Hawaiian Electric has delivered a 96-page report to the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission in response to 30 information requests and nearly 200 questions about the Aug. 8, 2023, Lahaina fire, which killed 102 people, caused $5.5 billion in damage, left thousands homeless and decimated Maui’s visitor industry.
The PUC needed an official finding of what caused the wildfire before investigating whether a lack of preparation by the utility company contributed to the deadly tragedy that Maui is still working to recover from.
PUC Chair Leodoloff R. Asuncion Jr. previously told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an interview that the deliberative body is bound by Hawaii Administrative Rules and must follow due process.
Commissioners can’t call in Hawaiian Electric and ask whether it properly set up and maintained utility polls and power lines because they saw a video of a wire starting a fire in the Lahaina grass, Asuncion said.
The report, delivered Dec. 19, “addresses the events surrounding” the Lahaina fire from the standpoint of Hawaiian Electric operations, and “summarizes the many measures that Hawaiian Electric has taken since the fire to mitigate the risk that its equipment is involved in an ignition,” wrote Joseph P. Viola, senior vice president of Hawaiian Electric’s customer, legal and regulatory affairs.
Hawaiian Electric believes its findings “comports with Hawaiian Electric statements made a few weeks after the Lahaina Fires, the information previously provided in response to Commission Information Requests issued over the last eleven months, and the information in government reports issued by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Maui Fire Department and by the Fire Safety Research Institute of Underwriter Laboratories for the Hawaii Department of the Attorney General.”
“This Report does not contain information or conclusions that depart in any material way from this body of work,” Viola wrote. “Rather, it builds on it by incorporating internal company data, addressing conclusions and recommendations in the public reports, and outlining mitigation measures and other corrective actions identified, implemented, and contemplated by Hawaiian Electric. Hawaiian Electric will expand on the mitigation measures outlined in this Report when next month it files its 2025-27 Wildfire Safety Strategy, a further step in the Company’s continuous efforts to improve public safety.”
By Oct. 15 the PUC issued more than 30 information requests totaling nearly 200 questions to Hawaiian Electric as part of an ongoing investigation into the Lahaina wildfire.
The PUC “has been and remains committed” to investigating the tragic wildfire, according to a previous statement to the Star-Advertiser about a nondocketed compliance investigation opened Jan. 23 regarding the role that Hawaiian Electric’s operations and equipment played in the Lahaina and Upcountry Maui wildfires, the Mililani Mauka fire on Oct. 30 and the Nov. 14 Waianae fire.
The commission is reviewing the cause and origin report from the Maui Department of Fire and Public Safety and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives that concluded the Lahaina fire started when downed power lines reenergized in overgrown vegetation that violated the county fire code near a utility pole off of Lahainaluna Road.
“The Morning Fire appears to have started around Pole 25 and in a strip of vegetation owned by the State of Hawai‘i makai of Pole 25, between Lahainaluna Road and its sidewalk,” read the Hawaiian Electric report. “The Morning Fire appears to have spread past a chain link fence and into a grass field owned by Kamehameha Schools adjacent to Lahainaluna Road. The Morning Fire also spread around the Ho‘okahua Street cul-de-sac and into the uncultivated field of vegetation south of Lahainaluna Road. Fire was not observed near Pole 7A.”
