Summer wildfires have hit the Upcountry Maui community of Kula the past two years, fueling community efforts to ensure area residents are better equipped for the worst-case scenarios.
“I really think it is about peace of mind, it is about security, but then it's about being prepared,” said Jordan Hocker, board president of the Kula Community Association.
Earlier this month, the group wrote a letter to state officials asking for two 500,000-gallon water tanks in Upcountry Maui. The tanks would serve as a backup source for drinking water and fire-fighting capabilities in the event that power outages disrupt water pumps.
“That's really our concern as a community at this point, is we still do not have the water that we need in the case that electricity goes out to actually fight a fire,” Hocker said.
Asking for help
Residents said that when the power goes out, water goes out too, because Kula’s water has to be pumped uphill.
The Maui County Department of Water Supply said they do have backup generators in what they call “critical locations.” It’s not clear when those were installed. County officials said they’re also renting additional generators to stand in while over two dozen new generators are being purchased with federal assistance.
“These generators are huge, the size of a semi-truck, cost several hundred thousand dollars each and take months to acquire,” the county told HPR in an email. “We have placed all the generators we have at the most critical locations and will add the next priority locations as new generators are acquired.”
But residents aren’t convinced. During the 2023 wildfires, they turned on their garden hoses to fight the blaze in their backyards, only to find there was no water.
Hocker said she’s worried help isn’t moving fast enough to support them for this summer’s fire season.
“It's just something that, as a community, we know that certain strides have been made, but in terms of securing water to fight fires, in the case that we have something like that going on, we still don't have a solution,” she explained.
The Kula Community Association is also asking for better stewardship of more than 10,000 acres of state lands, which she described as “currently unmanaged and overgrown.”
“From our perspective, it's hard not to see the state's acquisition of land and then subsequently not managing it, as a huge part of our fire regime,” Hocker said. “If, say, you have 2,500 acres that gets pulled into quote unquote conservation, right, but it's not managed, and the invasive species haven't been taken care of, but before, it was managed through agriculture or ranching, it's hard to say that that transition over the last 30 years hasn't significantly increased our fire risk.”
Hocker said based on the responses they’ve received so far from their requests, she’s hopeful “that we can really drive a coordinated effort and have a seat at the table.”
Removing the wattle
For the community-led Kula Community Watershed Alliance, preparation for the summer has meant targeting the removal of black wattle, an invasive fire-fuel tree that grows rampant in the area and contributed to the rapid spread of recent wildfires.
In 2023, 20 homes burned in Upcountry Maui. But the fire only made the wattle stronger, said executive director Sara Tekula.
“We're now seeing a flush of wattle regrowth,” she said. “And what happens with wattle is it's a fire-adapted species. It's from an area in Australia that fire is a very natural part of the ecological cycles, and it more readily germinates after fire.”
The alliance has launched the "Wipe Out Wattle" initiative, attacking the problem with a grant-funded local team of conservation professionals. They’re removing wattle in Kula’s steepest areas.
“Now our crews are out there tackling the parts of the gulch that no one else wants to or should attempt without the right equipment and training,” she said.
Tekula said it’s a race against time to not only reduce wattle growth before fire season but also remove as much as possible before it reseeds the area.
But she stressed that for the Kula Community Watershed Alliance, it’s all part of a calculated, long-term conservation plan that takes a holistic approach. Along with removing invasive trees, they plan to replant native species, and there will be fencing to keep out predators. There are also unexpected factors to take into consideration — like Hawai’i’s only native land mammal.
“We're trying to get everything cut before [the wattle] start to produce seeds, but also before we get to a really important season, which is the ʻōpeʻapeʻa pupping season, or endangered bat,” Tekula explained.
“A lot of Kula residents love watching the bats. They circle around at sunset, and it's just, they're magical. Well, between June 1 and Sept. 15, they are in pupping season, and it's generally best practice, especially in conservation organizations, to not cut trees taller than 15 feet tall during that time.”
That’s because mother bats leave their pups in the trees while they go hunting.
“If you cut the tree down, you've taken out at least two — usually they have twins — of our endangered bats. So it’s kind of a race against time, both with the pupping season and with fire season,” Tekula said.
Clearing fire breaks
Kyle Ellison leads Malama Kula, a grassroots nonprofit formed through community response in the wake of the 2023 wildfires.
“Even as I talk right now, we're prioritizing cutting fire breaks around homes,” he explained. “And there was a new Maui County fire code that was adopted in December that is much stricter.”
Malama Kula has also spearheaded an effort to bring green waste disposal bins to Kula. Before that, residents often threw green waste into nearby gulches, which ended up fueling the wildfire. The nearest official disposal location was the Central Maui Landfill, nearly an hour’s drive away for some Upcountry residents, said Ellison.
“About 1,900 pickup trucks full of green waste [has] been removed from the mountain through that program,” he said. “And amazingly, on top of that, we are approaching almost a million pounds of wood, of fire fuels, that have been removed — burned wood downed trees, wood that's just laying on the ground — that were fuels in our community.”
The wood is chipped and used as mulch to help stabilize the soil of burn scar areas.
Ellison said the Kula community is no stranger to drought conditions in the summer, and they have increased fire prevention efforts.
“Just having that fire break area can make the difference between your home surviving and not,” he said.
As the community works in different ways to gear up for fire season, they hope their efforts will pay off with a safer summer.
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