This week, The Conversation has been looking at different aspects of rebuilding Lahaina Harbor. Now we hear from scientists who have been concerned about the marine environment due to the nearly 100 burned vessels and the potential hazardous runoff from the devastated neighborhoods.
The fire in August 2023 burned through most of the fuel inside the boats as they rose out of the water and then burned down to the water line before sinking, said Russell Sparks, a biologist with the Division of Aquatic Resources at the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The U.S. Coast Guard has since removed all of the vessels that sank.
Sparks said there would have been a lot of fuel pollution to the nearshore waters if the boats had sunk normally. But he's still looking out for long-term impacts from pollutants such as fiberglass, paints and metals.
No one knew what to expect initially, though concerns were eased a bit after water and sediment tests were completed.
"The contaminant levels were not nearly as high as I feared," said Renee Takesue, a geochemist with the U.S. Geological Survey out of Santa Cruz. "Someone suggested that the reason being the fire was so hot and so intense that many of the contaminants were completely incinerated, and so we don't see them in the environment as we initially feared."
Takesue and Sparks have a long track record of working together. They sprung into action after the fire to collect data and better understand how the hazardous materials could impact the marine environment.
"I guess the samples that have been analyzed to date, and even the ash and some of the stuff done on land, suggests that a lot of the concerns, a level of contamination that we're concerned with, may not be a problem after all. So that's definitely good, but, you know, we still have to do some of the analyses on some of the early samples to truly understand all that was liberated into the marine environment, so I guess check back later," Sparks told HPR.
If there is a long-term negative impact, he said, it will slowly reduce the health and resilience of the coral reefs, and we might start to see an increased incidence of disease or bleaching compared to other reefs that weren't exposed.
"Hopefully it's not going to have a long-term negative impact, you know, that's what we all have got our fingers crossed for, but it helps for us to at least know what it was exposed to, so we can start to think a little bit more about what we should be looking for."
In June, the state Department of Health also started sharing its environmental monitoring data on a new website.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Aug. 7, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Sophia McCullough adapted this story for the web.
