this all boils down to blackrock and more past that if you choose;
After failing to protect Lahaina from the known fire risk, County administrators put Kihei's vacation apartment owners in the crosshairs.
December 31, 2025
In September 2023, I posted an essay on this newsletter in which I presented evidence that the August 8, 2023 Lahaina, Maui fire was a Predictable & Predicted Disaster. That the lovely, historic town was in grave danger of being incinerated by wildfire was obvious to everyone who noted that a similar fire almost incinerated the town on August 24, 2018.
On that day, a wildfire broke out on the hillside above Lahaina, driven by high winds resulting from the low pressure of Hurricane Lane that passed south of the Hawaiian Islands. The fire destroyed 2,100 acres, 21 houses, and 27 cars, and caused $4.3 million in damage, but stopped just short of incinerating the town.
In response to this near miss, Maui County made little if any investment in preventing the same thing from happening again, which it did exactly five years later under eerily similar meteorological conditions. However, this second fire could not be stopped on the east end of town, but ended up burning all the way to the waterfront and destroying every building in the historic district..........more.............
