Who Bears the Risk?

My heart goes out to the people of Lahaina who’ve lost their homes, all of their possessions, and, in many cases, family members to the fires that have swept through their town. We won’t know for a while how great the fatalities were. It will turn out to be something between 1% and 10% of the town’s population. Claire Rush, Beatrice Dupuy and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher report at the Associated Press:

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town climbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.

“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles, and it is full of our loved ones,” he said, noting that the number of dead is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”

The scale of the destruction and damage is substantial:

At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, nearly all of them residential. Across the island, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion.

To give you some idea the total permanent population of Lahaina is something around 12,000 people, nearly all of them employed in the hospitality sector: groundskeepers and cleaning workers, cooks, waiters and waitresses, etc. Not exactly high-income people.

The article goes on to strike a parallel between the Lahaina fire and the Paradise fire in northern California a couple of years ago. I think the parallel is too many people living in a environment that can’t really support such a population, low housing construction standards and weak regulations, and emergency infrastructure inadequate to the task.

At this point none of our friends or acquaintances who have cadaver dogs have been called into service although I wouldn’t be surprised if some were.

Clearly, such a poor population cannot be expected to bear the costs of this tragedy but I don’t think having the costs fall on poor people on the mainland is just, either. That’s what happens when the federal government spends more than it receives in revenue and borrows the rest. The burden of that falls mainly on the poor.

This disaster was no surprise. They have been warned of it for more than a decade, as reported by Dan Frosch and Jim Carlton at the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly a decade before a wildfire destroyed the coastal Maui town of Lahaina this week, killing at least 89 people, a report by Hawaiian fire researchers warned that the area was at extremely high risk of burning.

Another report, in 2020, tied fires to winds from a passing hurricane—similar to the ones that fanned the Lahaina blaze.

And the state’s electric utility had for years worried about wildfire risk in the area. It even flew drones to monitor conditions.

Yet local authorities said in the aftermath of this week’s devastation that though they knew wildfires were becoming more frequent in Hawaii, they weren’t prepared for one to roar through Lahaina.

IMO it’s pretty clear that the tourism and hospitality sectors need to bear more of the risk of such catastrophes. There are 378 hotels in Lahaina. Poor mainlanders shouldn’t be subsidizing them.