Nearly three years after a downed power line sparked the destructive and deadly 2023 Lahaina wildfire, Hawaiian Electric is beginning a two-year, hardening project in the seaside town to replace wooden utility poles with stronger ones made of steel or composite fiberglass.

Crews started digging holes this week along a critical corridor of Honoapi‘ilani Highway where a growing number of homes are being rebuilt and a future Maui County community center and fieldhouse is planned. 

The work, which will run through June, involves removing 20 wooden poles and replacing them with 19 poles made of stronger materials on a nearly 2-mile stretch between Kai Hele Ku Street and Aholo Road.

While Hawaiian Electric put in more than 70 steel poles in Lahaina in 2024 to help restore a critical transmission line, this section of Honoapi‘ilani Highway is the “first targeted area of critical pole hardening in Lahaina.”

It’s also a signal that above-ground utility poles are here to stay and are a key part of Hawaiian Electric’s wildfire risk reduction plans, even as the company looks to bury lines in strategic places around Lahaina.

“I know that we would all love them to be underground, but it’s not a free thing, and who would pay for it is a big question,” said Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin, who holds the West Maui residency seat.

Mat McNeff, Hawaiian Electric’s director of Maui County, said during the county’s disaster recovery meeting in Lahaina earlier this month that installing stronger poles is part of the company’s “wildfire safety strategy where we seek to strengthen our infrastructure along important egress routes.”

Honoapi‘ilani Highway is the only exit route on the southern end of Lahaina and connects directly to neighborhoods that were heavily populated prior to the fire, with homes, churches, a homeless shelter and the Lahaina Aquatic and Recreation Centers in the surrounding areas. The aquatic center reopened in 2024, and the neighborhood across from it has become a hub of activity as more homes undergo construction. 

It could become even more bustling in the future with Maui County planning a new community center and fieldhouse next to the aquatic center that would have two regulation-sized basketball courts, and serve as a gathering space and an emergency shelter.

Shayna Decker, Hawaiian Electric’s director of government and community affairs, said the poles are being placed “at key access points along Honoapi‘ilani Highway, including in areas closer to the road and where lines cross the roadway.”

Decker said work will continue “along the critical traffic corridors” of Honoapi‘ilani Highway toward Kā‘anapali Parkway through 2028. 

The actual advantages of the steel and composite fiberglass poles aren’t their ability to survive wind speeds. In fact, wood, steel and composite poles “all rated comparably to withstand hurricane force winds and challenging terrain,” Decker said. 

But steel and composite poles are stronger and more reliable because they are made of human-engineered materials instead of natural materials, which make them more “straightforward to inspect” and “consistent in strength” compared to wood that can vary.

The steel and composite poles are “expected to withstand more catastrophic damage, such as falling,” Decker said. 

During the August 2023 fire, 450 of Hawaiian Electric’s 750 poles were destroyed or downed. Decker said “all poles that were needed to restore power to customers after 2023 were replaced based on the restoration of main circuits and service requests to individual properties.”

In 2025, Hawaiian Electric replaced or upgraded more than 980 wooden poles in Maui County as part of its wildfire safety strategy. 

Given that the area surrounding the aquatic and recreation center was so popular prior to the fire, especially for families, Paltin said it makes sense that the pole hardening work is starting in that area. 

“The aquatic center, the recreation center is where a lot of our kids play … and our kids to me are like some of our most important resources,” Paltin said. “So it is really important to have strong infrastructure.”

It’s why she also supports Hawaiian Electric’s plans to bury 2.5 miles of power lines along Lahainaluna Road, which runs past major neighborhoods, Princess Nāhi‘ena‘ena Elementary, Lahaina Intermediate and Lahainaluna High School and is where a downed power line ignited dry brush in the 2023 fire. She sees protection of those areas as paramount.

“If the schools would have burnt, our recovery would look much different and be much harder,” Paltin said.

Decker said that design work for the underground project “is already underway and is estimated to be completed by 2030, depending on permitting and other construction factors.” The work is expected to cost $11 million a mile and will be covered by a U.S. Department of Energy grant.

Undergrounding lines may be a popular public request, but Decker says it’s just one solution to reduce fire risk and has to go hand-in-hand with other measures, such as “critical pole hardening, installation of covered conductors versus bare wires and broader grid hardening efforts all done in combination.” 

“By prioritizing circuits based on wildfire risk factors — including wind exposure, vegetation density, proximity to critical infrastructure, cultural sensitivities, and the importance of ingress and egress routes, Hawaiian Electric is implementing critical pole hardening where it will have the greatest impact of reducing risk,” Decker said.

Decker said that the company is coordinating with the state and county to determine additional areas to bury power lines “based on long-term rebuilding efforts that are being finalized along with new developments being planned.”

Rebuilding Lahaina quickly is also part of the reason why officials aren’t looking at burying utility lines across the entire town, which they say could delay the recovery. When participants at a workshop earlier this month on restoring Lahaina’s commercial area also asked about underground power lines, Managing Director Erin Wade said that there were no plans to put lines underground in the area and that “for efficiency purposes, power is being restored as it was previously.”

Given the costs and the years it would take to bury power lines along just a couple of miles, Paltin says the above-ground poles are better than nothing.

“I do prefer that they switch out the wooden poles and have something more sturdy as we wait for them to do more,” Paltin said. 

Nell Laird-Woods, whose home was the lone survivor in a neighborhood leveled by the fire across from the Lahaina recreation and aquatic complex, often drives along the corridor where the new poles are slated for installation and knows the importance of the roadway. 

“You need as many exit points as possible, because otherwise the ones you have become choke points,” Laird-Woods said. 

She is not sure what to think of the poles being installed down the road. She lives in a neighborhood with all underground utilities, and she says that was one of the reasons she bought a home there. While it makes sense that “something up in the air is going to be much more prone to flames and heat than something that’s underground,” she pointed out that burying utilities isn’t a silver bullet either.

“Unfortunately as we all discovered after the fire, the stuff that was in the ground got burned, too,” she said.

Laird-Woods said the underground power lines in her neighborhood were well protected and survived, but the wiring for services such as the internet burned, and only recently have they started to fix it. Before, satellite-based Starlink was the only game in town. Now, Hawaiian Telcom is offering fiber-optic connections.

Laird-Woods estimated that about 50 to 60 houses in her neighborhood “are in one phase or another” of rebuilding. She’s excited that not only will the homes be built up to modern codes and more fire resistant, but that many are still owned by the same people as before the fire.

For now, Paltin thinks it’s important to at least have something sturdy in place ahead of the approaching El Niño climate cycle that typically increases the risk of hurricanes in the Pacific. Hurricane season in Hawai‘i starts in June and runs through November.

“I don’t know if it’s going to be a permanent solution,” Paltin said of the stronger poles. “But I’m glad that they’re doing it in advance of this pretty heavy El Niño that forecasters are seeing could impact us.”