Historic and hazardous structures are focus of final fire debris cleanup stages in Lahaina

Every week, Judy Kinser pulls a 200-foot-long hose across the fire-decimated Waiola Church property in Lahaina and waters a cluster of keiki breadfruit plants, offshoots of the mother tree that once grew right outside her office before it died in the August 2023 blaze. 

“It really gives me a lot of spiritual strength, I gotta tell you. I know that sounds a little hokey, but it really does help,” she said. 

Kinser and her fellow church members are waiting for the call from the Army Corps of Engineers to notify them when their property is next for cleanup. Waiola Church is among the properties that have been put off until the end of the cleanup process because of their historic characteristics and physical hazards. 

These larger, more hazardous properties are the focus of the final stages of the cleanup as the residential cleanup nears the finish. On Monday, the Army Corps announced that it was removing debris from the final three residential properties.

“The next step is that we just need to shift all of our energy onto commercial and historic properties and make sure that we get those done in accordance with our contract,” Col. Eric Swenson said on Aug. 14 during his last week as commander of the Hawai‘i Wildfires Recovery Field Office. “I’m confident that we’re going to be able to get those done by February.”

As of Monday, 1,387 of the 1,390 residential properties in the Army Corps’ debris removal program had been cleared, well ahead of the original deadline of January 2025, and 91 of the 159 commercial properties had been cleared. 

Some of the remaining properties still have standing walls and unstable overhead structures that need to be removed before the rest of the debris can be cleared from the lot, Swenson said during a media tour of Lahaina earlier this month.

The two most challenging properties are King Kamehameha III Elementary School, where the Army Corps has monitors on site to make sure nothing of cultural significance is missed or disturbed during removal of the foundation, and the 505 Front Street parking garage, where groundwater has seeped into the underground structure. 

The Army Corps has six crews working daily on commercial properties and is also coordinating with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, State Historic Preservation Division and landowners of historic properties to see what can be saved depending on the damage, Swenson said.

Commercial and historic structures that are burned but still standing in Lahaina town include the building that once housed Fleetwood’s on Front Street, the string of businesses that included Lappert’s Ice Cream and the Old Lahaina Courthouse.

Lt. Col. Collin Jones, who took over Swenson’s former post, said that his team did walk-throughs of several of the most complicated properties, including Waiola Church. 

“They’re a little more tricky and complex, and we need to ensure that they’re made safe when we remove the debris so that no one’s injured and we’re taking proper protocols on the property,” Jones told HJI on Aug. 14, when the county introduced him at a weekly disaster recovery meeting at the Lahaina Civic Center. 

Jones said the top three priorities over the course of his six-month mission are the cleanup of the remaining commercial properties, the completion of the 169-unit Kilohana temporary housing project that the Army Corps hopes to have ready by the end of October, and the installation of a sewer line that will serve the housing project and Fleming Road residents. 

“We do have priorities from the county, and then we listen to the community at events like this,” Jones said. “And so we’re using those to help shape, with the contractor … when certain projects and lots will take priority over others. There’s a limited number of crews out there, so it’s very important. We’re listening to the community to understand what the community wants done first. So one of those examples would be churches.”

At Waiola Church, the burned-down sanctuary “looks exactly” the way it did right after the fire, said Kinser, the church’s treasurer and a trustee. The roof and most of the walls collapsed into a pile of debris on the sanctuary floor. A few outer walls are still partially intact, and the church’s iconic A-frame is still visible. 

“They’re very dangerous, so obviously we don’t go in there to look for anything, which, probably everything in there was wood, so I doubt they would have survived anyway,” Kinser said.

She had sat on a pew on the church patio to wait out the fire on Aug. 8, 2023, until she spotted flames across the street and had to evacuate. 

The graveyard where many Hawaiian royalty are buried remains intact, and church members had hoped to save the remaining portions of the sanctuary, which has been destroyed multiple times by fires and winds since the church’s founding in 1823.

But an assessment found that the remaining structures were too dangerous and that they would have to be demolished and rebuilt, Kinser said. The plan is to rebuild with the same footprint and design but with more preventative measures like fire-resistant asphalt roofing. 

Waiola Church members have been worshipping with another congregation in Honokōwai and are looking forward to returning to their property, said Kinser, who not only lost the home she was renting on Lahainaluna Road but also the Lahaina Restoration Foundation office where she worked as an executive assistant to Executive Director Theo Morrison. 

Eight of the foundation’s sites were impacted by the fire, and several of those still include partially intact structures. The Plantation House, the Kindergarten Building leased to Village Gallery and the wooden buildings at the Old Lahaina Prison, however, burned down. In November, the foundation put braces on the Baldwin Home and the Master’s Reading Room at the corner of Front and Dickenson streets to keep them from toppling until the properties can be cleared and restoration work can begin. 

After the foundation lost its sources of funding in the fire — the parking lot fees and the three commercial buildings it rented to businesses — it had to lay off 14 employees and cancel many of the cultural and community programs it hosted at its sites, Morrison said.

Unlike other properties where damaged buildings are being taken down, structures on the foundation’s sites are being left intact in hopes of restoring them someday. 

The Army Corps will shore up other buildings on the foundation’s sites, then they’ll have to go in and manually remove debris with wheelbarrows, shovels and other non-heavy machinery. Foundation staff will have a chance to go through the debris and see if it can find any artifacts, though “we don’t have high expectations,” especially at the Old Lahaina Courthouse where three stories collapsed on each other, Morrison said.

“So far we’ve found very little intact, very few artifacts that are intact,” Morrison said. “The heat was just so intense that things that wouldn’t normally burn might burn.”

The buildings will then be analyzed by engineers and historical architects to determine how they should be restored. 

“These are really important buildings, many of them over 100 years old,” Morrison said. “It’s critical that these buildings are rebuilt.”