Earth Protect Blog

By Simon Romero

© The New York Times Co.

PA’AUILO, HAWAII » The blaze first swept across parched fields of guinea grass. Then the flames got so close to Emma-Lei Gerrish’s house that she feared for her life.

“I was terrified it was going to jump the gulch,” said Gerrish, 26, whose Quaker family raises cows and sheep in the hills above Pa’auilo, a ranching outpost on Hawaii’s Big Island. “I’ve never seen a fire this large in my lifetime.”

By the time firefighters got the wildfire under control last month — with a mix of helicopters dropping water while residents drove bulldozers to create firebreaks — more than 1,400 acres had been burned, adding to the tens of thousands across the state since 2018.

Hawaii may be graced with tropical forests, making parts of the islands some of the wettest places on the planet, but it is also increasingly vulnerable to wildfires. Heavy rains encourage unfettered growth of invasive species, including guinea grass, and dry, hot summers make them highly flammable.

Similar to the American West, where dozens of large blazes have raged in recent weeks and fire seasons have grown worse over the years because of extreme weather patterns and climate change, about two-thirds of Hawaii faces unusually dry conditions this summer.

Some of the recent fires, especially on the Big Island and the island of Maui, ravaged areas spanning about 10,000 acres. From 2018 through last year, at least 75,107 acres across the islands have been lost to wildfires, by far the most devastating stretch in a decade and a half.

While the fires showcase several challenges that Hawaii shares with states in the West, including the spread of highly flammable invasive grasses, authorities in Hawaii also cite other factors that make Hawaii unique. Those include big shifts in rainfall patterns over the archipelago and tourism’s eclipse of large-scale farming in Hawaii’s economy, allowing nonnative plants to overtake idled sugar cane and pineapple plantations.

Firefighters also have to operate across exceptionally diverse climate zones, extinguishing blazes everywhere from thick tropical forests to semiarid scrublands to chilly elevations where frost can be seen on trees along the slopes of the Mauna Kea volcano.

Even before the latest surge, the area burned annually in Hawaii by wildfires had already climbed fourfold from previous decades, according to Clay Trauernicht, a tropical fire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Trauernicht, who analyzed more than a century’s worth of wildfire records, also found that the area burned each year in Hawaii from 2005-11 was about 0.48% of the state’s total land area, roughly the same as in fire-prone Western states on the mainland during the same period.

More than 60% of land across Hawaii is currently considered “abnormally dry,” according to the National Drought Mitigation Center, and the vegetation in some of the pasture lands and fallow plantations on the Big Island has the yellow- hued look of arid ranches in the American West.

Even so, greater rainfall during the state’s winter, or wet season, may be just as responsible for Hawaii’s growing wildfires.

A lot of rain helps grass species such as guinea and kikuyu thrive. Both were introduced to the state decades ago, as both forage for livestock and to curb erosion. Some grow as much as 6 inches in a day and provide fuel for fires to quickly leap out of control. Before this year brought dry conditions across much of the state, last winter figured among the wettest in three decades.

“The biomass out there is off the charts,” Trauernicht said. “When you have a huge wet winter, that will influence fire risk to a greater degree than actual drought conditions.”

Volcanic eruptions and tsunamis also threaten Hawaii, but natural causes such as lightning or flowing lava account for only a small fraction of wildfires in the state, according to fire-prevention officials. Instead, people ignite more than 90% of Hawaii’s wildfires.

The results can be disastrous for native species steeped in the islands’ culture, including the ohia, a tree that grows easily on new lava flows, featuring flowers that are often scarlet red.

In 2018, for instance, a worker repairing a bulldozer with a plasma cutter, a tool used to cut metal, accidentally sparked a blaze that spread into the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The fire burned 3,572 acres of largely native forest.

“Some of these invasive species are actually colonizing barren lava flows, taking away these natural fuel breaks,” said Greg Funderburk, the park’s fire management officer. “Now we have a sea of grass in what would have been barren rock with sparse ohia trees.”