![]() The exact ignition source has yet to be determined, and the risks were heightened by the strong winds associated with Hurricane Dora, but Frazier said “the overall cause of this fire being so large was the invasive grasses”. It is shocking and gut-wrenching, but the fire itself was not a surprise.” “I never expected it to be this bad in terms of lives lost. Frazier was on the nearby island of Oahu when the Maui fires broke out.įrazier said the Maui fires were no surprise, although the human toll was shocking. “The early part of 2023 was wet, which helped grass growth, and then we have had quite a dry summer, with a moderate drought on Maui for about a month now,” said Prof Abby Frazier, a climatologist who studied in Hawaii and is now at Clark University in Massachusetts. The grasses, PFX said, were originally introduced to feed cattle and provide ornamentation. ![]() The 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), a Hawaiian fire science communication project. The land around Lahaina was used to grow sugarcane until the late 90s, and then left ‘completely unmanaged’. 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”. During the wetter part of the year, “a lot of vegetation and particularly grasses … grow and grow very fast,” he said. The 2021 report quotes Trauernicht describing the wildfire season in Hawaii as a “one-two punch” of wet then dry conditions. Nothing’s been done since then – hence the problem with invasive grasses and fire risk,” said Clay Trauernicht, an ecosystems and fire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.Īsked if the non-native grasses made the Maui fire worse, Trauernicht said that any form of “land use or land care would have made the situation safer”, given that the grasses were “completely left unmanaged”. ![]() ![]() “The lands around Lahaina were all sugarcane from the 1860s to the late 1990s. Hawaii’s last sugarcane mill, HC&S, which covered 14,570 hectares (36,000 acres) on Maui, closed in 2016. 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”. ![]()
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