 One and thank you for joining me here on Think Tech Hawaii's human-humane architecture series. I am the co-host of this program. My name is DeSoto Brown. I am the Bishop Museum Historian and the Curator for the Archives Department at Bishop Museum here in Honolulu. And the photographs I'm gonna be showing you today come not from Bishop Museum where I work, but were taken by me on a recent visit to Maui. And this is part two of my show that I did the first part last week about the conditions in Lahaina today. And Lahaina Maui, as everyone is aware, underwent a terrible disastrous fire which occurred on August 8th and 9th of 2023. I visited September 16th of 2023 some weeks after fire. The death toll as of now is 98 people and that of course is the biggest tragedy of what happened there. But there are many other things to talk about. There was a great deal of destruction and Lahaina faces entire reconstruction in its future which is going to take in a great deal of things to be considered. And so the photographs I'm about to show you, show you some of the conditions in Lahaina pretty just a short time ago. And I will be talking about what happened, how some of it happened and what we can be thinking about for the future. So let's go to the first slide. Here is a positive and uplifting sign that's posted on the grounds of the Kinkakumanu Center which is a shopping mall in Kagu Louis, Maui. And it is something that obviously everybody wants to support, everybody wants to give support to Lahaina, to Maui in general and to keep things possibly as optimistic as possible as we deal with the repercussions of the disaster that recently occurred. There are different ways to help. There are obviously ways to donate money to a variety of organizations. And it's also possible to go and visit Maui as a tourist to give them money as a tourist. And this is extremely important because Maui's economical, that the foundation of Maui's economy is tourism as is true for the entire state of Hawaii. And if we do not have visitors, we do not have income. And that means that a great many people don't have jobs or are not earning the money that they should. So while on one hand people are saying, no, it's disrespectful to go to a place that's undergone a tragedy like this and be a tourist, the reality is that if we don't have tourists, they are suffering economically as well. So that's something to keep in mind if you are thinking of potentially visiting Maui, obviously you will not be able to visit Lahaina itself but you can go to Maui in general and support them. Next slide. So here's an overview of what Lahaina looks like today. And this very clearly shows some of the destruction, 2,200 structures are estimated to have been destroyed by the fire. And as we look at this, it is a very sobering and emotional thing to think about. And in the foreground, you see a badly burned coconut palm, which is also one of the victims of the fire. But if you look very carefully, at the very top of the palm, you can see a little bit of green showing. That means that this coconut palm is not dead. Despite the way it looks, that means that it is just going to regrow. And I don't wanna be too unrealistic about this, but every time something regrows this way, it is caused to be optimistic. And that's what I would like to say for this photograph. Lahaina is going to come back. Lahaina is going to regrow, just as some of the trees are gonna regrow. But it's gonna be a very long, difficult process. It's gonna be very expensive and there are gonna be lots of things to consider. Next slide. Obviously you cannot go everywhere in Lahaina today. A great deal of the town is still closed off and everywhere you go, you will see barriers like the ones that are in this photograph. So when I visited, I was not able to see a great deal of Lahaina to see for myself what had happened. Although I could see a great deal and get a very good sense of what had happened. Of course, possible to see online, drone views, aerial views, views that other people have taken to get a better idea of the extent of the destruction. But there is a reason for Lahaina not being open this way. And that is because it is still dangerous to be going around in the burned areas. And that's not only because there are broken things that are sharp and that can cut you, that you can fall into, that you can be injured by. But also there are poisonous compounds, poisonous things that are in the burned areas. And that's why even though people are now being allowed back in to visit their properties, to visit their homes and to hopefully salvage a few things from the ruins of their homes, they are being provided with protective clothing and they're being supervised when they go into these burned areas. So Lahaina, it will be a long time before all of Lahaina reopens for people to freely circulate. Next image. Everywhere you look in the open areas of Lahaina, it is not difficult to find evidence of what the town went through in August in terms of its destruction. And because a lot of this destruction still has not been cleaned up, it's not possible to clean all of this up yet because there's so much to do. It is not difficult to see for yourself like this picture shows what some of the damage was. And again, you're only seeing a part of it because again, you can't circulate everywhere. But you do see that not only are there the evidence of the fire and its destructiveness, but you also see that it hasn't been possible, as I mentioned earlier, to clean up very much of this yet because there is so much to do. So debris and wreckage is still very easy to see in a number of places, which under other circumstances, if it had been a small confined fire, all of that would have been cleaned up by now. Well, no, not yet in Lahaina, that's gonna be taking months, weeks and probably months for that to process to continue. Next picture. A lot of people have been thinking about the damage to the economic part of Lahaina, meaning front street where most of the businesses were located because that's important because that's where the money was coming from to support a number of the residents of the town of Lahaina. Many people worked in those businesses which were oriented towards tourists. Well, obviously those have burned and that's what's been given a lot of attention, but the great majority of the buildings which were destroyed in Lahaina were residences. Like the photograph that you see here, these are just a part of the thousands of private homes which were burned. And many of those private homes house a lot of people because they were extended families. They were not just a small group of people but maybe eight or 10 people. So that means that every one of these homes that's destroyed may have made a number of people homeless. And when we go to the next photograph, we can see that the dependency on tourism actually had an unintended and unknown benefit after the fire because closely located right next to the town of Lahaina is the resort area of Kanapali, which you see in this photograph here and the Sheraton Maui is the picture, is the building that's right in the center that we're looking at in this picture. But this is just one of a number of hotels and condos and timeshare buildings right next to Lahaina. And Kanapali was not damaged by the fire. Fire did not reach it. And probably had it even gotten closed would not have caused as much damage because most of these buildings are concrete and they would not ignite in the wind blown fire. However, what this meant was that there were numerous hotel rooms which became available shortly after the fire as all of the tourists who had been staying there left because there wasn't any electricity, there wasn't any water and they were also urged to leave because of the destruction. So it has been possible for many of the fire refugees to be housed in these hotels very close to Lahaina. So this was again unexpected and unintended but a very fortunate turn of circumstances that emergency housing was possible using these hotel rooms. Now, obviously that's not gonna be able to go on forever. And pretty soon, in fact, it might even be today, I believe October 4th is the day I'm recording this program. This part of Maui is expected to be reopened for tourism. That means that people staying in these hotels are not gonna be able to stay there. That means that housing is still going to be a problem and temporary housing is a major concern which is gonna have to be faced. Next photo. Most of the buildings that were destroyed in Lahaina were small, they were single story or two story and that includes the commercial buildings as well as most of the residences. However, there were and are larger buildings there. And this is the wreckage of one of those buildings. This was a low income housing project and it was very new. It had been built and opened only within the last year or two. And unusually, although it was four stories tall, most of it was built of wood. And let's go to the next image and see what this meant. So this large wooden structure, which was again housing, it was apartments, only had some small elements that were concrete and these would have been the emergency stairs as well as the elevators. So all of the building was completely consumed and all of it burned pretty much to nothing except for the three concrete structures. And these are two of them. The other one I just showed you in the previous photograph. And if you look at the tower on the right, you can clearly see that this is the bank of elevators because you can see the two elevator doors that existed on each of the four floors. This is an unusual building in line up because as I say, most of it was low rise and not that many larger buildings, but it's also unusual that a building of this size would be built entirely of wood. Normally these are concrete. They are cement block or poured in place concrete. And that's important because wood is flammable and that is why the Hina burned because most of the Hina was composed of wooden buildings. Dry wood is used to make structures is what burns. And fire like this, that is what happened. So just this one building being destroyed means that numerous people who lived here are now without a place to live and have lost everything that they had in their apartments. Next photo. Something I mentioned last time in the previous show that I did and something which again I'm going to mention too is that in the combination of extremely high winds which were blowing on the day of the fire and into that night, which helped spread the fire very dramatically. And these were winds that were almost hurricane force with the extensive area that was inflamed. A tremendous amount of wind blown debris was being carried down the wind. That included live embers and actual pieces of burning structures, pieces of burning wood. Those landed all over the place and they caused fires all over the place. Some of those fires remain small. So here's evidence of one very confined fire. This is in an area of steel or metal structures, warehouses for the most part, and parked in between some of these metal structures which for the most part resisted the flames because they didn't catch on fire. These three parked trucks did in fact get ignited and they did in fact burn until they were completely destroyed. And go to the next photograph and we see them again. Here are the three parked pickup trucks. Now, what's amazing obviously when you look at this is the building in the background downwind has no extreme fire damage. Why is that? Well, because this is metal and so it was not as easy to burn as all the wooden structures were. But something else that I'm going to be talking about too is we tend to think of vehicles as being made of metal and therefore not being that flammable. And when we drive them and when we are passengers in them and when we wash them and when we vacuum them, we tend to think of them as metal boxes. Well, in fact, vehicles are very flammable and there's a lot in vehicles that can and will burn. And that includes the gasoline that's in the gas tanks. It includes the tires. And it includes the interiors of the vehicles as well. And let's go to the next photo. Here is another small confined fire started by blown wind blown debris. This is a Starbucks drive-through. And if you look on the left, you can see that the signs and the kiosks that you order from when you're sitting in your car are intact and above them is a milo tree that's still green, lots of green leaves. But on the right, this row of Areca palms obviously had a bunch of dead vegetation in it that would have been flammable. And when something landed here, it lit it on fire. There also are the remains of a plastic fence. You can see the fence has mostly burned. There's only one panel left and the upright posts have melted because of the heat. Well, also at this same location, let's go to the next image. Here is an outdoor umbrella because it was a seating area as part of this Starbucks. And you can see here that something flaming, something burning landed on this vinyl umbrella. And I need to emphasize, things that are made of plastic come from petroleum. Petroleum, I need not tell you, is flammable. That's what oil comes from. And oil gets refined into gasoline, it gets refined into kerosene, it gets refined into all kinds of flammable liquids that we use to run our economy. So plastics that also come from petroleum are equally flammable. And here is one small evidence of something that caught on fire but didn't go much further than that. And next picture, we also see the chairs that were located in this outdoor seating area. And while the frames are metal and they didn't burn, you can see that the woven plastic of the seats did burn. And something I also wanna bring up at this point is that I personally am hoping to see that Lahaina gets a memorial not only for the fire and the people who died in the fire but also a fire museum to commemorate this disaster in the same way that there are museums, for example, to commemorate the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9-11, 2001. And it would be objects like these that would be displayed in a museum like that to really get across to people what happened to Lahaina on August 8th and 9th of 2023. Next image. Well, as I said earlier, we think of vehicles as primarily being made of metal that isn't flammable and that's not correct because the back of this van or the back of this SUV very clearly shows what I'm talking about. Most of the vehicle is intact but you can very clearly see plastic that has melted. And again, plastic is made from petroleum and it burns. This is parts of cars that we don't even think about are plastic but in fact they are. The bumper assemblies of passenger vehicles for the front and the back are plastic and also to my surprise in the case of this van, the panel immediately below the back window, the decorative panel is also plastic and it's melted as well. And it isn't until something like this happens that you realize how much flammable stuff is around us all the time and in a disaster like this, it's gonna burn. Next image. Here are two other vehicles which again show evidence of what I'm talking about. These are the taillights of two separate vehicles parked in two different places. The taillights have not melted but they have turned white from the heat that they have been exposed to. So the one on the right is completely white. You no longer can see the clear plastic or the red plastic that normally is there. And on the other side of this parked van, the taillight on the other side which was not exposed to the blown heat, the wind blown heat was intact and not discolored this way. And the Porsche that you see in the picture on the left looks to be entirely intact. But if you look carefully in the taillight, the clear plastic area has discolored and turned white because this was parked next to a building that burned. It was far enough away that it didn't catch on fire. But there is the effect of the heat. And this is the type of stuff that even if things were not destroyed or badly damaged, all of these things have to be fixed and replaced as well. This is innumerable things that don't even show that aren't even very dramatic but that are gonna affect people that are gonna have to be paid for it. Next image. Many of the vehicles that burned no longer have license plates. There are no license plates left on them and you think, where did they go? They melted and license plates are made of aluminum. And this license plate, if you look carefully on the left and right edges has started to melt. It has in fact begun to warp. And that's because the heat of burning vehicles, there's so much flammable stuff that it gets incredibly hot and it can in fact cause aluminum to melt. And we'll go to the next photograph. And around many of the burned vehicles on the ground, you will see congealed melted metal puddles of it like this which I presume are aluminum, which is a very clear demonstration of how hot a burning vehicle gets when there is no way to put out the fire. And there was no way for most of these fires to be extinguished for a number of reasons. So when a vehicle burns until everything is consumed, it will get hot enough to melt metal. And that's what we see right here. Next image. One thing you notice also about burned vehicles, there's no glass anymore. There is nothing left in the windows. They are burned out hulks. And this very clearly shows you that this rear view mirror is entirely gone. Glass is a funny stuff. It remains in a solid state or what appears to be solid to us, but it does also melt and turn to liquid. And it can also just shatter into small pieces under extreme heat. Well, that's what happened to this mirror. And let's go to the next picture. And this is the base of the windshield of a burned out vehicle. And if you look carefully, you'll see that the glass is melted. There's a little bit of it left along the bottom edge and it's melted. Well, windshields have to be made differently from the rest of the glass that's in a passenger vehicle. The rest of the glass is safety glass in the back windows and on the side windows. And it will shatter into very small rounded pieces, but windshields have to be a sandwich of glass and plastic to make them more robust in the case of a crash. And that means that they melt differently than the other windows do in a vehicle. And in the next photo, inside a burned out vehicle, if you look carefully, you can see that there is melted glass from the windshield. But everything else inside is gone and that's the important thing. Inside a vehicle where we sit on seats, where we have door panels, where we have a headliner, where we have visors, where we have a steering wheel, all of those things are flammable. There's metal underneath them. There are metal structures that, for example, compose the seats. But when they burn, all of the stuff that we normally interact with, that we see, the carpet and all that stuff, it's all gone. It's petrochemicals and it burns and it burns hot. Particularly if the car or the vehicle initially is closed up and the heat builds up very intensively inside. So this is a clear indication of what happened in this tremendous fire. Next photo. Well, also in this particular area, which I was describing earlier, this is made up of metal buildings. These are warehouses and these are steel. They are a steel framework and then they have roofs and siding. It's also made of corrugated metal panels. Well, steel is pretty robust. It takes a great deal of heat to melt steel. And the heat was not so extreme that it literally melted. But you can see that these steel structures, the frameworks, were heated to the point where they deformed and warped. Well, how could that be if steel doesn't burn easily? Well, there's no mystery about that. Go to the next picture. And it wasn't that the steel burned, it's the contents of the buildings that burned. And all of these buildings were filled with flammable stuff. But again, wind-blown debris didn't damage most of them. But if it got inside to where it lit something on fire and nobody put the fire out, this is the result. And you see what's left is not only ash from burned combustible material, but a lot of deformed pieces of metal. And people have said, well, what happened to the water supply of Lahaina? Why was it not possible for the firefighters of the water to use water? Why did they run out of water? Well, it's because pipes in the burned area were made impossible to use. Sometimes there were plastic pipes, particularly used for irrigation, and those melted if they were above ground or even not buried, not too deep underground. And even metal pipes will work. And when the structure around them burns, they will just spew water. Well, if you have innumerable pipes broken and spewing water, you lose water pressure. And that is what happened to the terrible detriment of the town of Lahaina, next photo. And in the ruins of, of course, the private homes, all of its left in many cases, are just the pieces of metal that happened to have been in the home. And so if you look at this picture, which is a variety of things outside of home, along with other debris that ended up there later, like a plastic bucket and a child's ball. You see on the right, there is the remains of a lawnmower. You can also see the framework, the metal framework of a chair. And these things are very poignant reminders of what was lost. And sometimes it's possible for people to go through the debris and find ceramic things, glass things, metal things that survive that they wanna keep. But for the most part, most of what we have in our lives, is made of stuff that burns and we lose it in a situation like this. And this is something for all of us to keep in mind. We don't think we're gonna go through a fire, but we could. When it does happen, we lose everything that we treasure in many cases. And let's go to our last photo. And again, I wanna end on a more optimistic note that even in the midst of destruction blackened debris and ash and all the sad things, all the pointed things, the burned things, there is life returning as we see in this picture of the blooming oleander bush in the foreground with the blackened debris in the background. So we can look forward to what Lahaina is going to become. We can look forward to optimism. We have great many questions to answer. We have a lot of things to consider. We have a lot of people's opinions to take into account and to accommodate the people who live there but to also restore the economic force that Lahaina was and needs to be. Thank you all for joining me, everyone. Again, I'm DeSoto Brown. You've just watched Human Humane Architecture, part two of the Lahaina view of Lahaina today. Thanks for joining me. You can watch me again in coming programs in the future. And again, thanks a lot. I'll see you next time on DeSoto Brown. Till later, aloha.