Good data is behind what can help make good policy. That was part of a conversation Wednesday on Maui as a U.S. congressional subcommittee met at the Lahaina Civic Center to examine the federal government's response to the wildfires.
On hand were officials from the U.S. Small Business Administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. U.S. Reps. Jill Tokuda and Ed Case of Hawai'i called for Congress to replenish FEMA's disaster relief fund. They also questioned how organizations used data to inform their responses in the weeks and months following the disaster.
HPR took a closer look at some of that data — and the inconsistencies.
The Aug. 8, 2023, Maui wildfires destroyed nearly 1,400 homes and displaced thousands of residents. Faced with a daunting path to rebuilding, some, like the Perez family, chose to leave the island entirely.
Braazlee and Sergio Perez moved their family to Las Vegas after they lost their home in the Lahaina fire. Despite having to find new jobs and fundraise to fix their car, they told KTNV Las Vegas reporter Abel Garcia that leaving Maui was the right call for their family.
"Yes, this is the best decision that we have made, especially for our kids. But us being here, it feels right, it feels good, we get sad at times. Now we’re here in a whole new life, and you know we’re making it work, we’re adjusting," Braazlee Perez told Garcia earlier this year.
Four thousand is an early estimate of how many people left the island following the fires, according to data analyzed by the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization. This number, known as outmigration, is based on figures from FEMA, the state Department of Education and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.
But Carl Bonham, the executive director of UHERO, said his agency’s forecast should be taken with a grain of salt.
"It's an informed estimate based on a bunch of different data points. But, we don't have hard data on how many people have left the island," Bonham said. "All of these data sources are problematic. None of them are sort of hard data on actual outflows of people. Basically, right now, I would say we have almost no data.”
Despite researchers’ misgivings, that number has been widely cited by officials and has been used to inform policy and make decisions on key issues like housing. UHERO does not currently have any additional data sources that would change its forecast of outmigration.
How the 4,000 estimate came to be
The outmigration estimate is influencing how much housing gets built by organizations like CNHA, but it may massively undercount the true number of people who have left Maui.
"I think it's very important for us to have a very good idea of where people are, so we're building the right types of homes, so we're building the right amount of homes. I think, in the end, the more educated we are based on data, the better the decisions that we're making as leaders helping with recovery could be aligned to their needs," said Kūhiō Lewis, the executive director of CNHA.
Lewis said that at least 1,500 families – and likely many more – have left Maui. His organization bases its number on hundreds of responses from fire survivors surveyed through CNHA’s lease program and the Alaska CARE Flights Program, which drew sign-ups from hundreds of families.
Alaska CARE “was a good chance for us to ask a bunch of questions to see where they're at,” Lewis said. “It's probably the most refreshed data than anybody has, because Red Cross data gets stale. FEMA data gets stale."
The regional administrator for FEMA Region 9, Bob Fenton, agreed that the agency’s numbers are likely out-of-date.
"The only time that we get information from individuals affected by the disaster are those that apply to our program, and so if they applied to our program, and as part of that, they have to furnish their address, but it's the last address they use," Fenton said.
FEMA is not obligated to track survivors’ addresses over time; additionally, its data leaves out applicants who were not deemed eligible for aid, including those experiencing homelessness at the time of the fires and those who did not apply for aid in the first place.
A fractured landscape for data collection
Matt Jachowski was the director of data, technology, and innovation for CNHA until June. He also put together some of the earliest reports and estimates in the immediate aftermath of the fire.
Jachowski said CNHA and UHERO cared about the data from the start – but they were some of the only ones who did.
"From my perch, there was nobody who was taking a serious look at the data in the first several months after the fire, maybe except for me and the work I was doing," Jachowski said. "But in the immediate aftermath of the fire, I didn't run into a single other person who was engaging with the data in any deep way and trying to inform decision-making."
"It was really sad to me to see that our residents who live here and had front-row seats to this recovery that was happening didn't engage in any deeper way," Jachowski said.
Another issue that arose for researchers was the time it took for them to gain access to the data. In certain cases, they were refused access entirely.
For instance, The People's Fund of Maui, which was established by Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, distributed money to more than 8,100 Maui residents. But Jachowski said the fund declined to share information with researchers that it collected from recipients, like names or addresses.
A spokesperson from the Entertainment Industry Foundation, which manages the fund, said in a statement that the fund does not have permission to share personal information about its beneficiaries, including their banking information. The spokesperson added that it encourages other organizations to engage in direct financial giving, as it has been shown to be effective for recovery.
“Every single time you want to ask for this relevant information from an organization, you have to go through, at a minimum, a weeks-long and often a month-long process of finding data sharing agreements and getting lawyers involved, and sometimes they just don't want to do it,” Jachowski said, adding that it took until December for CNHA to access FEMA data.
Fenton stressed that FEMA follows a mandate to safeguard survivors’ privacy. These protections often result in barriers to sharing sensitive information like a person's whereabouts.
However, the agency realizes there is still work to be done.
FEMA has backed federal legislation to reform the process. A U.S. House Bill called the Disaster Survivors Fairness Act would establish a FEMA-managed unified disaster application system. Reps. Ed Case and Jill Tokuda of Hawaiʻi have co-sponsored the bill. The measure currently awaits a House floor vote.
“If Maui has taught us anything, it is the need to prevent the disaster after the disaster,” Tokuda said in a written statement to HPR. “Federal assistance to help with the rebuilding process after a disaster is crucial, yet the application process for each agency can be lengthy, confusing, and oftentimes, retraumatizing. That's why I've cosponsored the Disaster Survivors Fairness Act, which would streamline applications and lessen the burden victims already face. After enduring great loss, the last thing a disaster victim needs is the stress of trying to navigate through numerous documents. If our priority truly is to take care of people, we need to make the process simpler so they can focus on healing and moving forward.”
Better numbers down the road
Bonham shared that UHERO recently contracted to purchase U.S. Postal Service data that will show how many people have changed their address from Maui to another place, and vice versa. Those numbers will likely become available to UHREO in January. The state’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism is tracking data from the U.S. Census Bureau and expects to have a clear estimate of outmigration by December.
In the future, Bonham said he hopes to survey subsets of the state’s population over multiple time periods, calling the technique a way “to learn from our mistakes.”
“If we’d had 500 people on Maui responding to a survey every six months, and then before and after [the fires], you can get an estimate of how many people have left,” he said. “I think that's the direction we need to go, and it's something we're continuing to work on.”
Right now, researchers are stuck waiting for national data sets that policymakers needed months ago, Jachowski said.
“I think, frankly, it's not acceptable to just wait for that data to become available when you're dealing with a disaster,” Jachowski said.
He said there could have been a concerted effort early on to focus on the data and collect it in one place. Instead, responders lost a valuable opportunity.
“I think each time you were majorly helping some fire survivors, that's a golden opportunity to collect systematic data on how they're doing in their recovery,” Jachowski said. “It's really a missed opportunity that we didn't do that.”
Residents won't feel some of the impacts of these decisions for years to come. Some of the decisions based on incomplete data will likely affect displaced residents’ desires and abilities to return to Maui.
CNHA Executive Director Lewis said that when he thinks about outmigration, he focuses on the people, not the data, because it was the people who made Lahaina what it was – and they deserve to be a part of Maui's future.
“Our hope and everything that we're trying to do is really to keep people home. We've lost so many of them already. Hawaiʻi was already losing our population before the fire,” Lewis said. “What's underneath all of this for us as a Hawaiian organization, is we got to keep the fabric of Hawaiʻi, and everyone that leaves this state is part of that fabric. And if anything, my hope is that they start to come back home.”
This segment aired on The Conversation on Sept. 5 and 6, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Tori DeJournett adapted this story for the web.
