Investigations into the causes of the Maui wildfires are entering a new phase, as government officials prepare to release reports in April and lawyers for fire victims accelerate their own inquiries previously stalled in the face of procedural maneuvers by defendants.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, are calling on state utility regulators to launch a separate independent inquiry, which is required by state law. A hearing on the Senate concurrent resolution is scheduled for Friday.

The Hawaii Attorney General’s Office this week said it will release a much-anticipated first phase of a three-part investigation on April 17. That report, which was due months ago under the state’s contract with fire investigators, will not speak to the cause of the fire but instead is expected to include a detailed timeline of the fire’s spread through Lahaina on Aug. 8.

Meanwhile, officials with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are assisting Maui County with its investigation of the origin and cause of the fire, said Jason Chudy, an ATF spokesman in Seattle. The report by the Maui County Department of Fire and Public Safety could be released as early as late April, said Chris Stankis, the department’s public information officer.

But the reports from the state and county — which are also defendants in lawsuits brought by fire victims — aren’t the only investigations into what happened the day of the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century. The fires killed at least 101 people and destroyed nearly 2,000 structures, displacing thousands of people.

Fire victims have filed more than 70 lawsuits against defendants including the State of Hawaii, Maui County, Spectrum, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools and Hawaiian Electric Industries and its subsidiaries. The investigations related to these lawsuits are accelerating.

“Things are really ratcheting up right now,” said Jan Apo, a Maui lawyer who is also serving as one of several liaison attorneys for wildfire plaintiffs’ attorneys. Apo said his firm has more than 1,000 clients lined up.

The investigations by plaintiffs’ lawyers had been stalled after defendants including Hawaiian Electric Industries, Spectrum and Kamehameha Schools moved dozens of cases from Maui state court to federal court. But, earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Jill Otake said the federal court didn’t have jurisdiction and remanded the cases to state court.

Now, Apo said, the plaintiffs can resume discovery of documents from defendants as well as third parties with relevant information. Already plaintiffs’ lawyers have gathered hundreds if not thousands of pages of documents, Apo said.

Ultimately “there’s going to be thousands and thousands of pages of documents” produced, Apo said.

Lawyers on all sides are working with Maui Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill to establish a centralized document management system so the parties can have convenient access to what is expected to be a massive library of potential evidence, Apo said.

The lawyers soon will begin deposing company executives and key witnesses, possibly in late April or early May, Apo said. The depositions will produce a mountain of testimonial material on top of documents, plus evidence from the accident scene, Apo said.

Apo predicted the plaintiffs’ investigations will be more detailed than what the state and county release.

“Quite frankly, our discovery will be much deeper, much more detailed,” he said. “We will dive way deeper than anybody else.”

Apo said Cahill is setting aside time to begin trials later this year.

State Report Will Not Discuss Fire’s Cause

In the meantime, the impending reports from officialdom will add to the collection of narratives on what happened on Aug. 8.

Plaintiffs allege the electric and telecom utilities contributed to the Lahaina fires by failing to design, construct, inspect and maintain their infrastructure as necessary to mitigate fire risks they knew about.

The plaintiffs also blame landowners like Kamehameha Schools for allegedly failing to properly manage vegetation on their lands, which plaintiffs say allowed the fire to spread more rapidly. The suits assert the state and Maui County failed to mitigate known wildfire risks on Maui and didn’t implement evacuation procedures, which resulted in chaos, property damage and death.

Hawaiian Electric Co., HEI’s utility subsidiary, is one of the few defendants to talk about the fire’s cause. The power company issued a statement less than three weeks after the fires acknowledging that fallen power lines had ignited a blaze the morning of Aug. 8 — an event that had been widely reported and documented on social media. But the company said the morning fire was extinguished, so the fire that burned much of Lahaina was caused by something else.

The first phase of the Hawaii attorney general’s report is expected to come out first. That investigation is being conducted by the private Fire Safety Research Institute under a $1.5 million contract with the state.

The contract, which was signed on Oct. 5, called for the first of three reports from the institute — including a detailed timeline of events — to be completed in three months.

A second report will evaluate things like incident response, pre-incident planning, firefighting capability and the county warning and water systems.

But on Monday, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez announced the release of the first report would be pushed back to April 17. A news release from her office said the attorney general has had to issue dozens of subpoenas to get information from Maui County.

Specifically, the release said that in November the attorney general “served three subpoenas upon the Maui Emergency Management Agency, the County of Maui Department of Public Works and the County of Maui Department of Water Supply seeking documents relevant to the investigation.”

Afterward, according to the attorney general, Maui said “subpoenas would be required for all further information, including documents and interviews with county personnel.

“As a result, the Department has needed to serve upon County of Maui agencies and officials, eight additional subpoenas for documents and 53 additional subpoenas for interviews, to date,” the attorney general’s statement said.

Maui County Report Will Determine Origin Of Fire

Meanwhile, the Maui Fire Department’s investigation into the cause and origin of the fires could be coming as soon as late April.

Chudy, the federal ATF bureau’s spokesman, said the bureau has sent a team of investigators, which he described as “the best of the best,” to conduct the investigation. The investigators are conducting follow-up interviews with eyewitnesses and gathering additional documents, Chudy said.

“The most important thing to ATF is that we provide Maui Fire Department with the most complete and factual investigative details for their origin and cause report,” he said. 

Stankis, the Maui department spokesman, said it expects to receive the ATF report as early as late March, after which it could take two to three weeks for the fire department to incorporate its own findings and complete the report.

“We’re really at this point mostly waiting for ATF,” Stankis said.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are pushing for an independent wildfire investigation by an agency not involved in wildfire lawsuits.

A Senate resolution introduced in early March notes that Hawaii’s public utilities law requires the Public Utilities Commission to “investigate the causes of any accident which results in loss of life.”

“Despite this,” the resolution says, “the Public Utilities Commission has failed to investigate the causes of the August 2023 Maui wildfires.”

The resolution goes on to urge the PUC to “comply with its statutory duty to investigate the causes of the August 2023 Maui wildfire” and submit a report at least 20 days before the start of the 2025 session.

The measure is scheduled for a hearing on Friday before the Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee and the Public Safety and Intergovernmental and Military Affairs Committee.

The PUC has drafted testimony arguing it is “fulfilling its statutory mandate.”

The testimony, by Commissioner Colin Yost, outlines more than a dozen actions the PUC has taken in response to the fire. Those include issuing information requests to HECO related to grid engineering and operations, as well as the utility’s response to the fire. In addition, Yost wrote, the PUC has assigned two senior staff to support the ATF’s inquiry and has produced timely responses to inquiries from the attorney general.

Whether this will persuade the committees is unclear. The Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee’s chairman, Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, has taken a tough stance when it comes to perceived conflicts of interest by government investigators.

After it became apparent that Lopez would be overseeing the state’s official investigation of the fires while simultaneously defending the state against lawsuits accusing the state of wrongdoing, Keohokalole sponsored a bill that would have allowed the attorney general to appoint a special counsel in circumstances where conflicts of interest were present.

The bill made it through the Senate but stalled in the House after Lopez testified that the department is independent and already has a range of options when conflicts of interest arise implicating the attorney general personally or the office.

In an interview, Keohokalole said the problem under the current law is that only the attorney general has the power to issue subpoenas pursuant to such investigations.

“So what happens when the state is implicated in the investigation?” he said. “It’s a clear cut conflict of interest.”

Concerning the PUC, Keohokalole said he is looking forward to Friday’s hearing.

“We’ve been asking for months for some clarity from them on what appears a mandate,” he said.