Pacific Hurricane Dora didn’t strike Maui. But its tropical storm winds set off what we now know as the most fatal outbreak of spontaneous — but nonetheless predictable — fire in the United States in 55 years. The island’s 150-year dependence on a one-crop economy — essentially sugar, then pineapples, now tourism — had wiped out natural safeguards and led to an aftermath of indifference to climate change.
Maui was unprepared. So were thousands of vacationing visitors.
Yet in 8 days, the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) was able to publish an update to its 5-year strategic plan already in draft as a message to the travel trade that Hawaii intends to become the global leader in climate travel.
Before and after the fires
Plantation sugar and plantation pineapples had spread across the island, reducing the native soil seed bank and ending a way of life sustained by small farms that met islander needs. Wetlands and ponds that were filled by plantation owners were no longer available to contain flooding. Native grasses were replaced by exotic species imported as cattle forage. Fast growing when it rains and adaptable to drought when lands parch, these grasses have fueled wildfires that have grown in intensity across Hawaii, including the blaze that this month claimed more than 100 lives on Maui.
Tourism in Hawaii had grown important along Waikiki Beach after the overthrow of the Kamehameha dynasty by plutocrats, some having arranged strategic marriages with members of royalty, in 1893. Then as now, tourism has been controlled by global capitalism. Its growth on Maui was much slower and only took off after the Second World War, when inter-island air flights resumed and international flights from the American west coast began landing at Kahului Airport that wartime had improved.
But tourism was mainly looked to for jobs and otherwise accepted no stake in building community. There lay its fault, common to much of the tropical world.
In theory, workers no longer able to live off the land that became subject to alternate flooding and drought would spend their wages to support a shopkeeping economy. However, this frequently required two jobs to afford housing priced out of reach once the cost of land soared from the highly inflationary model of ultra-luxury tourism adopted from Oahu in the post-WW2 years.
By the start of 2019, at least half of Maui residents were employed by the visitor industry, according to a report by the Maui Economic Development Board. After the pandemic began, Maui’s unemployment rate soared to 35%, the highest among all U.S. metro areas and higher than the national unemployment rate during the peak of the Great Depression, ABC News reported.
Many of the island’s existing problems were exacerbated to crisis levels.
The median price of single-family homes sold on Maui in February this year was $1.07 million. The median price for condos, $908,000. It would take an annual income of more than $200,000 to buy a house or condominium and 100% of the island’s average wages to keep it. The average annual wage was $45,000.
If tourism isn’t building communities it’s competing with them
Residents and visitors have always competed for scarce resources.
“Even before the blazes wiped out hundreds of homes in Maui, the state was going through an affordable housing crisis fueled by international demand from people buying second and third homes to vacation in or use for short-term rentals,” according to Sterling Higa, executive director of Housing Hawaii’s Future, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the workforce housing shortage in the state.
Following this month’s fires on Maui, which showed grave infrastructure failures, the HTA called for visitors already planning Maui vacations to book their stays elsewhere in the state. Those already vacationing at beach resorts undamaged by fire directly were also asked to leave. Some did so on very short notice, many roused during the night and for the most part in chaos. New York Times reports have told of the island’s emergency alarm system not functioning and of fire hydrants that quickly lost pressure. Lawsuits have started. Investigations will begin
On the night of August 7, after wind gusts picked up and flames spread, Dr. Art Chasen, trauma surgeon and trauma medical director of Maui Health, told CBS news says that the 214-bed Maui Memorial Hospital had about 40 patients come in including residents and vacationers.
“We’re not ‘business as usual,’ but we’re able to maintain the pace,” Chasen told CBS. Maui Memorial also staffs a clinic at Wailuku together with Kaiser-Permanente. The main Kaiser-Permanente Clinic at Lahaina was destroyed by fire.
The destruction of Lahaina
Lahaina, though long a tourist town, still retained its history and charm, showed Hawaii’s racial diversity, the scale of its open-air shops and the easy pace, where a video of Front Street that combines remembrance with devastation speaks to a local will to rebuild.
It’s hoi polloi, charming but off-putting in its way while privileged travelers enjoy the luxuries of $1,000-a-night resorts only a few miles to the north.
But things will be different, good and less so.
HTA writes in its new report, “Community leaders and government representatives have identified tourism issues and specific sites where tourism has affected the quality of life for residents and the quality of experience for visitors. Media coverage provides regular accounts of resident frustrations. Clearly, Hawai‘i has reached a point where the impacts of tourism need to be actively managed.”
Meanwhile, Hawaiian botanists, who have spent years pushing for forest restoration projects, say the inevitable loss will be felt deeply on the state’s landscape for years to come. Others report speculators pressuring grievers to sell out.
The fire threat was real but its realization could not be foretold by a calendar date. However, a clearheaded analysis could have been made of the ability by authorities to combat such outbreaks and by the level of training among hotel staffs. Once again, my call for scientists, ethicists and others not from inside tourism to sit on destination tourism authorities.
Yet I admit that even now I am reluctant for destination marketing organizations to announce “seasons of climate events” lest tourists and their advisors write some — and maybe far too many — destinations off limits.
But for Americans, it makes all the more sense for travel to the deep nearby, from which retreat homeward becomes far easier. For next week.
NOTES
https://www.hawaiitourismauthority.org/media/4286/hta-strategic-plan-2020-2025.pdf
Aug. 13, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/us/hawaii-wildfire-factors.html
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Hotel-Salary--in-Hawaii
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/podcasts/nyt-audio-headlines-show.html
