‘E ola ‘oe, E ola makou nei.’
“My life is dependent on yours, your life is dependent on mine.”
I followed my GPS through a neighborhood in the town of Kihei until I reached a dead end where a sign on a gate said “No trespassing - Haleakala Ranch.” I sat in my car and waited as car after car drove by and I took notice of how busy the neighborhood was and also of the scenery around me. If it weren’t for the mountain in front of me, I would’ve been sure that I was in Kansas on a warm fall day. Everything was brownish gray and dry against the beautiful blue sky with a warm breeze in the air.
I saw an old Ford in my rearview mirror and stepped out of the car to meet Brendan Balthazar of the Diamond B Ranch, a 73-year-old Maui paniolo (the Hawaiian word for cowboy). I hopped in the truck and we went through the gate into a pasture where eight bulls greeted us. As we drove further and further into the pasture, the dust kicked up and I noticed burnt grass patches every few hundred feet. It was as if there were little fires burnt everywhere instead of one big fire that scorched the entire ground how I assumed it was going to appear.
Balthazar explained to me that the wind was blowing 60-to-80 mph so the patches I saw were from embers landing and then being put out and more embers skipping a few hundred feet and igniting.
“Fire is a living thing,” he explains to me. “Fire has to consume something to live and with a fire like this one, it created its own weather.” Balthazar worked for the Maui County Fire Department for 38 years. But in all of his years fighting fires, he had never seen anything like the day of August 8th.
His day started with a phone call around 2 a.m., alerting him of a fire threatening his pasture near Olinda in the upcountry of Maui. Balthazar, along with other ranchers and the upcountry community, would work for the next 36 hours fighting the worst wildfires in the history of the Hawaiian islands.
“When I was a firefighter, I never fought any wildfires like this,” he says. “In all of the years that I have been living, I have never seen fires like these. And not only because of the devastation to Lahaina. It was just the perfect storm.”
The recipe for the perfect storm? Unusually dry conditions, low humidity, strong winds, the ongoing drought, the area where the wildfire began consisting of an abundance of dry grass, igniting during the end of summer, in one of the longest periods Maui’s gone without rain.
‘Laulima’
“Many hands working together”
Apart from the devastating fire that took the town of Lahaina on the West side of Maui, three other fires raged that day in rural central Maui, all within 20 miles of one another, in Kula, Kihei and Olinda.
Ken Miranda is the general manager of the Kaonoulu Ranch, a family-owned ranch in the upcountry for more than 100 years. He filled up his water truck and drove to help fight the first fire, having to stop and move trees off the road to get there. Trees and powerlines lay on the ground, trees that had snapped in half from the wind brought on by Hurricane Dora. It's been confirmed that the fire began after a tree fell across a power line, igniting a fire in a very dense forest. The fire jumped into the Haleakala ranch pastures and took off downhill.
“As we were dealing with that fire upcountry that ultimately consumed about 600 acres of our pastures, there was a separate fire that ignited a couple of miles away in the residential neighborhood of Kula,” says Scott Meidell, president and CEO of Haleakala Ranch, one of the oldest and largest ranches on Maui, originating in 1888 with almost 30,000 acres to this day.
The fire department turned their concern towards residential neighborhoods and worked to protect houses that were in the trajectory of the fire - a difficult task with the winding gulches, forest area and rough terrain that encompasses the upcountry.
Kula is home to almost 7,000 people living on the west mountainside of the dormant volcano, Haleakala. Its elevation provides spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean through the clouds that hover over Maui. On August 8th, 19 homes in Kula burned to the ground.
At 3 p.m. the west Maui fire in Lahaina became the biggest concern for the Maui County fire department. On an island, there are only so many firefighters around.
Another fire was born and raged across pastures, consuming 2,600 acres of the Haleakala ranch, 100 acres of Kaonoulu ranch land and about 3,000 acres of Mahi Pono agricultural land. This fire moved quickly toward the town of Kihei.
Balthazar has owned and operated Diamond B Ranch on Maui since 1968, leasing property all over the island for his 550-cattle herd. He has leased one particular property from the Haleakala Ranch for over 25 years. After fighting fires for almost 12 hours, he got another call about fire threatening his cattle - near Kihei.
'Kuleana'
"Responsibility, as in the ability to respond to whatever is happening"
Balthazar stopped the truck and got out to show me his wooden corral in the Kihei pasture. He told me that two years ago, a fire burned the fencing completely and he had to rebuild it. In his Hawaiian-style pidgin, he says, “You don’t put one nice corral on a property that you’re leasing you know what I mean? But if I knew how many fires there’d be here maybe I would have.”
He tells me the story of how he went straight to the corral to try to protect it while the firefighters worked to protect the houses right below. He pointed at the ground and asked if I thought I could dig a hole through the rocks that the grass was growing out of. “That’s what we deal with to put our fence posts in,” he says. I've put fence posts in before, but no, I don't think I could dig a hole through a rock.
The firefighters fought the fires away from homes near Kihei, Kula and Olinda while the ranchers were fighting the brush fires from their own pasture properties along with construction workers. Critical - since there was no air support for 48 hours.
“Almost every fire that I have ever been involved with or saw, even after I retired, the helicopters could get to the unreachable places,” Balthazar says. “But because of the winds, the helicopters could not be used to get ahead of the fires.”
Balthazar lost 500 acres of grazing in that pasture, but most of his losses were due to wind damage and took place on a different property where he had pipelines broken and water tanks torn apart. “The water tanks we put on the mountain are strategic,” he says. “To lose one is to lose the whole system.”
The particular water tanks Balthazar has to replace are part of a relay pump system that pushes water up the mountain, 6,000 feet in elevation, that he installed on a piece of property he is now fighting with the state to keep. The 3,000 acres have been used for ranching for over 100 years and are now being claimed for conservation.
He took me to the top of said property, near Kula, and I can understand why anyone would want to take it. It has one of the most spectacular views I have ever seen. Standing at the top of it looking down, it’s hard to believe that the damage done despite the conditions wasn’t worse than it was. Perfectly painted houses stand right next to houses burnt to the ground. Big trees stand tall next to piles of uprooted trees.
Wildfires aren’t rare in central Maui, but the conditions of this fire could have resulted in a lot more damage had it not been for the community and the management of the land. “People working at the ranches really understand the history and the nature of wildfires,” Meidell says. “Managing fuel loads is an important priority when it comes to rotational grazing so fire is always in our awareness.”
Balthazar can only imagine the possibilities had the grass not been grazed. “There’s a lot of strategy that’s going to be discussed in the preventative topic,” he says. “I hope that the focus does not go away from land management. Ag will take care of the land. It takes the fuel down.”
Meidell and the Haleakala Ranch lost 3,100 acres, 100,000 feet of fencing and 40 miles of water lines. They are using this destruction to reevaluate their paddock configuration as well as their livestock program.
“All of us who steward the mountain, the ranches and the large landowners, have been at this for a long time and have experienced fires over many generations,” Mediell says. “But this is truly of a higher magnitude than any of us have ever seen. So I think it’s time for us to recognize that maybe there are new realities and to take another look at how we're mitigating these prospective risks and evolve our land management programs accordingly.
When I asked Balthazar what could be done to prevent this from happening again, he shook his head and looked away. All he said was, “Pray.”
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