An overlooked Maui community realizes ‘no one is coming to save you’

KULA, Hawaii - When sparks lit the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history in Lahaina, another corner of this island had been spewing smoke all night.

Wind-whipped flames tore down a gulch in Maui’s Upcountry, a rural area 20 miles east where homes are perched amid thick forests on the slopes of the dormant Haleakala volcano. The fire burned hotter than the surface of Venus, turning farms, homes and cars into ash, and transforming a serene mountain community into a wasteland of embers.

The second inferno, which destroyed much of the treasured town of Lahaina and claimed 100 lives, quickly overshadowed the calamity in Kula. In the days and months that followed, the Upcountry fire faded from the spotlight and residents grew frustrated with a government bureaucracy stretched thin as it reacted to multiple disasters at once.

Even though the Kula fire is still burning - in root systems and buried debris, occasionally bursting into the open in terrifying flare-ups - the attention of many across the island, state and nation has ebbed, drawn to other pressing issues.

“It’s amazing how many people, even on Maui, will still come up to Kula and go, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea,’” said Kari McCarthy, who lost her home of 40 years to the August fire.

Nearly six months later, the overlooked story of Kula shows the challenges that officials, aid organizations and residents face in the age of successive, cascading natural disasters. But Kula has also become a case study of a community’s ability to at least partly fill the breach left by overwhelmed government agencies. A dedicated group of neighbors have banded together, formed nonprofits, enlisted heavy machinery to clean up burned properties, and worked to prevent landslides on charred hillsides. And they are looking toward the future, seeking to rid the land of the invasive plants that fueled so much destruction.

[Lahaina survivors come together to grieve months after Maui fires]

Their actions, funded by donations and volunteers, could be instructive for other places - such as Lahaina, which faces a much longer road to recovery - looking to rebound from past disasters and prevent future ones.

“There’s been a mass reckoning of ‘No one is coming to save you,’” said Kyle Ellison, who founded the nonprofit Malama Kula after his family’s house nearly burned in August. “For a long time, people looked to government like it was their job to take care of everything. But the best course of action is not to go through elected officials, it’s to stand up and do it. If we want anything done, just stand up and do it.”

‘We are not going anywhere’

McCarthy and her husband moved from California to Kula in the 1980s, and their patch of land along the Pohakuokala Gulch felt safe and secluded. Their A-frame home reminded McCarthy, a painter, of Lake Tahoe.

But the fire turned her landscape from muse into miasma. Flames destroyed her home and many of her paintings. And they forced her from the place where she was still mourning her husband, who had died a year earlier, and caring for her 91-year-old mother, who has aphasia and mostly uses a wheelchair.

Even after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared much of the rubble and debris - one of more than two dozen sites the engineers worked on in Kula - random wreckage still remains, impeding any rebuild and standing as a constant reminder of what was lost.

Friends and neighbors, many of whom McCarthy met only as they tried to keep the blaze at bay with garden hoses, have stepped in to help, working to clean up the spots federal contractors left behind and renovating nearby rental units where she and her mother now live.

“It really teaches you what’s important,” she said of the disaster, which has made her skeptical of the government’s capacity to lead response efforts. “But I would put the community in charge of anything.”

Ellison points to McCarthy’s property as an example of what’s missing in the U.S. approach to disaster cleanup, which typically operates in two phases: the removal of hazardous waste and the disposal of toxic debris. Ellison, a tall and animated 39-year-old who has been a fixture at community meetings, has been advocating for a third phase, which would involve cleaning up any remaining fire flotsam - burned washing machines, melted satellite dishes and tons of torched trees.

One of the community’s biggest frustrations has been the limits of the Army Corps’ removal mission, which was confined to a structure’s ash footprint. This means, Ellison said, that swaths of large properties and vacant land had yet to be cleared of burned material, leaving areas around house sites exposed to toxic debris.

Army Corps spokesperson Rick Brown said that federal guidelines determine what can be removed from a property and that the agency had cleared “all eligible debris” from the Upcountry sites.

“So there may be outlying debris on a property, but via the process and guidelines, it was deemed ineligible,” the spokesperson said. “Non-eligible debris is the responsibility of the property owner.”

Brown said insurance companies and Maui County should determine the next steps.

“If they’re ‘done,’ who comes in and cleans it all up?” Ellison asked. “I know you have to draw the line somewhere, I do understand it, but is that in the best interest of the neighborhood as a whole?”

Even the power of an engaged and organized public has its limits. Some of the uncleared sites are dangerous, Ellison said, and volunteers shouldn’t be expected to sort through arsenic-laden ash. If a homeowner’s insurance policy includes debris removal, officials said they should be able to use if for any material that still needs clearing, but not everyone has that coverage.

These issues are not abstract policy matters for Ellison, like many Kula residents. The fire burned much of the area around his family’s home and covered the house in ash. His 8-year-old son now fears the red of his night light because it reminds him of the blaze that forced the family to flee. And just last month, embers smoldering underground mere feet from Ellison’s front door burst into 12-foot flames, as if to confirm his children’s nightmares: The fire is not yet done with Kula.

In weekly community meetings, convened in the cafeteria of Kula’s elementary school, officials have sought to reassure residents that the continued cleanup will remain a priority.

“I appreciate all of the shortcomings you bring up when we come here,” Richard Bissen, Maui County’s mayor, said at a recent gathering. “We recognize those, and we can do a better job.”

Bissen said that the county will continue to work with the community long after federal agencies leave and that his team is attempting to juggle Lahaina’s nascent recovery alongside Kula’s. He said the county will help Kula residents finish clearing their lots, but he did not provide a timeline.

“Everybody’s working as hard as they can, as best as they can,” he said. “No one is forgetting to do stuff. We’re just doing something else instead of that right now. But we pledge that we are not going anywhere until that all gets cleaned up.”

‘This is savable’

While the fires in Lahaina and Kula, along with the neighboring Upcountry community of Olinda, were all triggered by winds from the same storm, the disasters are distinct. So are the recoveries.

Kula - where the population is much smaller and, on average, less diverse and more wealthy than that of Lahaina - is further along than the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Far fewer structures were destroyed and no one was killed. Residents will soon be able to apply for permits to begin rebuilding, a step far in the distance for most in Lahaina.

But disaster cleanup is not the only priority Upcountry. People like Ellison and the newly formed Kula Community Watershed Alliance, a group of more than 120 residents, are also using the fire as an opportunity to pursue long-sought restoration projects that would protect the town from future disasters.

Their first concern is the place they believe the Kula fire began: the yawning Pohakuokala Gulch. The region used to be one of Maui’s most diverse ecosystems, covered in koa and other native trees. But years of deforestation and the introduction of invasive species such as black wattle and eucalyptus radically changed the area around the gulch.

The wattle, introduced by federal government experiments in the late 1800s, sucked nutrients from the soil, dried up waterways and crowded out native plants that were more fire resistant. The gulch and the forest around it became a bonfire pit waiting for a spark. This was, said Sara Tekula, the watershed alliance’s executive director, the disaster before the disaster.

Now the gulch is full of burned trees and unstable soil, the alliance says, and it presents a looming risk - not only to nearby homes but also to some of the island’s most delicate ecological areas.

The edges of the gulch, still lined with houses, are eroding into the bed below, part of the Waiakoa watershed, which eventually drains into the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge, home to important and endangered species that could be further imperiled if inundated by fire debris.

“We’re working really hard to prevent secondary disasters and to make it better than it was before the fire,” Tekula said.

The alliance - whose members include restoration ecologists, conservation experts and former national park employees - has begun turning burned and invasive trees into wood chips and spreading them over acres that would otherwise easily erode. Tekula has applied for a host of grants to fund this work, and she is urging local and federal governments to join the effort.

Officials have praised the alliance and signaled they would partner with the group going forward. The U.S. Agriculture Department has approved about $16 million in funding for environmental damage Upcountry, including nearly $3 million earmarked for erosion control along the gulch. But the program is still weeks from beginning.

“We’re just trying to keep our whole neighborhood from washing away,” Tekula said.

After natural disasters, particularly wildfires and hurricanes, residents often decide the risk of a repeat catastrophe is too great to rebuild. Some acknowledge the land was never suitable for homes in the first place. Tekula insists this is not the case in Kula. Most people plan to stay, she said, and the community now has a window - before the invasive plants return and more storms roll in - to build something more resilient.

“This is savable,” she said, standing near the burn scar. “That’s what makes it urgent.”