Kula resident Kyle Ellison stood on burned ground at the edge of a deep gulch.
“So this is a vacant lot," he explained. "That house burned. And this house burned. You have FEMA documents saying, 'Hey, we agree with the State of Hawaiʻi's assessment, this is toxic ash. It's full of arsenic. Because it poses an immediate and urgent public health risk, we are going to come in and get this out of here.’”
But there’s a hitch.
“And then in the very next paragraph, it says 'We do not cover vacant lots,'" Ellison said. "OK, but what happens when that vacant lot is sandwiched between two houses that you just said are covered in toxic ash? And then all that ash ends up on the vacant lot? They go, ‘That's not what we do.’”
The government cleanup in Kula is done. During phase two, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scraped the toxic debris from burned home sites. But upcountry residents are finding there’s still widespread debris the government has no plans to clean up.
So who does it?
“We’re going to come in here and clear this ourselves,” Ellison said.
Ellison and others have been advocating for a community-advised phase three of cleanup.
Sara Tekula is the executive director of the Kula Community Watershed Alliance. Kula neighbors formed the hui to protect their community’s natural resources. She agreed there’s a huge need for cleanup outside of house foundations cleared by the Army Corps.
“What happens to the land that's falling outside of that box?" she asked. "That is something that is yet to be addressed. What happens to the lawns and gardens and parks in between? That, to me, is what phase three is all about. Beyond the ash footprint of a house, what about the rest of the land? From a watershed protection perspective, we're really concerned about that.”
Ellison said it’s not part of the government’s plan, and though he's grateful for the assistance, it’s the community that’s stepping up to fill in the gaps.
And that’s nothing new to them.
In the wake of the fires, Ellison and others spent thousands of volunteer hours fighting flareups, supplying drinking water and food to neighbors, and clearing fallen trees and green waste.
Now, Ellison has founded his own nonprofit, Malama Kula, to continue the work. That recently included clearing 7,000 pounds of scrap metal left exposed in the community after the fires.
The Watershed Alliance is working alongside them. That organization has covered eight acres, so far, of exposed burn scar area with chipped wood from invasive trees. As Ellison describes, “using what's available here in Kula to heal Kula.”
And it’s been working, even through recent heavy rains.
“I'm happy to report that everything is still in place on those sites,” Tekula said. “So it's working as designed, as planned. And we're seeing the wood chips kind of absorbing a lot of that water as it comes down the hill preventing erosion in the places where we've done the treatments.”
She said they still have a lot of ground left to cover, as they start work on the next phase of restoration.
“We've been thinking ahead towards restoring the land that we are stabilizing, and the ultimate vision of the alliance is to put more resilient, healthier vegetation in the place of what burned,” Tekula said.
“And hopefully prevent another fire, and also kind of restore the ecological identity of Kula back to a native plant-dominated landscape. And so one of the things we started doing is hosting community seed collection hikes.”
After attending propagation workshops also organized by the alliance, community members are already growing those natives — gathered from their own ahupua’a — to plant in the coming months.
Ellison said the key to preventing future fires is to be proactive, rather than reactive.
“I think it's too easy to come up with reasons why you can't do something, than it is to just simply do it,” he explained.
“The kind of status quo way of approaching things is not sufficient, and we need to be better. And if that means, again, that people just need to get up and just do it, then get up and just do it. When we all come together, we can do a lot.”
