The Lahaina Fire, August 8, 2023

The wind off Hurricane Dora arrived before dawn. By six in the morning on August eighth, twenty twenty-three, power lines along the Lahaina coast were already down, some of them sparking in dry grass that had not seen significant rainfall in months. Hawaiian Electric had received warnings about fire risk in high-wind conditions. The utility had not de-energized the lines.

The fire moved faster than the warning systems. Residents in some neighborhoods had minutes. Others had none. The historic town of Lahaina, which had served as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom from eighteen twenty to eighteen forty-five, burned almost in its entirety. At least one hundred people died. More than two thousand two hundred structures were destroyed. Seven thousand people were displaced. It was the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century.

What burned was not only buildings. Lahaina had been the seat of Hawaiian royalty, the site of Lahainaluna Seminary, founded in eighteen thirty-one as the oldest school west of the Mississippi River, and home to some of the densest concentration of Hawaiian Kingdom history surviving anywhere in the islands. The great Banyan Tree on Front Street, planted in eighteen seventy-three, was badly scorched but survived. Twelve blocks around it did not.

The fire exposed a collision of systems that had been building for decades: climate change drying the landscape, an electrical grid not adapted to fire conditions, water infrastructure diverted from the watershed for agricultural use, and a tourism economy that had steadily displaced local residents from affordable housing near the coast. The people who died in Lahaina were largely those who had nowhere else to go.