KAHULUI, Hawaii — The wildfire that brought sheer devastation to Maui is especially heartbreaking for Hawaii because it struck one of its most historic cities and the onetime capital of the former kingdom.
Lahaina holds deep cultural significance for Hawaiians. The city was once the royal residence of King Kamehameha III, who unified Hawaii under a single kingdom by defeating the other islands' chiefs. His successors made it the capital from 1820 to 1845, according to the National Park Service.
Kings and queens are buried in the graveyard of the 200-year-old stone Wainee Church. Later named Waiola, the church that once sat up to 200 people was photographed apparently engulfed in flames this week.
"It was really the political center for Hawaii," said Davianna McGregor, a retired professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
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Dozens of people were killed and hundreds of structures were damaged or destroyed in the blaze that ignited Tuesday and quickly spread throughout the western Maui community of less than 13,000 residents.
It's feared that the fire also consumed much of Lahaina's historic Front Street, home to restaurants, bars, stores and what is believed to be the United States' largest banyan — a fig tree with roots that grow out of branches and eventually reach the soil like new trunks.
Richard Olsten, a helicopter pilot with tour operator Air Maui, said he and other pilots and mechanics flew over the scene Wednesday before work to take stock.
"All the places that are tourist areas, that are Hawaiian history, are gone, and that can't be replaced," he said. "You can't refurbish a building that's just ashes now. It can't be rebuilt — it's gone forever."
Francine Hollinger, a 66-year-old Native Hawaiian, said witnessing the destruction of Front Street was "like losing a family member … because they'll never be able to rebuild it, like we wouldn't be able to bring back our mother or father."
The hall of historic Waiola Church in Lahaina and nearby Lahaina Hongwanji Mission are engulfed in flames Tuesday in Lahaina, Hawaii.
The full extent of loss won't be known until officials can assess the damage done by the flames, fanned by winds caused in part by Hurricane Dora moving west hundreds of miles to the south of the island state.
The Lahaina Historic District is home to more than 60 historic sites, according to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. A National Historic Landmark since 1962, it encompasses more than 16,000 acres and covers ocean waters stretching a mile offshore from the storied buildings.
For Native Hawaiians, the city is a connection to their ancestors. Lahainaluna High School was where royalty and chiefs were educated, and also where Kamehameha and his Council of Chiefs drafted the first Declaration of Rights of the People and the Constitution for the Hawaiian Kingdom.
"From going from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, the ruling chiefs in and around Lahaina and those educated at Lahainaluna played very prominent roles in our governance at that time," McGregor said.
The capital was moved to Honolulu in 1845, but Lahaina's palace remained a place where royalty would visit.
Lahaina also has a rich history of whaling, with more than 400 ships a year visiting for weeks at a time in the 1850s. Crew members sometimes clashed with missionaries on the island.
Sugar plantations and fishing boosted the economy over the decades, but tourism is the main driver now. Nearly 3 million visitors came to Maui last year, and many of them came to the historic city.
The fire is "just going to change everything," said Lee Imada, who worked at the Maui News for 39 years, including his last eight as managing editor until his retirement in 2020. "It's just hard to register, even right now, what the full impact of this is going to be."
Imada lives in Waikapu, on Maui, but has ancestral ties to Lahaina going back generations. His mother's family owned a chain of popular general stores, and his granduncles ran the location on Front Street until it closed around 60 years ago.
He recalled walking down Front Street among the tourists as they shopped or ate, looking at the banyan tree and enjoying the beautiful ocean views from the harbor.
"It's just sort of hard to believe that it's not there," Imada said. "Everything that I remember the place to be is not there anymore."
How wildfires have worsened in recent decades
How wildfires have worsened in recent decades
Earlier this month, residents throughout the Northeast woke to hazy orange skies as smoke blew down from a nearly 12-million-acre wildfire burning in Quebec, threatening national forests and property throughout the province. Thirteen American states issued air quality alerts, highlighting the impact of large-scale fires beyond their immediate path.
Wildfires are innate to forest ecosystems, clearing out dead debris and paving the way for new growth, but climate change has elongated dry seasons, increased temperatures, and widened the potential for large-scale wildfires. Beyond weather-related factors, the prevalence of insects like bark beetles damage trees and make them more prone to burning. Invasive vegetation such as cheatgrass also easily burns and contributes to spread.
Trees, traditionally a storage vessel for carbon, release carbon immediately when burning and during decomposition. The EU's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service estimated that global wildfires in 2022 released 1,455 megatonnes of carbon emissions. Black carbon, or soot, can also travel beyond wildfire zones, absorbing sunlight and warming the earth further.
Beyond the environmental threats, the widening reach of wildfires threatens the displacement of countless residents. Despite this, people continue moving to wildfire-prone areas, putting a growing population at risk of longer fire seasons and associated health risks.
Stacker cited data from the National Interagency Fire Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to visualize how the spread of wildfires has worsened in recent years.
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The number of wildfires is decreasing, but more acres are burning
Throughout the mid-20th century, forest management largely focused on preventing forest fires of all scales. Smokey the Bear was a national mascot for fire prevention, overseeing a multi-decade decrease in the number and average size of fires. But without regular fires, debris built up. This, combined with other environmental factors, eventually fueled costlier, large-scale blazes that have come to define the current wildfire season.
Despite having nearly 10,000 fewer fires per year on average from 2011-2021 compared to 1983-2010, the average acreage burned by those fires per year has more than doubled. From 1983-2010, the average number of acres burned per year was about 4.4 million. That number has jumped to 7.5 million acres per year for the 2011-2021 time period.
Wildfire seasons are getting longer
The total acres burned by wildfires in December 2020 was three times greater than the 10-year average for the month. The following year also experienced a damaging December, with a less extensive but still above-average spread covering 336,984 acres. Wildfire season traditionally lasts May through October, but shorter winters and earlier snow melts have extended wildfire risk. 2021 set a record for days at preparedness level 5, the highest alert for wildfire risk.
The USDA Forest Service warned in 2021, "For years, agencies relied on seasonal firefighters for summer months, but now that wildfires are burning into the winter, they need to reevaluate their hiring plans."
Wildfire suppression costs have risen by billions of dollars
With the increasing severity of wildfires every year, it follows that more resources are required to tame the blazes. In 1999, just before the turn of the century, the Forest Service and all other Department of the Interior agencies spent a combined $515.5 million on wildfire suppression. During the course of the last decade, the average cost of wildfire suppression has skyrocketed to nearly $2.1 billion annually. The Forest Service carries the brunt of this cost, contributing approximately three-quarters of the funds each year.
Though there is not currently an official tracking mechanism for the cost of wildfire damages, academics across the country have attempted to estimate the economic impact of wildfires. In 2020, a team of researchers estimated that the 2018 California wildfires caused $148.5 billion in economic damages.
Lightning fires are causing more damage in the West
At the national level, 89% of wildfires were caused by humans in 2022, but human-caused wildfires contributed only to 44% of total acreage burned. In the Southern and Eastern U.S., human-caused fires still cause the most damage, but elongated dry seasons in the West have intensified the impact of lightning when it does strike.
Dry lightning is created through high-altitude thunderstorms. Extreme heat and drought can cause rain to evaporate before it reaches the ground. Lightning fires can also pose greater damage because it can take longer for them to be detected, whereas human-caused fires are often closer to towns and high-traffic areas. Winds associated with dry thunderstorms can further fan the flames as well. These factors mean that even as the West is less prone to lightning than other parts of the country, the bolts can spark more damage.
California's wildfires continue to set records
While lightning has sparked some of the most devastating fires in California, powerlines have also fueled far-reaching damage. Contact with overgrown trees, downed lines, and frayed wires can spark flames. Pacific Gas & Electric was held responsible for the 2018 Camp Fire and 2019 Kincade Fire and has instituted rolling blackouts on high-risk wildfire days.
Even as the origin of fires varies, each is exacerbated by existing environmental factors. A 2018 survey from the USDA Forest Service identified nearly 150 million trees that died between 2010-2018 in California. Two years later, 2020's record season burned nearly 4.4 million acres, and the five largest megafires happened concurrently in August and September. The season demonstrated how the buildup of vulnerable trees can ignite unprecedented spread.
A 2021 aerial survey by the USDA Forest Service offered some hope. Annual tree mortality declined over a five-year period, with an estimated 9.5 million dead trees in the state spanning more than 1 million acres, although tree mortality remains at a much higher rate than California's pre-drought levels in the early-2000s.
