A Hot Time in the Old Pacific

The El Niño winter drought brought hot dry weather, unusual winds, and a bizarre fire season to the Pacific Islands. The islands had wildfire all over the place, particularly on Guam and the big island of Hawaii; FEMA assistance was applied for to help recover suppression costs. By April, on the Hawaiian Islands anyway, fire services had been able to pool resources for control; they narrowly avoided a couple disasters, though, and both funding and suppression resources were limited. National Weather Service reports predicted that the islands might be back to normal weather patterns by June or July, but those are normally the drier months. Fire managers were facing the possibility that the islands could be without decent rainfall all the way to November.

"El Niño has disrupted our normal weather pattern," said Jack Manassian, Pacific Island fire management officer for the National Park Service. "We're in a severe drought here; we've received only 10 percent of our normal rainfall since early January, and we've been experiencing extreme fire behavior in our rain forest, with high intensity fires and spot fires. This is almost unheard of. We've instituted road closures in some Park areas, and have banned all fires except in campgrounds."

Manassian, who has ridden herd on fire in Hawaii for ten years, said most of the responses made by Park Service personnel were in assisting other agencies outside the park. "We've had a few fires just outside the park boundary, and these were mostly Hawaii County Fire Department fires. Those fires could have traveled into the park, though, and we had some concern for structures and personnel." He said most of Volcanoes National Park's 235,000 acres is wildland. There is one concession at the park headquarters, and inside the park is Kilauea Military Camp, a Department of Defense R&R; camp for military personnel stationed in Hawaii. The camp includes a few motels, a gas station and store, a few cabins, and a four-person fire department with an engine.

Manassian said the department had assisted Hawaii County on recent fires, too. "They rolled on some of those fires, and the Volcano Volunteer Fire Department also responded. The nearest Hawaii County fire station is 24 miles down the road, so between us and KMC and the volunteers, we're often the first responders on fires in this area."

But the park isn't ready for a big-time fire. "We're pretty limited in our resources," said Manassian. "We have just one Type I engine, plus a Type III engine with 300 gallons and a Type VI engine with 200 gallons. Then we've got a Type III 1000-gallon water tender. In the Pacific Island cluster, we have only 119 red-carded firefighters, and they're not all available at once. If we need additional resources, they have to come from the mainland. In 1992 we had to bring in a 20-person Type II crew."

Big Fire on Oahu

John Clark, deputy chief for the Honolulu Fire Department on the island of Oahu, was one of the IC's on the Waiawa Ridge Fire. The blaze began the second week of March and ran for six days. Clark was sent out on the fire on the second day. "We had it contained on the evening of Day 2," he said. "But it had been running about two days solid. It started in a wildland area between the H-2 freeway and the Koolau Mountain Range, about 15 miles west of Honolulu. By the time the fire had ended, it had burned about 1500 acres, which for us on this island is a lot."

The fire burned over 600 square miles; the cause was not determined, but exhaust from dirt bikes was suspected. This is an area with a lot of motorcycle riders, and the bikes are usually not licensed or equipped with mufflers. "When I got there at the beginning," said Clark, "it had already burned about 500 acres. We had it pretty much contained, and we went up for an aerial survey on the morning of Day 2. The initial fire was pretty much knocked down, and we only had a few hot spots. The wind was quiet in the morning, but it picked up about mid-day and started generating flying embers. The embers were igniting areas that were unburned, and the fire took off again. We sent everybody back out again � we went from no companies out there the second day, to another 500 acres, and by evening we had about a thousand-acre burn on our hands."

Most of the fuels were tall grasses � some as high as six or eight feet. The ugly part, though, was the heavily forested gulches � they're steep and nasty, 500 or 600 feet deep, and choked with ironwood and silver oak.

"These gulches are dense," said Clark, "and the fire ran down in the gulches and burned the rubbish and brush under the trees. We had a hard time accessing the gulches, and we found that the water drops were not effective because the tree canopies broke up the water. The dense canopies are 40 or 50 feet tall in the stands, which are probably 30 or 40 years old, and we ended up having our guys hike down in the less steep areas and walk the bottom." The suppression effort turned into a brushbeater-and-backpack show with hand tools; they did run some lines down through the gulches, but once they got water to the bottom, they couldn't extend enough to be effective. They had pumpers and tankers in the area, including about a dozen tankers and other resources supplied by the Honolulu Fire Department, the Army, and the Air Force.

"This was a good mutual aid response," said Clark. "We were lucky we got some Army tankers and helicopters in here for water drops." The area features some scattered reservoirs � remnants of the plantation days on the island � and they had Bambi buckets dipping from the reservoirs.

"The fire was fairly close to Pearl Harbor," said Clark, "and we also had some of the bigger choppers lifting saltwater out of Pearl Harbor. We averaged four helicopters a day; we have one, the State Forestry hired a private copter, and we had on average two military copters with us at all times."

The normal weather patterns in the area usually include the winds picking up as the day heats up. Clark said they were lucky with the winds on this fire; the normal tradewinds blow from a northeasterly direction, and had that occurred, the wind would have pushed the fire across the freeway into a housing subdivision. "For the duration of the fire, we had southerly or kona winds," he said. "They pushed the fire and the smoke back toward the mountain range. We were really fortunate; although the subdivision residents saw the smoke and the fire lines, they weren't smoked out and the fire didn't jump the freeway. The winds kept it going a couple days, and blew it inland to the mountain range and uninhabited areas."

There were three threatened facilities within the burn area. One of those, a state prison called the Waiawa Correctional Institution, had about 300 inmates. "They got smoked out, but we had the Board of Health go in there with monitors," said Clark. "They made sure the toxicity stayed within reasonable levels, and we had buses from the municipal bus system standing by in case we needed to evacuate." They had contingency plans in place to evacuate inmates and staff at the prison and the other two facilities � Teen Challenge, a drug rehab facility, with people who were mobile and able to leave, and a cemetery, where people weren't so mobile or able to leave.

Clark said the RH was unusually low � below 50 percent � with hot sun every day. "Our weather forecasters are attributing these conditions to El Niño. Usually by now we are getting substantial rain here, but this has been a very dry winter. It's almost like our summer brushfire season is starting."

"We went up to do the aerial survey with an FD Notar � we call it our Air 1 copter � and look for hot spots," said Clark. "I went up with the battalion chief, and we determined we'd send a couple companies � four guys with pumpers � up there, with tankers for support, to mop up the hot spots. Well, they get up there and the wind picks up, and it's a shifting swirling wind. It started picking up embers and sailing them into the underbrush; they were landing in the thickets and unburned brush. The fire then raced upslope and up the gulches. The winds changed and the fire took off and started moving south toward the Pearl City industrial park at the south end of the burn. The fire line at one point during the night was about a mile long and moving toward the industrial park; it was real exciting for the people in the subdivision, because it looked like a rift zone, like the volcano was erupting. It wasn't moving very fast, but it was long and steady and persistent from the freeway to the base of the mountain, with flamelengths of 30 to 40 feet."

The winds died down at night, and because of the dangerous terrain, they pulled everybody out of the field and set up fire watches. During the night, a few fingers from the fire came down the slope into the park, but firefighters down there were able to take care of them. The fire came within a quarter mile of the prison, but there was no serious threat.

They got the fire contained a second time on Day 3, with nothing blowing or flying, and nothing new ignited after the day. Then followed three days of mopup. Most of the property was state-owned watershed � conservation land � and the natural vegetation returns quickly enough that they expected little or no rehab would be necessary.

"The tankers carry about 1500 gallons, and the military has some bigger ones," said Clark. "We had enough fire companies in there that if we felt it was profitable to extend, we could get 500 or 600 feet out there, but the water streams aren't effective anymore then. We carry three diameters of hose on the pumpers, along with our booster lines, chem line, and 200 feet of 1-inch rubber hose on reels. We also have 1½-inch and 2½-inch hose and a 4-inch supply hose. We were pretty close to the urban subdivisions, so we had hydrants we could run back and forth to. It wasn't far at all to the city water system, plus there are hydrants at the correctional facility and on the other side of the freeway in the subdivision."

"This is normally our wet time; it's usually humid. Our brush is normally moist and green and not so burnable," said Clark. "We're looking at this statewide; the local civil defense coordinators are looking at this, too, and we see that this is not going to go away. It's just going to escalate, so we're pre-planning. We have excellent mutual response here in the islands; we have to, because we're on our own out here. The only major resources we have are the military; on Oahu we have all four branches of the military, with mutual aid agreements. It's a good thing, too, because it's 2000 miles from here to California."

"We had a multitude of engines out there," said Wayne Ching, Hawaii's state protection forester. "There are some former sugar cane fields out there, where grasses had invaded the former cane fields, and the fires were threatening both urban areas and industrial parks. We had structural ladder companies out there, brush rigs, and Humvees from the Army. They provided helicopters and ground crews, and the Marine Corps provided some helicopters through the civilian agencies. This is all done through mutual aid through the Federal Fire Department on contract to protect areas of Oahu." Ching said the big island also had some nasty fires, one about 150 acres that grew to 265, and another of a couple thousand acres that was big enough to create quite a stir in the fire suppression system.

Guam Grief

Guam was suffering the effects of El Niño and fire in a worse way than even Hawaii. "It's bad here," said Dennis Orbus, the assistant director of Fire & Aviation Management for the Forest Service's Region 5 (California, Hawaii, and the Pacific). "And Typhoon Paka, which hit here before Christmas, made it even worse. The typhoon stripped all the vegetation and trees, laid a lot of vegetation on the ground, and even snapped off the power poles. It even snapped off concrete power poles � the ones they thought were typhoon-proof."

"Guam has burned 8,000 acres in 800 fires since the dry season began the first week of January," said Orbus. "They are just overwhelmed; they're scrambling." Fire officials in Guam requested FEMA assistance, and they rely on the Forest Service as their principal advisor in seeking assistance. When Orbus showed up late in March, Guam had received about a tenth of an inch of rain and was expecting a few showers, and the break in the action came as a welcome relief. Orbus said the little bit of precipitation wouldn't do much for the larger fuels, though, which were still dry.

Interagency assistance was being mustered, and a Navy helicopter squadron was based there. They're trained in water dropping, with 2000-gallon buckets under the big CH-46 twin-rotor Sea Knights. Between the Federal Fire Department and Guam's other fire services, there were about 300 personnel � Forestry has about 30 � they were practicing ICS and trying to use common communications; the only sticky part was the air-to-ground communications, which needed some work. "The rest of it's working well," said Orbus. "They have some used trucks here from California under the Federal Excess Property program, some Model 51s and 41s from California, and some Chevy Blazers we helped them get, on the island."

Arrangements were under way to acquire a couple of additional engines � 51 and 41 � from Bishop and Redding in California. Flying them to Guam would have run about a half million dollars; sending them over by commercial container ship was much more reasonable and was expected to take only a couple weeks.

Guam's weather in the spring was extremely dry, with temperatures around 85 and RH to about 40 percent. Tradewinds were running 25 to 30 mph, all of which had combined for some major spotting problems with fires. "The way the island is built up," explained Orbus, "there are people scattered here and there, and the whole island is interface. They don't have much rain forest left here, after World War II, but they have maybe 30 tons to the acre of fuel, most of it swordgrass. It burns like chamise, with 30-foot flamelengths. It's just been running them ragged."

Pacific Interface

The fire community in Hawaii wasn't quite ragged in April, but they had been hard pressed to keep up with the busy season. Ching explained that most of the fires had been multi-agency response, especially those on the island of Oahu. "FEMA has a regular office here, and they've given us two forest suppression assistance grants for wildfires � one in February and one early in March," he said. All of the fires were grass and brush fires � there is no standing timber on the islands. The fires were primarily in interface areas, and one of them threatened as many as 200 homes.

"That one started February 16," said Ching. "During the investigation, it looked like a malicious fire; it started on an old county road, where there was a lot of trash alongside the road, about a half mile from the subdivision southeast of Hilo. The county fire department responded with five D9 tractors and a 14-person hand crew from the division of forestry. It got up to 2400 acres, most of which burned on the second day. We had a mile-and-a-half firefront heading toward the subdivision, with humidity about 40 percent and the temperature at 85 with light winds. It was burning in grass and ohi'a brush, with uluhe ferns running six feet tall or more. The ohi'a is about 12 to 15 feet, but it's sparse growth there. The fire never really had a chance to lay down, but the suppression efforts by the hand crew and a couple of helicopters with water drops helped tremendously. They were running Bambi buckets out of the ocean, with a couple minutes' turnaround."

The helicopters, which also had a diptank set up, are on private contract with the state and county, and fly out of Hilo. Ching said they also had a couple CH-47s provided by the National Guard out of Honolulu on the second day. The fire was finally brought under control ten days later, with � all told � 60 personnel on it.

On another subdivision blaze, firefighters had to contend with 13 homes inside the fire perimeter. A nursery business and about 300 other homes were threatened. This fire started March 14 in the Leilani Estates subdivision about 25 miles south of Hilo. "We found a molotov cocktail on that one," said Ching. "We sent the evidence to the FBI; it was found near the point of ignition and that fire is considered a malicious start."

Interface fires on the Hawaiian Islands rival those in the more well-known areas of the West. Vegetation is a problem on the islands just as it is in California, but the Islanders can't bring to bear the resources available to fire crews and managers who deal with California interface fires. "In some of these areas, we had dense vegetation even under the eaves of the homes," said Ching. "There are some beautiful homes in there, but in some places we couldn't even distinguish where one began and the other ended."

Initial response was by the Hawaii County Fire Department, who brought out a couple engines and a pumper. In the meantime, though, they also had three other fires going on in the county. "They requested the State Division of Forestry to assist on this one, and we had a 14-person hand crew and two Gamma Goats with pumpers in the back and a couple of overhead people to run the operation," said Ching. "This was on a Saturday, and when I got there Monday morning it was about 50 percent contained. We had people around the perimeter, which was about 150 acres by then. We were mopping up, and by Monday it was determined by the IC that it was contained. We had a helicopter and four pumpers and hand crews out there, but the fire was burning in ohi'a brush and uluhe and very dense grass of six to eight feet. Fortunately, the winds were very light and there was no erratic fire behavior. Because of that, a lot of homes were saved � and none were lost." Most of the homes in the area are on one- or two-acre lots, with a lot of metal roofs. Vegetation problems are common, though, and many of the homes had lumber or other flammables stacked alongside the homes, with no water lines available.

"Getting water for suppression was difficult," said Ching. "We went to the next town, over a mile away, and used the hydrants to fill up. Most of the water to the homes there is on a tank catchment system. The main roads are okay � they're more than 20 feet wide, but the access to the homes and driveways is mixed. Some of them are almost non-existent."

Despite all these challenges to fire prevention and fire suppression, the best thing Hawaii's got going at this point is its unusually good cooperation among agencies. The state has mutual agreements with the county departments, and the various military and civil defense outfits are ready to rock'n'roll when needed. "The cooperation among agencies here is just outstanding," said Ching. "Though we're not a 24-hour fire-fighting unit, we are wildland fire trained. We have limited resources, but the counties have come to depend on us for wildland firefighting efforts. Given our limited resources, though, there's another FEMA request for fire suppression assistance to help offset the cost."

And what kind of cost are we talking about? The Leilani Estates Fire hadn't been totaled up at press time, but the cost of the Hawaiian Beaches Subdivision Fire � just to the state � ran $66,000. Between February 5 and March 25 the state was involved in seven fires � all interface fires � and they cranked up a $140,000 bill before the end of March. Their annual firefighting budget is only $200,000.

The Hawaii Beaches subdivision had the potential to lose several hundred homes. It was built, decades ago, to a very low standard, and has alternating lots with nothing on them but uluhe (false fern) and ohi'a. "Given that," said Orbus, "with the tradewinds blowing and the fire adjacent to the subdivision, if the wind had shifted just a few degrees it would have taken that subdivision out."

The fire community in the Pacific Islands region is not as well prepared as they'd like to be for the fire effects of El Niño; they face challenges both in limited resources and in a wildfire history and perspective that's substantially different from that of the mainland. They are considering their needs for increased resources and pre-planning for disaster-related fires. The fire community can take pride in their good grounding in mutual aid and interagency cooperation, and perhaps deal politically and legally with the need for a means of recovery of suppression costs on human-caused fires. Hawaii has not been as vigorous as some other Western states in pursuing recovery of suppression costs from responsible parties. An interface fire in 1988 on the island of Molokai, for example, started in a back yard. After the property owner thought the fire was out, it grew to 12,000 acres. Firefighters and resources from all over the islands fought that fire for a week and spent over $1 million to control it; it eventually exhausted all Hawaiian resources, but suppression costs were not recoverable.