04/18/2024

New Maui Fire Report Spells Bad News for Hawaiian Electric

The report shows the utility waited hours to respond to broken powerline

Hawaii’s electric utility did not respond quickly to the first alerts of its power lines breaking before the deadly Maui fire last August, according to a new timeline report by the Hawaii attorney general’s office, a lapse that experts say may have contributed to the deadliest fire in U.S. history.

The report shows that Maui Fire Department first learned a power pole had snapped, sending “low hanging wires across” the road at 5:16 a.m. on Aug. 8, prompting fire officers to immediately alert Hawaiian Electric, referred to as Maui Electric in the report."MECO was contacted but no ETA provided," the logs say. But a utility worker did not arrive on scene until hours later that afternoon, the report stated. By that point, numerous power lines had fallen in high winds, multiple fires were burning and the utility could not confirm to firefighters that the remaining power lines had been de-energized, according to the official timeline.

The 376-page report, conducted by the Fire Safety Research Institute on behalf of Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez and released Wednesday, is the first in a three-phase probe into how and why the Lahaina brush fire turned so catastrophic. While it did not assign blame or responsibility for how the fire started and spread, it — along with a Maui Fire Department report released earlier in the week — raises fresh questions about how Hawaiian Electric and multiple public agencies handled the fire that would ultimately wipe out Lahaina, especially given that both investigations cited the “profound link between proximate hurricanes and wildfires" and gave recent examples, such as a devastating hurricane wind-sparked blaze in the Lahaiana-area in 2018.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.