Hawaii Hurricane-Wind-Driven Wildfires: Info On An Unexpected Big Disaster
How To Help + Big Picture Info & Response
We don’t write about every US disaster because — simply — there are too many, they are increasing, we are not a news agency, and we’re trying to get a political nonprofit going.
That said, what’s going on in Hawaii is a bit unexpected and is going to require some unique response. Folks will need help, and many of the traditional big disaster mechanisms will be a bit challenged to respond because of the unique logistical challenges of, you know, islands. This post will address that first, and then a big picture perspective on this disaster.
To Help, Send Money Not Stuff
First — we often say this (like here’s the Hurricane Ian post on it), but it’s the primary reason for the post: send money not stuff.
For freaking crying out loud, this is always an issue in every disaster but it is particularly so when the disaster is in the middle of the ocean. LOGISTICS MATTER IN BIG, WEIRD DISASTERS. Don’t try to get your church ladies together to rent a shipping container to send stuff to Hawaii. If you feel compelled to do something, raise money locally with your church people — or whoever — and send that money to help Hawaii.
If you’re looking for organizations ready to help in big US disasters with good, well-established logistics and volunteer systems, we always recommend starting with NVOAD because, well, the NVOAD organizations are specifically organized to help with national disasters — with money, logistics, and trained volunteers. Hawaii also has an advisory out to help people avoid fundraising scams.
Again, this is a time when big bureaucracy is good — because big bureaucracy means big logistics. Send your money where it can help for the crisis. Little tiny aid organizations don’t have as much capability to access ships, boats, aircraft, etc. to move critical supplies, equipment, trained volunteers, etc.
As an aside, we’re also fundraising for this nonprofit here writing this newsletter through our website or on ActBlue or with a paid subscription. This nonprofit is set up to catalyze widespread public pressure and civic engagement to move the US toward a healthier democracy and away from far-right extremism. We do posts like this as a larger public service, as folks tend to send money to disaster regions in crises. We like to help get the word about about how all that disaster money can be more useful. Plus, as climate change intensifies we’re going to all need to be more resilient and deal with more disasters — so disasters are a key part of our work long term.
Getting Wildfire Info
Normally in the case of unusual or particularly damaging wildfires, I recommend that folks use the official interagency mechanisms set up for interstate wildfire coordination to get info/intel. In this case, those official mechanisms are not up-to-date because these wildfires started Wednesday morning after official reporting cut-offs. More on that in a minute. Official mechanisms are also not up-to-date because this is an unusual, unexpected catastrophe with lots of impacted interdependent systems, communities, and infrastructure and corresponding cascading effects. For example, cell towers have burned down so communication is limited which causes lots of other complications.
Hawaiian city, county, and state government agencies are either maxed-out or going-all-out to help with highly urgent life/safety priorities and are not able to handle some of the bureaucracy we normally expect from government (for example, Maui County stopped posting emergency updates on their website Wednesday morning at 0635 hrs local time, likely due to complete overwhelm in the face of super-fast-moving and destructive fire activity).
Long story short — if you’re looking for up-to-date Hawaii wildfire info, use reputable news media sources until government agencies can get caught up. Missing persons tracking, fatalities, and damage reports info may not be available/current as the incident is actively unfolding.
If you’re using Google or YouTube, you can search for stories updated “in the last hour” using the filter feature to get the latest. NBC News has a good Hawaii wildfires page with video and regular updates.
This local news video below out of Sacramento, California has a nice overview of the weather situation that contributed in several ways to the intense winds on Wednesday and that will likely keep things dicey on Thursday; plus they have a good overview map and a look a drought. Diurnal winds will also be a factor Thursday — those are localized daily fluctuations in winds that change throughout the day due to heat from the sun (like after sunrise) and due to local topography and other localized weather factors.
Official Coordination Systems
In terms of wildfire coordination, all wildfires in the US are coordinated through an interagency Geographic Area Coordination Center (GACC) System of 10 centers, with the national center that coordinates between the regions being located in Boise, Idaho — it’s the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC) at the National Interagency Fire Center. Normally, the NIFC NICC Incident Management Situation Report (IMSR) has the best big-picture overview of what’s going on, but the cut-off for the NICC IMSR is late Mountain time the night before, and the IMSR is published at 0530 hrs (5:30 am) Eastern Time. These Hawaii wildfires really took off on Wednesday morning, and Hawaii is six hours behind the US east coast.
The NIFC Incident Information page may get a bit of an update on Thursday but that is unlikely because one or more ICS-209 Incident Status Summaries need to be entered into an online system for automated mapping, imagery, and information reports to happen — and the state of Hawaii has likely not had time to catch up with that kind of report because of the unprecedented nature of the disaster. ICS-209s are required to help with immediate disaster aid and response coordination; but in this kind of unusual crisis, data entry may be delayed due to life/safety actions and priorities (another aside… if you ever need me to tell a long but cool story about my experience in government over many years and a few jobs, ask me about ICS-209s).
The Geographic Area that’s responsible for interagency wildfire (and often other disaster) response in Hawaii is Northern California — otherwise known as “North Ops” (vs. “South Ops” in Southern California). The North Ops Coordination Center website is here, but as of this post it has exactly zero helpful info about the current HI wildfires except for the Red Flag (weather) Warning in HI. My guess is that once these fires took off Wednesday morning, staff at North Ops and at the NICC in Boise sprung into action behind the scenes as normally happens when new big wildfires happen (by phone and computer systems), but as one would expect it takes some time to get wildfire resources from the continent out to the middle of the ocean. Public reporting on all that will also be behind due to the time zone change, so even the official info we get in all of these channels above on Thursday will be behind.
Which brings us to the state.
Hawaii is currently a state in crisis. As noted above, Hawaiian city, county, and state government agencies are either maxed-out or going-all-out to help with highly urgent life/safety priorities. This disaster is a combination of drought, high winds from a nearby hurricane (plus other factors), and new wildfires. Because of the fast-moving nature of the fires (some winds may be estimated at 90 mph), government agencies, nonprofits, and the private sector infrastructure owners/operators that might all normally be involved in response are in many ways impacted and/or are urgently addressing life/safety priorities.
In other words, lots of folks are trying to stay alive or to keep other people alive.
That’s the priority. That may still be the priority on Thursday if the intense winds keep up.
Raw survival and basic emergency communication to protect life and safety are made so much more difficult when an incident is so fast-moving, and when communication and other capabilities are knocked out by the disaster.
As such, we’re not likely to get fabulous updates about where the fires are, who’s alive, who’s not, who’s missing, what’s burned down, what still works, and so on from the state of Hawaii or its local agencies.
The media would do well to note this when there’s a crisis such as this; but some seem to forget to think critically about how government agencies, like humans, can only handle so much crisis at a time — and also that certain things sometimes take priority. Keeping national media updated when you’re trying to keep local people alive is not always a priority; nor should it be.
More Big Picture Response Parts
FEMA’s involvement at this point will be to start activating funding and certain federal resources outside of the interagency wildfire coordination systems that can handle many of the unique logistical challenges of a disaster in the middle of the ocean and that sort of thing.
State-to-state mutual aid resource response may be coordinated through EMAC; which FEMA funding can help with.
Private sector mutual aid may be coordinated through other channels if needed for critical infrastructure restoration in various areas; but because of the unique logistics this may also involve the federal government and its public-private-partnership coordination capabilities.
Military aid may occur through domestic military response channels and tends to be coordinated through FEMA when needed if the situation is big or complicated enough. In this case, military aid is most likely for logistical coordination including to support nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the NVOAD organizations referenced above (yet another good reason to support existing, well-established nonprofit organizations). Military aid may also help with moving assistance from other federal agencies, state-to-state mutual aid, or critical infrastructure restoration capabilities especially for things like critical communication capabilities.
If this sounds messy, it is. That’s because there is not one single disaster response coordination system in the US — there are about 12. It’s messy in every US disaster, but it’s way more complicated in a catastrophe or when the disaster has incredible logistical challenges — such as occurring in the middle of the ocean. I also have long stories about this, but that’s not today’s focus.
Climate & Resilience & Transformation
A situation like what’s happening in Hawaii this week is not necessarily worsened by climate change… but we do know for sure that climate change is occurring on a finite planet with an increasing world population living largely in high-hazard zones… and that that means we’ll have more frequent, more intense, and more devastating disasters.
With that, there will be lots of the unexpected. It’s reasonably safe to guess that this sort of thing is what the unexpected will look like — hurricane-wind-driven wildfires in a drought-impacted location.
We will need to be more resilient, more disaster-ready, and with stronger connection, communities, and coalitions — and we will need to be way, way, way more serious about collective problem-solving locally to nationally.
We’re not doing that at all right now and it’s a problem.
The current far-right authoritarian movement after years of political gridlock keeps the US in a holding pattern even as our world destabilizes… but it doesn’t have to all go to heck.
This nonprofit here is one of thousands of political organizations set up to help counter this authoritarian threat — but we’re highly unusual in that we’re also set up to help put pieces in place to help us navigate this coming instability with connection, community, resilience, partnerships, problem-solving, and so on. And that’s part of why we write pieces like this.
What’s happening in Hawaii is our present and our future.
Whether we shift our direction in the US to one where we more aggressively deal with this reality is yet to be determined — but we’re going to do what we can to help us get there.
The US (and the world) is already in a transformation.
What we don’t know yet is who’s going to drive the most change from within that transformation. Shift the Country intends to do what we can to help Americans drive that change — and to put us on a more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, and equitable path.
Join us.
Update on Hawaii fire fatalities...
https://www.kitv.com/news/lahaina/36-confirmed-dead-federal-and-local-officials-give-updates-on-maui-fires/article_5498454e-374e-11ee-aa9e-dbbaab703229.html
Here's more on why the fires are bad, from what I wrote in an emergency management discussion group...
🌴🔥 There are actually reasonably frequent fires in Hawaii due especially to lava starts so they deal with wildfire quite a bit.
It's a fire-adapted ecosystem natively with local species that are reasonably flammable. The USDA Forest Service Riverside Fire Lab in SoCal has done quite a bit of science on the Hawaiian fire ecosystem.
There are also now other non-native plants such as grasses that are common in the urban interface areas and carry fire fast. That has reportedly been an issue in this case, and of course urban interface, spotting from wind, and other extreme fire behavior factors that make bad wildfires spread faster.
In this case some of the worst fire is occurring on the drier side of the island(s) that's been in a drought.
There were 3 different factors playing into high winds including a high pressure system to the NW, a nearby hurricane, and a strong ocean wind pattern coming from the NE. Plus a 4th factor: localized diurnal winds relating to the geography, etc. especially the mountains (volcano).
🌴🔥