Bury all power lines or rebuild the town fast? In Lahaina fire recovery, it’s hard to do both

LAHAINA — As Gene and Joann Milne rebuild the Wahikuli home they lost in the August 2023 wildfire, one familiar sight has returned to the neighborhood — the towering wooden utility poles and power lines that toppled in the hurricane-force winds during the fire.

Like many others, the Milnes are wary of these new poles being installed around their neighborhood more than a year after a downed power line led to the devastating fire that burned through Lahaina town and killed at least 102 people.

Soon after the fires, there was public outcry to bury them, no matter the time and cost. Many lawmakers agreed, too.

But reality has set in. For residents eager, and in some cases desperate to rebuild while insurance payouts and other money is available, it’s a risk they will have to live with for now. 

The Milnes, who recently finished the ‘ohana unit they’ll live in until their main house is complete, couldn’t have imagined waiting any longer to get back home. So while Gene Milne said it would be “wonderful” to have electric lines buried in the burn zone, “at the same time it’s not realistic to think that it’s going to happen before people start rebuilding.”

For Hawaiian Electric, which is already on the hook for half of the $4 billion settlement reached for the damages caused by the fire, the priority is putting everything back in the same place in order to get residents back home more quickly. But they say these installations come with changes that will address the risk their equipment posed before.

Mikey Burke, who serves as the West Maui community liaison for HECO and also lost her home in the fire, said the company has “been hearing a lot of chatter from the community” about HECO reinstalling the same overhead lines and poles. But, she said, burying lines would take many more years and billions of dollars, delaying the rebuilding of Lahaina.

“We have heard you from Day 1 about your desire to underground electrical lines, and we are committed to continue that conversation with the community, with our federal, our state and our local agencies about how we bring that vision to life for the Lahaina community,” Burke said at a public meeting earlier this month. “It’s just going to take some time. Bear with us, give us grace, we will work on it.” 

UNDERLYING COSTS

Lahaina residents and government officials have been talking about burying electrical equipment since a power line was caught on video snapping in hurricane-force winds and sparking flames in dry grass near Lahaina Intermediate School on Aug. 8, 2023.

During a visit to Maui in September 2023, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said she would like to see electric lines underground but acknowledged that it would be “enormously expensive.” 

In the months after the fire, Maui County Council Member Gabe Johnson proposed a bill that would require new utility lines to be placed underground in all subdivisions. 

Underground lines are more reliable and less susceptible to high winds, but they can be at risk for flooding, and fixing a short circuit takes longer than it would above ground, according to Hawaiian Electric. Permitting and construction of underground lines often takes 4 to 6 years, compared to 2 to 3 years for overhead lines, and the cost is 5 to 10 times more. 

More than half of Maui already has underground electric equipment, according to Shayna Decker, Hawaiian Electric’s director of government and community affairs for Maui County.

Converting the rest of the island to underground utilities could come at a rough estimated cost of $7 billion, including $2 billion just for the high fire risk areas, which span West Maui, Upcountry and other places in HECO’s public safety power shutoff plan rolled out after the 2023 wildfires, HECO Maui County Director Mat McNeff explained. 

Several areas of Lahaina already had underground power lines before the fire, including parts of Puamana, some neighborhoods mauka of the bypass, the Lahaina Business Park, the Komo Mai Street neighborhood, Opukea at Lahaina condos, areas of Wahikuli close to the Lahaina Civic Center and sections of Front Street, including near the banyan tree, McNeff said. 

For now, HECO is reinstalling either aboveground or underground systems depending on what the area had before the fire. When asked if that was setting Lahaina up for the same level of risk, McNeff said that the equipment is new and they’re building to different standards, such as using stronger poles, encasing them in mesh to protect from termites and changing the configuration of the lines to make them less prone to faults during strong winds. 

“So in no way is it the same as it was prior to August (2023),” he said. 

Because the company is regulated by the Public Utilities Commission, they have to find the most economical way to serve customers, McNeff said. Typically, that means aboveground poles and lines. However, if a developer of a subdivision wanted underground utilities, McNeff said, they would need to pay for the difference, and the cost of the homes would likely go up. 

Getting permission is what makes installing underground utilities tricky in Lahaina. Each homeowner or landowner would have to decide what they want, and Hawaiian Electric would need to get easements to install transformers on the ground instead of on the poles. Owners would also likely need to modify their home plans to allow electric equipment to be routed underground. 

McNeff said it’s much harder and inconvenient to dig up sidewalks, roads and yards to install lines once the homes are built out. He said installing lines underground now “would be ideal” but that “the timeframe is not conducive to getting people back into their houses quickly.” 

Decker and McNeff said they and other HECO employees are part of the community and are committed to the efforts to recover from the fires and improve resiliency. They agreed the priority is rebuilding homes, though they said the company will continue discussions with the community about what it wants to see in the long term. 

“It is something that we are definitely looking at and want to work through with everyone,” Decker said. 

Last week, Hawaiian Electric released an expanded 3-year safety plan that calls for $450 million of work and improvements, including undergrounding about 2 miles of overhead power lines in critical safety areas of Lahaina based on input from a community working group.

The plan also calls for replacing, upgrading and strengthening poles and equipment; expanding tree removal; and installing more weather stations and hazard-detection cameras. Some of the funding comes through a federal grant HECO received in 2024 for grid resilience. 

In some places, burying lines underground was an immediate priority after a fire. After the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif.— which had been the deadliest U.S. fire in a century until Lahaina — Pacific Gas & Electric Co. announced that it would put all electric distribution power lines underground in Paradise and surrounding areas while the town rebuilt. As of last year, it was still doing so, though some neighbors raised concerns about how close the work was to their homes. 

Hawaiʻi State Sen. Angus McKelvey, whose district includes West and South Maui, said at first he thought Lahaina should do the same thing, but “the horse may have left the barn already” with people already rebuilding and putting in requests to have their power restored. He pointed out there’s also pressure to rebuild quickly so people can stay on Maui and tap into funding before resources start going toward the rampant Los Angeles fires.

But with overhead lines going back in, McKelvey worried about Lahaina ending up in the same position as before unless homes are hardened against fire risk and roads are widened to prevent evacuation issues should poles go down again. He said it’s in both HECO’s and the community’s best interest to be as “aggressive as possible” in making the electric grid more resilient against disasters.

“We’re in such a precarious position,” he said. “If we don’t move quickly to rebuild as fast and efficiently as possible, people are going to lose their insurance to be able to rebuild, materials are going to skyrocket even more … and the real fear of a Lahaina being owned by offshore entities exclusively could become a reality.”

Many people in the community still want to heal, but “they never got that chance, me included,” said McKelvey, who lost his home in the fire.

“But now because of what’s happening in L.A. and everything else, we’ve got to move or we could be left with literally, I don’t know.” 

NO TIME TO WASTE

Some families from Lahaina don’t have the luxury of waiting for the lines to be installed underground before they rebuild. 

Earlier this week, the University of Hawai’i Economic Research Organization reported that the 2023 wildfires reduced Maui’s population by at least 1,000 people, according to an analysis of state income tax filing addresses. The change was due in part to more people moving away and fewer coming in; at least 430 to 510 Maui residents are estimated to have left the state due to the fire. 

The drop in population could cost the state’s economy at least $50 million in annual income, but even more concerning for some is the potential change to the community. 

“Really the most important thing to our administration is that we get you folks home,” Mayor Richard Bissen said at a community meeting in Lahaina earlier this month. “If we build 1,000 homes and we don’t recognize the faces of anybody who lives in those homes, we have not done our job.”

Ariel Ah Hee was eager to return to Lahaina after months of squeezing into her parents’ home in Pāʻia with her husband and their two young children. They were still paying a mortgage even after losing their home in the fire, and they were commuting to the west side on a regular basis to rebuild what they’d lost. 

“It was just a really huge strain on our family,” Ah Hee said. “So that’s why I was like, I just can’t do this any longer. Everything is too hard. I need to get back to the house already.”

With the help of their contractor and dedicated friends and family, the Ah Hees became the first family to finish rebuilding their home in Lahaina and moved in just before Thanksgiving. 

But getting power back was one of the hardest parts. Ah Hee said they requested electrical service in July, received an invoice and paid it in August, and then went weeks without hearing any updates.

She said Hawaiian Electric didn’t call her back until she criticized them on Instagram and someone finally reached out. The Ah Hees got temporary power in September and permanent power in November, just as they were finishing their house. She said the company also overcharged them more than $1,000 and still haven’t given her a refund. 

Ah Hee said the electricity issue didn’t delay the construction, but it was more costly because they had to pay for gas and a generator, and overall more frustrating at a time when they were already under a lot of stress.

“It’s like, thanks for burning down my house and not giving me power,” she said. 

The family lives along Komo Mai Street, a newer neighborhood where lines were underground before the fire. But there’s a big pole on a different property behind her house, and it scares her. She said Hawaiian Electric lost the community’s trust “and it’s hard to regain it,” especially “when we see the same thing happening that probably wasn’t a good idea in the first place.” She says they need to find a way to install lines underground even as rebuilding is happening. 

Despite it all, “life is so much better” now that she’s back in her own home. 

“We want everyone else to feel this way, too,” she said. “We’ve had the worst years of our lives and we’re happy to have overcome it, but we want everyone else to overcome it also.”

On Malanai Street in Wahikuli, the Milnes also couldn’t afford to wait. They had a time limit to use their insurance money to buy new furniture to replace what they lost, and they decided if things weren’t moving forward within two years, they would sell their property and move to the Mainland. 

Fortunately, the Milnes got power back earlier than most because a handful of nearby homes survived the flames, prompting Hawaiian Electric to restore power to the area. 

After spending several months living with his mom on the Mainland following the fire, Gene Milne returned to Maui in May 2024 to start construction on the ‘ohana unit and main home that was 70% completed when the fire destroyed it. He was the first person in Lahaina to start rebuilding and is among a very small number of people who have completed a home since. 

By July, he had temporary power, and in mid-November, he got permanent power. He’s routing the power underground on his own property, but his home is still surrounded by newly installed utility poles. When asked if he was concerned about the risk, he said, “no more than I was before.” 

“They can be problematic. We obviously learned that,” he said. “And it’s really all about maintenance. Who’s going to maintain the poles and what is truly their responsibility when something on that pole is deemed not usable anymore, such as old phone lines?”

His son works for a power company in Southern California, so he knows how long it can take for lines to be installed underground and said “it’s just not feasible for people to wait.” 

Rebuilding his own home and getting power took a lot of polite phone calls and patience — “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” he said — and now he and his wife are enjoying their cozy ‘ohana unit with blue-painted walls, vibrant green plants and homey touches like the wooden signs urging people to “relax” and “always believe that something wonderful is about to happen.”

The Milnes love all 672 square feet of their newly built cottage, a spacious upgrade from the RV they lived in while rebuilding. There’s a spot for Joann to work from home, an astroturf yard for their dogs to roam and plenty of space in the living room for Gene to stretch out his long arms and not hit the walls. They know they’re among the lucky ones. 

“Our heart still breaks for those that just won’t find their way back,” Joann Milne said.