The West Maui brush fire that burned more than 100 acres in Olowalu over the weekend has been contained. The fast-spreading fire, fueled by high winds from Hurricane Nolo, was reported just before 2 p.m. on Saturday.
Olowalu farmer Eddy Garcia said his property is less than a mile from where the fire burned.
"I ran up the hill in my utility vehicle," he told HPR. "I noticed there was some sirens at the bottom already, but the fire was burning pretty fast. It was coming down from the electric poles."
The Maui Fire Department has not released a cause or origin of the fire.
“It just flew down the mountain. There were gusts that were upward of 60 miles an hour," Garcia said of the fire when it ignited on Saturday afternoon. “It had maybe traveled about 300 yards when I saw it, and within moments it traveled maybe 2,000 yards all the way down towards the ocean.”
He said the remote nature of the terrain made helicopters dropping water on Saturday critical.
“It was the choppers that predominantly put out the fires,” Garcia told HPR. “Those guys are amazing. There were 60 mile an hour gusts, and they were able to really make a difference on containing that fire and stopping it from jumping to where it would have been catastrophic.”
Garcia said by 5 p.m., “you could tell the smoke turned white and it looked pretty contained.”
But the experience was nerve-wracking.
“For myself, it was pretty scary,” said Garcia. “We have two other families, all of us are over 50, that are living on the property and displaced from the Lahaina fires. And for us to see a fire that close, moving that fast [was scary].”
Garcia said they’ve experienced several fires in the Olowalu area in the past three years, and even a small fire on Saturday shortly before the larger brush fire began.
“It’s just been one thing after the other. Every time we see smoke, we're on high alert,” Garcia said.
He described Olowalu as a “tinderbox” and feels clearing firebreaks is key to preventing larger fires from spreading.
“I think what it really comes down to is maintenance of the areas,” he said. “We need to really be proactive, and I think what the county did was a good thing that they had cleared that field proactively a few months before, because I think it made a huge difference.”
Though Garcia was in the evacuation zone, he said he chose to stay on his farm after assessing the wind direction and fire path.
A portion of Honoapiʻilani Highway was closed on Saturday, and Garcia said traffic in front of his property was backed up.
“At one point, when they were saying to evacuate, the traffic was just at a standstill, and we wouldn't have been able to evacuate. We would have been stuck with everyone else right down on the road again,” he said. “It was just deadlocked all the way until, I want to say, at least 9 or 10 at night, was the last time I looked at it.”
Evacuation orders for the area were lifted Monday morning. No structural damage or injuries were reported.
Electricity in the Olowalu area was turned off for more than 700 residents because of fire safety concerns, and severe weather caused an outage to about 10,000 West Maui residents early Sunday morning that extended into Monday.
