensive Timeline Report” is the first of three reports being produced for the AG’s office by Steve Kerber and Derek Alkonis of the Fire Safety Research Institute. The state is paying $1.5 million to engage the institute for one year and plans to extend the contract, Lopez said. While the broad contours of the timeline’s narrative have been reported, the report released Wednesday provides unprecedented detail into state and local government responses and how the fire spread in Lahaina.

The timeline is based on thousands of data points gathered by the institute’s investigators, Lopez said. They include police and fire department dispatch records, communications between police and firefighters, reports from Hawaiian Electric Co. and hundreds of photographs and videos from residents with time stamps showing exactly when the images were recorded, Alkonis told media at a press briefing.

For all of its detail, the timeline report is just that: a chronology of events with no assessment or analysis of actions taken or lessons learned. Those will come in the next two installments. Phase 2 analyzing what went right and what went wrong is expected in late summer, Lopez said. Phase 3 outlining best practices to incorporate will come out around the end of the year.

The reports also will not answer a key question: What caused the fire? The inquiry into the fire’s cause and origin is being conducted by Maui County with support from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Kerber said his team and Lopez decided to defer to the Maui County report because Kerber’s team “would have called the folks at ATF” to do the same analysis and there was no need to duplicate efforts.

Communication failures

While the report doesn’t analyze what went wrong, the timeline details numerous challenges in the response. Police and firefighter radios operated on separate channels, which meant they could not monitor what the other agency was doing. Police cars had GPS systems but most fire vehicles did not, making vehicle tracking difficult.

Hawaiian Electric Co. issued a statement around 3:30 p.m. on Aug. 8 saying the company was working closely with MEMA and other agencies, but the report shows that emergency responders did not know that power lines had been deactivated in the area — a major issue in the evacuation effort — until an emergency dispatcher called to request the power company do so at 4:11 p.m.

This animation produced for the AG’s office shows the fire progression on Aug. 8. (Fire Safety Research Institute/2024))

Another example of communication problems involved Maui’s emergency operations center and Maui Mayor Richard Bissen’s role there. Bissen told investigators he was in Maui’s emergency operations center asking “layperson questions” and generally being supportive without taking over from the center’s staff.

Instead of getting direct reports on the severity of the fire, information was trickling to Bissen on social media and through calls from Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke. When it came time to call on the state to help with traffic control at the request of the Maui Police Department, Bissen was initially hesitant to call Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, who oversees the Hawaii National Guard.

Eventually, Bissen was advised that the mayor calling Hara was past practice. After Bissen finally called Hara, he got immediate assistance, “like WD-40.”

But while Hara gave the authority to deploy 16 members of the Hawaii National Guard after talking to the mayor at 8:48 p.m., Bissen did not provide details on the severity of the fires during the call, according to the report. The focus of the call was mostly on the Kula fire, Hara later recalled.

Hara said he didn’t know how bad the Maui fires had been until around 4 a.m. on Aug. 9, when Luke called him.

“That was the first time I knew Lahaina (Town) burned; we still didn’t know how many died,” the report quotes Hara as saying. The state’s emergency operations center was finally fully activated that morning, the report says.

Morning and afternoon fires were in the same area 40 minutes apart

While the report doesn’t state the cause of the devastating fire, it does provide more details supporting the idea that a so-called afternoon fire that destroyed much of Lahaina was merely a continuation of a morning fire caused by a fallen Hawaiian Electric Co. power line.

Whether there were two separate fires is important because Hawaiian Electric Co. has acknowledged a downed power line caused the morning fire by igniting dry grass. That detail is a central allegation in more than 100 lawsuits filed against the company. But Hawaiian Electric has said firefighters put out the morning fire and that it was a second fire of unknown origin in the afternoon that destroyed much of Lahaina.

A map produced by investigators with the Fire Safety Research Institute shows their conclusion about how the fire spread in Lahaina on Aug. 8. (Fire Safety Research Institute/2024)

Although the report refers to the morning and afternoon fires as different fires, Kerber declined to say unequivocally that there were two separate fires.

Kerber said that the fire department stated that the fire was extinguished “by telling dispatch ‘affirmative’ when asked the question about 2:17 p.m.”

And, he added, a second truck was dispatched to the same area to fight the afternoon fire at 2:55 p.m.

“As far as what caused or what happened between the two, that is for the ATF cause and origin investigation to show,” he said.

Kerber said he would not get into whether or not the timeline indicated the two fires were the same fire.

“It was absolutely in the same area,” he said.

Hawaiian Electric Industries shares on Wednesday closed at $9.75, bouncing back from a 40-year low on Tuesday, when shares dipped to $8.74. The company’s stock was trading at nearly $40 a share before the fire.

First responders risked lives for hours

The AG’s report comes a day after the Maui fire department released an 85-page after-action report produced by the Western Fire Chiefs Association. That report included a harrowing and detailed account of the department’s response to the Aug. 8 wildfires in Lahaina and upcountry Maui.

As described by the fire chiefs, Maui firefighters were simply overwhelmed.

“Nearly every staff member and vehicle resource of MFD on Maui was deployed,” the report found. “The emergency response system did not break but rather it found itself outmatched by the extreme weather and fire conditions.”

While Lopez and the fire safety researchers repeatedly rebuffed questions calling for an interpretation of the timeline, Lopez did weigh in with one such assessment. The detailed chronology of police and firefighters moving through Lahaina on Aug. 8 shows an extraordinary effort, she said.

“When you read the communications and the radio talk between the firefighters and the police officers, you could only come away with the understanding that these folks risked their lives for hours, saving people and trying to keep people from dying,” Lopez said. “Those firefighters and police officers are heroes.”