Maui residents wonder if their burned town can be made safe. The answer? No one knows
When Daniel Skousen scrubs the ash and soot covering his Maui home, he worries about the smell.
What chemicals created the burning trash smell that has lingered since a deadly wildfire tore through Lahaina in August? Should he believe government agencies’ assessment of when the air, land and water will be safe enough for his family to return?
Or will the political and economic pressure to rebuild and restore Maui’s robust tourism industry — where visitors typically spend $14 million a day — lead officials to look at the test results through rose-colored glasses?
“It seems very important to them to get that tourist tax revenue back,” Skousen said. “It makes you wonder if the tests will be biased.”
The fire blew out Skousen’s windows and filled his home with ash, but the building still stands and he hopes to move back in someday. The house next door burned to the ground.
Skousen wants a second opinion on any government environmental assessments, preferably from an expert with a stake in the community. But the raw data isn’t easy to find, and experts say the long-term health effects of fires like the one that burned Lahaina are largely unknown. There are no national standards that describe how clean is clean enough for a residential home damaged by a nearby fire.
At least 100 people died in the August 8 wildfire, and thousands were displaced. Nearly 7,000 people were still in temporary shelter two months later.
The debris left behind includes electrical cables, plastic pipes and car tires that emit dangerous dioxins when burned; lead from melted vehicles or old house paint; and arsenic-laden ash from termite-resistant building materials.
After a major wildfire burned 1,000 homes in Boulder County, Colorado, in 2021, health officials found that even professionally remediated homes were often contaminated with ash, charcoal and other toxins long after the fire, according to Bill Hayes, the the province’s air quality program. coordinator.
The reason? High winds — like those that battered Maui this summer during the wildfires — forced fine particles into every crevice, Hayes said. Those particles sat in windows, behind light switches, between shingles and elsewhere until the wind picked up again and recontaminated the house.
“Char is carcinogenic, so we never say that a certain level of those particles is safe,” Hayes said. “That became a challenge when cleaning up: determining at what level it is clean enough?”
State and federal agencies have released regular updates on Lahaina’s relative safety. The water in much of the city is still unsafe to drink, and visitors have been advised to wear protective clothing in affected areas. Officials say pregnant people and children should stay out of the fire zone, although Hawaii’s Department of Education says schools, located above the burned part of the city, are safe.
Crews have installed air quality monitors throughout the city and are spraying ground sealant to prevent toxic ash from entering the ocean or blowing around.
An attorney representing Skousen and about two dozen other Lahaina residents sent a public records request to the Environmental Protection Agency last month asking for any data related to testing of pollutants in Lahaina and their impact on human health.
The EPA’s response, sent earlier this month, was not reassuring: “No data could be found that responded to your request.”
EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford told The Associated Press that his agency had conducted some environmental risk testing in the fire zone, but only to determine the immediate risk to workers involved in the initial cleanup.
He referred further questions about such testing to the Hawaii Department of Health, which he said was responsible for determining longer-term safety for residents.
The Hawaii Department of Health’s Environmental Health Services Division also told Skousen’s attorney that it had no data on testing contaminants in homes.
The Ministry of Health has declined interview requests. Spokesman Shawn Hamamoto said in an email that the department will conduct additional air quality and ash testing when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins removing debris from Lahaina.
“I think they’re playing ‘hide the ball,'” said Skousen’s attorney, Edward Neiger. “The question is: why do they feel the need to hide something?”
Ashford acknowledged that some residents are skeptical of the cleanup effort. He said the EPA has stationed people at the Lahaina Civic Center and workplaces to talk to community members about their concerns.
Andrew Shoemaker, a fine art photographer who operated a gallery on Lahaina’s famous Front Street, believes that going back to the burned areas to see what’s left is an important part of healing, but he recently had a lung infection and doesn’t want to risk his health.
“I don’t even want to risk going there,” he said.
Dioxins, toxic substances that can be released when burning plastic pipes, tires and other household materials, are of particular concern to Shoemaker. According to the World Health Organization, dioxins can persist in the human body for decades and cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, disrupt hormones and cause cancer.
The EPA has found that wildfires and burning household waste in backyard flaming barrels — as Skousen now describes the smell of Lahaina — are both major sources of dioxin emissions.
Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor and environmental epidemiologist at the University of California-Davis, said the air monitors are effective and can measure particles about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Still, there’s a lot scientists don’t yet know about the long-term health risks of fires, Hertz-Picciotto said.
The odor Skousen noticed after the fire could be the result of outgassing, she said, which occurs when volatile organic compounds are absorbed into surfaces and later released.
Even if air quality is carefully monitored, outgassing can expose residents and cleaning crews to toxic fire emissions for months, and research shows that only some volatile organic compounds can be captured by high-performance air particulate filters, according to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder .
“If it smells like burnt plastic or burnt power lines, those chemicals are probably in the air and not healthy,” Hertz-Picciotto says. “The other side of it, though, is that even if you don’t smell it, that doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
Skousen is a teacher and also runs a cleaning company. He has spent his off hours in Lahaina cleaning his and his neighbors’ homes. Skousen and his wife decided to homeschool their children at their temporary residence outside Lahaina for the time being, rather than risk exposing them to potential health problems.
Most guidelines for human exposure to pollutants are based on industrial settings, where people may work 40 hours a week — not on their homes, where they may spend 90% of their time, said Hayes, Boulder County’s air quality coordinator. Whether a home can be made safe enough for occupancy depends in part on the resident’s risk tolerance, Hayes said.
“There is no black and white, one-size-fits-all answer,” he said. “If they have young children in the home, or if anyone has breathing problems, they may want to clean significantly more than what the guidance documents acknowledge.”