Sonoma County leaders share experience, lessons learned with visitors from fire-stricken island of Maui

Story by The Press Democrat.

The trip was hosted by After the Fire USA as part of the nonprofit organization’s annual three-day Wildfire Leadership Summit in Sonoma. It’s an example of what Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Gray Thompson and After the Fire call “paying our lessons forward.”

 

For the people of Maui, it may be too soon to think much farther ahead than a single day or a few weeks.

Still just 13 months from the catastrophic fires that killed 102 people, leveled thousands of homes and caused losses exceeding $6 billion, they may be hard-pressed to envision how recovery on the Hawaiian island might eventually look.

But a team of Sonoma County leaders who Thursday toured a contingent from Maui through areas burned by the Nuns and Tubbs fires seven years ago hope their visitors have the imagination needed to glimpse their own restoration in the transformation that has occurred here.

Sonoma County’s reconstruction came with a steep learning curve, enormous frustrations and challenges that organizers wanted to share with their guests from Hawaii.

“We were all on our heels,” when the fire hit, even though hazard mitigation maps identified the high fire risk areas, Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore told the group.

He and Santa Rosa Fire Division Chief and Fire Marshal Paul Lowenthal led much of the tour as a bus carrying several dozen community leaders from Maui traveled through the Sonoma Valley, around Fountaingrove, and finally up Old Redwood Highway to Larkfield, revisiting neighborhoods decimated by fire only to come to come back better.

Along the way, they shared challenges and lessons learned as Sonoma County built back from the North Bay Firestorm, as well as fires that came later.

From insurance battles to inflated building costs, evacuation woes to federal grants, they and others shared insights and warnings they hoped might smooth the road for those in Maui just getting started and help them feel less alone.

And it made an impression.

“It helps us to see the future,” said Maui Mayor Richard Bissen. “We’ve never done this before.”

“It’s fortifying my personal sense of hope, and just reiterating that it’s a long haul, too,” said Helen Kau, with the Maui County Office of Recovery, part of the Department of Management.

The trip was hosted by After the Fire USA as part of the nonprofit organization’s annual three-day Wildfire Leadership Summit in Sonoma. It’s an example of what Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Gray Thompson and After the Fire call “paying our lessons forward.”

It’s also an extension of outreach that local leaders ― including Gray Thompson, Gore and Lowenthal and many others ― have offered to Maui and other communities hit by the megafires of the new age.

“It can be incredibly lonely to be a leader,” Gray Thompson said in an interview.

That’s why the nonprofit exists: to provide leaders facing catastrophic fires a connection with those who faced it before and help communities navigate what’s ahead.

Amos Lonokailun-Hewett, a retired Maui fire battalion chief who was appointed administrator of the Maui Emergency Management Agency in December 2023 after the fires, said the support from people like Lowenthal, who has made numerous trips to the island, and from others in Sonoma County has been “critical to helping us find our way.”

“They’ve already done it,” he said. “They’ve found the problems. They’ve already found the solutions ― solutions that we can use right now.”

Gray Thompson, as well as several of the participants from Maui, acknowledged the unique hurdles facing Maui, given its isolation and the challenges anticipated in acquiring building materials to replace almost 2,200 structures.

That’s in part why the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, considers Maui to be the most complex fire it’s dealt with, said Bissen, Maui’s mayor.

During a stop in Larkfield, Tamara Paltin, a Maui councilwoman and chair of the council’s Disaster, Resilience, International Affairs, and Planning Committee, stood under a graceful oak that survived the Tubbs Fire and described for those gathered the stress under which her constituents are living.

She said debris removal had just been completed in the historic community of Lahaina, which was decimated by fire.

She said housing is so scarce that people are sometimes paying $30,000 a month in rent for a five-bedroom home. Others pay $9,500 a month for a one bedroom, using insurance money that in turn leaves renters who had no fire losses struggling even more to find a place to rent.

They’re mentally and emotionally overwhelmed and exhausted, and now that the 1-year anniversary of the Aug. 8, 2023, fires has passed, their alternative living expenses are running out.

“Nobody really wants to fully admit that they need help,” she said, “but everybody needs help, and it’s hard when they say what they need and then you can’t provide it.”

The stop also included remarks from Karen and Brian Fies, fires survivors who described the importance of perseverance and community in rebuilding, and the recovery that continues even once you’re back in a home.

It’s also critical, Brian Fies said, to know that there will always be a “before the fire” and an “after,” that will never be the same.

“If anyone says ‘closure’ to you, you punch them in the face,” he said. “There’s no closure, but you will get through it.”

Josiah Nishita, who heads the Maui Department of Management, said having connection with people who have experienced the long slog of recovery helps to provide “a point of reference” for the progress the county has made since the fires, even if everything feels as if it’s moving slowly.

“It helps to give a sense of perspective,” Nishita said.

Bissen echoed the sense of comfort that comes from the shared experience of others.

“Look at the expertise they have: people who’ve lived it, been there,” he said. “We have friends. We have contacts and phone numbers we can call.”