Preventing the next Lahaina is a community responsibility that will take incentives and penalties, Hawaii’s leading fire experts told hundreds of people at the Wildland Urban Interface Conference on Wednesday in Nevada.

“A lot of the community just thinks the fire department takes care of all things fire. But that’s not right. A cohesive strategy involves everyone,” Maui Fire Chief Brad Ventura told the crowd. “We all have to be involved to really make our communities fire safe.”

Ventura was among a large contingent of Hawaii firefighters attending the Reno conference that’s about protecting communities from the perils of wildfires. The conference has a major focus on technological advances and public engagement and education.

Getting the community involved means that MFD will need to be both “a little bit more cordial, a little bit more forceful,” in how it protects the community, Ventura said.

That requires both educating the community and creating and enforcing fire codes designed to protect communities, a longstanding issue in Hawaii and across the nation.

Ventura was joined by Elizabeth Pickett of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization and Michael Walker of the state Division of Forestry and Wildlife on a panel focused on Lahaina and Hawaii’s intensifying wildfire problem.

Each shared their experience of the events surrounding the Aug. 8 Maui fires that destroyed much of Lahaina and parts of Upcountry, killing at least 101 people, and the simultaneous fires on Big Island.

“What went wrong on that day is all the things we weren’t able to get done ahead of time, because of that lack of engagement,” Pickett said.

Hawaii has since fallen behind on implementing new codes, ordinances or laws that could protect fire-prone communities, leaving them vulnerable to wildfires.

“We couldn’t even get started on that because our public complacence was … obvious even within our agencies that were in the sector that’s dealing with wildfire,” she said.

Walker, a DOFAW fire protection forester, says Hawaii failed to learn from past events, including a 2018 wildfire that almost reached Lahaina.

He said he “was just flabbergasted that nothing really changed,” leaving the state “walking along this razor’s edge” by maintaining the status quo.

That meant that when there was an extreme event such as the Lahaina fire, “there’s nothing that you’re going to be able to do to get people out of the way,” Walker said.

All three spoke about the lack of resources and the historical lack of public awareness, as well as the need for more outreach on how people can protect themselves from the risks of wildfire.

Hawaii lawmakers are now considering a long list of fire-related measures. Reinstating the fire marshal’s office, for instance, would help focus on statewide prevention, programming and fire codes, Walker said.

“It’s really fortunate this year to not have to go and explain the problem over and over and over again to individuals,” Walker said. “It’s pretty evident that we have a problem.”

The conference, put on by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, comes at the same time that Congress is mulling President Biden’s 2025 budget. The budget includes more than $1.6 billion for federal agencies to address the country’s wildfire crisis.

IAFC President John Butler says that wildfire has become “everyone’s fight.”

And while fire prevention and code enforcement work is “not cool work, not sensational, doesn’t make the news,” it is critical, according to Butler, who is also chief of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department in Virginia.

He said it’s important to underscore the necessity of fire prevention by “talking more about the fires that we didn’t endure, the property that we didn’t lose, the acreage that we didn’t lose, the lives that we didn’t lose.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.