The one-story house 100 meters from Lāhainā Harbor where Tiare Lawrence grew up was a typical Hawaiʻi plantation homea historic architectural style with a wide hipped roof, a wooden light blue exterior, and a purple bougainvillea bush in the front yard.
That’s where her grandmother grew up, and her mother and aunts and uncles too. For more than a century, her family held on to the house, even as the number of Native Hawaiian families in Lāhainā declined, property taxes rose, and the town around them turned into a tourist center. In high school, Lawrence would wake up at the crack of dawn before school and carry her surfboard from the carport to her favorite surf spot as the sun’s rays gently illuminated the West Maui sky.
Her voice breaks when she talks about it now: the banana patch her great-uncle tended, the countless family gatherings, the family photos now lost forever after the house burned in a vicious wildfire last summer.
Thursday will mark one year since a wildfire tore through Lāhainā, killing more than 100 people in the deadliest wildfire in modern United States history. The violent inferno devastated the coastal community, burning more than 2,000 buildings and displacing thousands of residents. This week the community have many events scheduled to commemorate the disaster: surfers will break out en masse, families will gather at the Lāhainā Civic Center, and more than 100 Kānaka Maoli sixth graders will put on a stage production to honor the history of the town, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom . .
The anniversary comes on the heels of a $4.037 billion preliminary settlement announced Friday. In the wake of the fires, victims filed hundreds of lawsuits against the utility company believed to have caused the fire and the landowners whose dry grasslands served as ready fuel. Settlement discussions has been delayed partly because of a fight over who should be paid first, the victims or insurance companies. More than 100 insurers filed lawsuits get back billions they have already paid out.
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That issue had not yet been resolved when Hawaiʻi Governor Josh Green announced Friday that the parties have reached a proposed settlement. The most of the money – $1.99 billion – will come from Hawaiian Electric, an amount expected to be enables the utility to avoid bankruptcy. It is not yet clear how the rest of the funding will be divided among other defendants, which include the state of Hawaii and Maui County as well as private entities. Insurers have 90 days to resolve their claims in the wake of the tentative agreement.
So there are still many unanswered questions about when Maui residents will actually get their money, and how the funding will be divided between survivors, lawyers and insurance companies. But once these questions are answered, the settlement could be a crucial boost for displaced families and a remarkably swift conclusion to litigation that has dragged on for years elsewhere.
It will also be another data point highlighting the high cost of wildfire disasters, which are expected to increase more frequently as climate change worsens. PacifiCorp last year agreed to pay $299 million to victims of the 2020 Archie Creek fire in Oregon, with claimants receiving an average of $646,000 each. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric settled claims related to the deadly campfire that killed 85 people $13.5 billion as part of their bankruptcy case.
On the West Coast, the pattern of devastation followed by lawsuits and large settlements has become a familiar cadence, one criticized for its lack of effectiveness in making victims whole. Sometimes, receivers see big tax bills which cut into necessary disbursements. Others argue the litigation is simply a Band aid on the underlying problem of climate change, which allows the federal government—it is generally not a defendant—to continue to evade its role in facilitating fossil fuel emissions.
In Hawaii, grassroots organizations worry that individual settlements do not address the expensive infrastructure improvements needed to truly rebuild the community. Various groups such as the Lāhainā Community Land Trust sent a letter to litigants in July encouraged them to consider including funding for a master-planned community and other necessities in the discussions. Four billion is a third of the $12 billion estimated overall cost of the disaster.
“We have one chance to get it right,” the organizations posted on social media. “And while individual cash payouts are crucial to the immediate relief of many, they don’t bring us much closer to that collective goal.”
Not everyone follows the settlement closely. Randy Dadez, whose rental house burned down in the fire, did not see last week’s headlines about an impending settlement because he was busy working as a shuttle driver for a West Maui hotel and taking care of his wife and four children.
“I don’t care about money to be honest with you,” he said. “To be honest, money is the furthest thing from my mind.”
Instead, he is worried about his four children, aged 9 to 22, and the stress they are under since they became homeless in the disaster. For months they bounced between hotels: first the Fairmont, then the Hyatt, then a long stretch in Honua Kai Resort, then the Royal Lahaina. It was only last month that the Federal Emergency Management Administration finally they moved into a house. But they are only there until February. After that, Dadez doesn’t know what’s next.
Of course money will help, he said. His father’s house, which had been in the family since 1938, burned down, and it had no insurance. Rebuilding Will Be Expensive: Home Building Costs on Maui can easily run $350 per square foot, or more than half a million dollars for a 1,500 square foot home.
But Dadez is skeptical about how far any settlement money would actually go, and is far more concerned about juggling his daily responsibilities, including transporting his wife and children to and from medical appointments for migraines, scoliosis, anxiety and various other ailments.
“All I pray for is that we have good health and I tell the Lord if there is something extra, it is all right,” he said.
Lawrence, the Native Hawaiian community organizer, is also skeptical of settlement news. She was not living at her family home on the day of the fire. But her great uncle, her sister and her brother were all in Lāhainā and managed to escape. Lawrence has spent the past year raising money for disaster relief and coordinating community projects. She also looked after family after leaving her family, moving to Oregon, Washington state and Las Vegas. What she wants most of all is for the settlement money to go to Lāhainā families to enable them to rebuild their community. She thinks of her 82-year-old great-uncle. He’s fine, but he doesn’t have decades to wait.
“He, like everyone else, would rather be at home,” she said.
