Xinyan Yu: A lot of people know Lahaina as this very popular tourist destination. You know, it has beautiful palm trees and really iconic historic town. So, it's really unfathomable for many people on the mainland to imagine a town like that burned down overnight. So, there's a lot of mystery around it. I was very curious how a seaside town with such access to seawater could be burned down overnight. I was really curious to find out more beyond what we were reading on the news headlines. I think because it was such a remote place to a lot of the mainland audiences, people were really hungry for information. And there was fake news even flying around talking about that it could be an attack or some kind. So, I think as a journalist, I was very driven by the curiosity and driven by the desire to know what really happened.
Patrick Center: So, you arrived there three months after the fire. What were your expectations and what was your reaction once you were there?
Xinyan Yu: I didn't really know what to expect. I've been to Lahaina before. I went there with a very small crew. It's just me and a cinematographer because I wanted to make sure that we're doing this story with sensitivity. We're centering the community because this is a closely knit community that is still grieving. And a lot of people were coping with swarms of journalists and vloggers flocking to this town hungry for information. So, I was trying to take a slower approach because we do have a longer production period. So, I really wanted to dig deeper, to understand beyond that day of the fire, to understand what contributed to the magnitude of the fire. Because it's not just the emergency response. Through the film, you learn a lot about what happened, why this tragedy was years in the making. I remember the first day I arrived, I was by myself, because I arrived first, because I wanted to spend a few days just talking to people. Driving through that town, it made me tear up. And I'm not even from Lahaina, and just looking at just how devastated the damage was. Everything was charred, there were boards, the government put up to block some of the views. And that was the time when the island already started reopening, which is a very controversial decision. And I remember I started talking to residents who were starting to live in some of the hotels because Hawaii and Maui were already dealing with a housing shortage. And after the fire, around 6,000 people were displaced. Many of them were moving from the shelter to these big hotels, living alongside with tourists who were coming back to the area. So, there is a lot of very sensitive distrust from the community that made it quite hard for me to talk to some of the community members. So, I started just hanging out. There was this group called Lahaina Strong that was occupying the beach, a very popular beach called Kaanapali Beach, right next to the all the five-star hotels. And they were trying to make a statement by putting tents up on the beach, asking for long-term housing options for fire victims. So, I started talking to them and there were people who were cooking for the community, people who were just coming to check on other people. So, I started to slowly get to know the community members and win their trust and learning that a lot of people had raised concern about wildfire risk way before the 2023 fire. And that's when I started to uncover the tragedy in your years in the making, which was also the finding of the state-commissioned investigation later on. So, I think this film, what we really wanted to do is to peel back on the intensity of the fire on the day and really tell people about what happened in history, dating back to the plantation era that really contributed to the severity and the speed of the fire on that day.
Patrick Center: What were some of the missteps that you uncover?
Xinyan Yu: So, what we did was gathering from multiple sources of information. On one front, we were talking to residents, trying to piece together their story, their experience on the day. We're also getting a lot of the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) documents from various agencies. There were over 1,000 911 calls. There were over 20 hours of police body cam footage. There were also public documents from the fire department, police department and mitigation reports from the county, also years before. And on top of that, there was state commissioned investigation, independent investigation that was also ongoing. But we didn't know the result of the investigation until very late around September, October this year. We spent basically 10 months trying to gather our own information about what the missteps were. And then a lot of them were also mentioned in the report. So together, we put together a very comprehensive timeline of what happened on the day of the fire. But also going back to 2018, for example, which was another very similar fire to almost burned down Lahaina. It reached the very edge of the town and burned down dozens of homes on the outstarts of town. There was a community meeting right after the 2018. It was a bit uncanny when we were looking through this community meeting. It was a three-hour community meeting in August, exactly five years ago, that residents started talking about the sirens not being sounded, a shortage of evacuation routes, the fact that all those power lines were whipping in the hurricane winds. So, a lot of these things that happened in 2023 also happened in 2018. And the resident members already raised that. And that meeting was attended by the former mayor, the former representatives from the police department and fire department, and HECO, the Hawaiian Electric Company representatives. It was uncanny to see that and to see that archival footage and also hearing the residents talking about the 2018 fire that somebody should have done something. And there was an after-action report that was issued by MEMA, the Maui Emergency Management Agency. But that report did not become publicly available until after 2023, when all the media were asking for all these documents. And we realized that a lot of these problems that were raised by the residents were not really addressed in after action report. So, in the end, combining all these sources, a confluence of factors contributed to the deadly nature of the fire. The state commissioned investigation had a very good chronicling of the event. What happened during the day of the fire is there was an overall lack of sufficient communication and poor coordination between the responding agencies and their communication with the public. There was no siren sounded, so a lot of people only knew that the fire was coming to them when the fire was already in their neighborhood. And because of a shortage of evacuation routes, a lot of people were trapped in their neighborhood with dead end streets and down power lines. People suffered from harrowing escape and losing their family members because they had to abandon them. But what was more interesting from the investigation was these long standing systemic issues that were unresolved for years that helped set the stage for the severity of the fire. For example, the report was talking about the severe underinvestment in wildfire prevention, despite the growing wildfire threat in Hawaii. A good example was the 2018 fire. And even after that, there was a widespread lack of preparedness among government officials and agencies tasked with the instant management. And there was also a lack of maintenance for these decade old infrastructure standards, especially because one of the areas, the Kuhua Camp where more than 40 people died, that's over one third of the victims died in this fire were living in these multifamily homes with very narrow roads that weren't updated for decades. People years before have asked for more evacuation routes, but that was pushed back and it never happened before the fire. So, a lot of people have big trouble when they were trying to escape from this particular area with all these obstacles. On top of that, there's also very big elements that contribute to the fire, which was the inadequate vegetation management. This is something that I learned a lot from doing this story, how important it is to proactively trim the grasses. It sounds really easy, but Hawaii has this very interesting history of the plantation era where people grew sugar cane, pineapple and in the tourism era, a lot of these lands were bought by real estate developers. And with the hotels, many landowners have abandoned a lot of the land and did not really maintain or trim the grasses and they became highly flammable. So, when the hurricane winds were blowing, the grass caught on fire really quickly and made Lahaina a tinderbox. So, all of these factors contributed to the fire being the deadliest in a century American history.
Patrick Center: What would you like viewers to take away from this film?
Xinyan Yu: I think a lot of people think of wildfires, a story in the remote forest of Canada, or a stroke of bad luck descending on a community. But right now, extreme weather has become a lot more frequent, and it could happen in any community. I remember last month, I was in New York doing some work, and then they were talking about wildfires in Brooklyn and in Boston, places that you would not normally associate with wildfires. I think the story is just serving as a reminder that communities around the world should be prepared. For example, the sirens in Hawaii, they are not usually used for wildfires. So that's why the emergency management agency didn't even think about sounding them because they were worried that people might think it's tsunami and go uphill. Through this film, we hope that people understand that communities should really prepare before disaster strikes. Prevention is always an afterthought. We talked to the governor of Hawaii in the film, and I think he made it very clear that Hawaii, for a very long time, prioritized tourism development and not so much in prevention because it's always an afterthought until a disaster strike and so many people died and now so many things are happening in Hawaii, policy changes, updating equipment, updating infrastructure, all after more than 100 people died. I hope that our audience understand that there is a global crisis going on and it could happen to any community. So, it does really take a community-wide effort, an inter-agency effort to reduce the risk. And it's also a collective responsibility from individuals taking action in our community to corporations and governments making meaningful policy and funding investment into wildfire risk reduction.
Patrick Center: Tonight at 10 o'clock on WGVU Public Television frontline investigates Maui's Deadly Firestorm. Filmmaker Xinyan Yu, thank you so much.
Xinyan Yu: Thank you, Patrick.