THE KILLING FIELDS: 25 KILOTON FIRESTORM BURNED UPWIND OF LAHAINA

Non-native grass species blamed for ferocity of Hawaii wildfires

Failure to heed warnings over unchecked growth meant blaze was ‘a disaster waiting to happen’

 Left ‘completely unmanaged’ for 25 years , abandoned canefields surrounding the town  hosted over a kiloton per square kilometer of dry grass. While Maui's wet windward side receives 300 inches of rain a year, Lahaina gets only 15.

 

Scientists and academics say they have been warning for several years that invasive grasses covering a quarter of the Hawaii islands are a major fire risk.

Untamed grassland helped fuel the spread and intensity of last week’s deadly fires on the island of Maui, according to experts… A July 2021 report on wildfire prevention by a Maui government commission warned that non-native grasses are making Hawaii more vulnerable to destructive fires, saying their presence, particularly on abandoned sugarcane fields, provides a source of “combustible, rapidly burning fuels” that “needs to be addressed”.

Hawaii’s last sugarcane mill, HC&S, which covered 14,570 hectares (36,000 acres) on Maui, closed in 2016. “The lands around Lahaina were all sugarcane from the 1860s to the late 1990s. Nothing’s been done since then... the grasses were “completely left unmanaged”.

The 2021 report quotes Trauernicht describing the wildfire season in Hawaii as a “one-two punch” of wet then dry conditions. During the wetter part of the year, “a lot of vegetation and particularly grasses … grow and grow very fast,” he said. Then, in the dry period, the grasses turn “from green to yellow to brown pretty quickly … making us way more vulnerable to these big, destructive fires”.

Non-native grass species include fountaingrass (Cenchrus setaceus) and Guinea grass (Megathyrsus maximus), both of which have “adapted to thrive with fire”, according to a factsheet from the Pacific Fire Exchange (PFX), 

Frazier  “ It is shocking and gut-wrenching, but the fire itself was not a surprise.”