The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is leading the next phase of debris removal in Lahaina, getting residents one step closer to returning to their homes. But some local land surveyors are raising red flags about the process.
They are worried the cleanup efforts may disturb physical markers that indicate property lines around the town.
The boundary markers, also called monuments or pins, are pieces of metal pipe or rebar placed in the ground at the corners of a property.
Without the markers, it can be extremely hard to accurately measure the boundaries of someone's property.
While there are paper records of past land surveys in Lahaina, documents are not always the most reliable resources, said land surveyor Meyer Cummins.
"In a lot of ways, the boundaries in the ground represent the actual survey. If you destroy them, you're destroying people's understanding of where their property was," Cummins said.
That could cause problems down the line for Lahaina residents who want to rebuild. Residents who end up with conflicting ideas about their property lines could face costly delays.
"People have to go to court to settle these things. And that costs money. That takes a lot of time," Cummins said.
Even under normal circumstances, land surveyors often have to do detective work to resolve boundary disputes between landowners.
With only a handful of licensed land surveyors familiar with Lahaina, Cummins said they will need all the help they can get. Preserving boundary markers is crucial to ensuring a straightforward rebuilding process, he said.
Push to preserve boundary markers
The Hawaii Land Surveyors Association issued a statement calling for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Corps of Engineers to require that organizations contracted for Lahaina's cleanup make efforts to preserve monuments.
"To do otherwise is to ensure further injury to Lahaina by saddling its landowners and businesses with boundary disputes, costly litigation, and delays in permitting and rebuilding," the statement said.
"If our officials do not advocate for preserving the town’s survey monuments, cleanup by the EPA and the Corps contractors may damage what might be the only thing the fire has not taken from the people of Lahaina: their ownership of real property."
The association has been in touch with several agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Corps, Gov. Josh Green's office, and Maui County.
A spokesperson for Dawson, the company contracted by the Corps to lead hazard site assessment in Lahaina during the first phase of cleanup, said that their field crews are "staking out approximate boundary markers to indicate the general vicinity of property corners."
They are also using Tax Map Key numbers, addresses, and a GIS-based mapping system to try to identify properties in the burn-out zone.
"In this phase of the work, the use of monuments, land surveyors, or survey transits on tripods are not required," the spokesperson said.
Cummins said that many of the officials he has been in touch with are anxious to help. But since few wildfires have burned through areas as densely populated as Lahaina, the exact procedure for preserving boundary markers is unclear.
"Nobody's really ever done this before," said Craig Clouet, a data scientist with the governor's office.
Property line challenges after other disasters
Other communities have often discovered too late that boundary markers were inadvertently removed during debris cleanup, leading to confusion about the fundamental property layout of their towns.
Clouet said that after the Lahaina fire on Aug. 8, land surveyors from California, Colorado, and as far away as Canada reached out to share their concerns.
"They immediately said, 'This is something you got to get in front of,'" Clouet said.
In 2016, a wildfire burned over 1,500 structures in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
An assessment later found that the heavy machinery used to fight the fire, clear the rubble and remove debris and toxic materials was "the major cause of disturbance and destruction to the survey monuments."
Hundreds of construction permits were issued before Fort McMurray could be officially resurveyed, resulting in concerns that property owners may incorrectly judge the boundaries of their land while rebuilding.
If a similar situation occurred in Lahaina, Cummins said it could take months to get the recovery process back on track.
"I can't think of anything more insulting than the people of Lahaina losing everything, and then running into foreseen issues that could have been prevented," Cummins told HPR.
Ultimately, direction on this issue has to come from Maui County, Clouet said. He added that the county was forming a working group to tackle the challenge of preserving monuments, which he felt was a promising start.
In his mind, Lahaina will be a test case for how Hawaiʻi handles real property disputes in the wake of a disaster.
"We need to really work as a team," Clouet said.
