You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
On August 9, 2023, the smoke finally cleared in Lahaina.
The scene was shocking. In the course of just a few hours on the afternoon of August 8, winds had fanned a dry grass fire on the northwest coast of Maui into an inferno that trapped fleeing residents and left more than 100 people dead and the city in ashes. “We understand that recovery will take years,” Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian, told me when we spoke in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. “And as that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves — that we don’t open the door for disaster capitalists.”
Since then, Ing and other community leaders have put in the work. Over the past year, their group, Lahaina Strong, has tried to empower the community and challenge the power structures they say contributed to the confluence of factors that made the fire possible.
“We’re all about the community arm — grassroots power, and coalitions,” he told me this week. “Unfortunately, our groups are the same groups that have had to respond to climate disasters like Hurricanes Maria, Harvey, Sandy, and the Paradise fires. There’s always something, and it’s getting more and more frequent.”
On the anniversary of the fire, I spoke to Ing about how other communities can learn from the Lahaina model, the victories organizers secured to ensure a better future for native Hawaiians and locals, and how to ride the momentum forward into November. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.
It’s been almost a year since we last spoke; at that time, you’d just arrived in Maui from your home on Oahu after the fire. What happened after that?
I don’t think there had been a clear model of best practices for how to respond. So when [a climate disaster] happened in my backyard, it was like, “Okay, let’s learn from all the responses and organizing traditions that we’ve studied and been trained on” — from the Civil Rights era to the mutual aid of the Black Panthers and tenant rights and welfare organizers, to the modern efforts of the Alinsky-type ACORN model, to the Sunrise model, which is momentum-based. But how do you draw from everything at once?
That is where Lahaina Strong came from. Because this is where I grew up, we knew which community leaders would be stepping up. But it’s not common for everyone to work together — they can be on different sides of different issues. So we convened all of them — mostly those we call kupuna, the older generation of elders. We started coordinating the responses of our leaders and immigrant churches, the heads of canoe clubs and governmental departments, Indigenous leaders, and pro-surfers, because that’s what the community here looks like. And what came of it was a few younger leaders — Millennials, so young for our community — were given the elders’ blessing and told, “It’s time for y’all to lead.”
There was Pa’ele [Kiakona], who was a server at a restaurant, and Courtney [Lazo] and Jordan [Ruidas], who were expecting mothers, and they’re the ones who really blew it up. I raised some money to get them on a salary and train them, but they were already community leaders in their own right. So the question was, “How do we maximize their power?”
The first thing we did was needs assessments. Everyone lived in a hotel, but many of the more established charities were opening up in malls 13 or 14 miles away. But our team had iPads and lived in the hotels, too, so while more established groups were getting 100 or so folks signed up, we were getting thousands every day because they were neighbors.
Yeah, you have to be there.
Right, and they all knew each other. We were working on a team with Salesforce — Marc Benioff was helping us back then — and we could figure out people’s needs and direct them to services. There are so many services, but people just lost their homes; they don’t know where to go. So that was the job.
The last question was, “Would you want to get involved down the line with the big decisions that the government will have to make about the priorities of the rebuild?” So once the council started holding hearings about the rebuilding and the policies of reopening and tourism, we were able to turn out hundreds of people instantly. We seized the momentum. We won unanimous support from the council for delaying the reopening of Lahaina to tourists, and we did a big petition delivery to the governor. The governor wasn’t supportive of us at the time, though, and we didn’t ultimately win that one.
From there, it was, “What else do we need?” We needed to house people; that was the main thing. There was also a government guy, Kaleo Manuel [who had been on the state Commission on Water Resource Management until a land developer accused him of delaying water resources during the fire], who we demanded to be reinstated, and we won that. We also had a demand for a billion dollars in direct aid; we won that. But the housing thing was a longer-term flight and went through the legislative session this year. We did this thing called Fishing for Housing, which involved the occupation of Kā’anapali Beach.
I saw your video about that!
That occupation was rough because we lived on a really sandy beach. And it was big. A lot of people came out. But the local news covered it pretty much daily, and it raised a lot of sympathy. We were educating tourists and raising money.
With that, we were able to form a historic partnership. Pa’ele’s uncle is an activist who wants to return water from the hotels to the communities and restore public streams. The unions generally don’t like that kind of stuff in Hawaii, but we were able to bring in ILWU, the hotel union here, and Local 5, another hotel union, which hadn’t partnered with ILWU since 1940. When we came to the legislative session, it was like, “Okay, we have real power now.” The governor came around and committed to passing the bill.
Our theory was that we had to raise a ton of money for direct relief; that was the most important thing, getting direct monetary aid to people. But it was not going to be enough; we weren’t going to raise $10 billion. We could buy one house if we raised a million and a half. Instead, we did this through a [501(c)4 social welfare organization], where you can advocate and contest power where it matters. And we were able to win 50,000 homes instead.
What’s next?
The next steps are on the climate front. The Inflation Reduction Act is a good step; building and electricity, we’re also on track. Agriculture and transportation on a national level are where we need to fill the gaps. Why is Maui growing mono-crops like sugar and coffee for people thousands of miles away? Why can’t we feed our own people? And transportation — when the fires hit, everyone was stuck because of the one-way-in, one-way-out road. Those issues are pertinent not only on the disaster, resiliency, and community infrastructure levels, but also on the mitigation side.
People are also excited about the possibility of microgrids or community-owned energy systems. When we initially had community hubs, members were using Star Link or small solar systems, and locals were like, “Wow, why can’t we do this everywhere?” It’d be way cheaper than fixing the grid at this point.
We have a blank slate to build the future we need. And we’re going to be up against a lot of powerful opponents in the next 10 years.
When we spoke last year, you talked about how rebuilding after the fire was an opportunity to ensure that the people came first and that the forces that contributed to the problem were pushed out of power. Has that effort been successful?
It’s ongoing. Power has many forms: There are the institutional forms, like CEOs and politicians, but there are the shadows — how ideas are organized, industry association gatherings — that are harder to crack. It’s a chess game, and we’re all trying to stay a step ahead.
I think that’s what is critical about our work. If we were to stop, if we could no longer provide our organizers with salaries, they’d have to go back to working two service jobs, and they wouldn’t have the time to compete with full-time lobbyists.
You mentioned other climate disasters early in our conversation. What advice would you give to people in other communities about incorporating mutual aid and holding corporate powers accountable after a catastrophe?
If you come out right away and say, “Hey, this is a climate disaster!” then everyone is like, Oh, an activist. But if you just come out and help and earn people’s trust — that’s what it really takes. Listen to folks.
The thing about climate action and climate solutions is that they have been so polarized over the last few years. I think it’s been moving in our favor. Generally, the population supports us. But those who don’t are much more vocal than they were 10 years ago, and that matters because as soon as they start speaking up, the less political people are just like, “Keep me out of this.” So we have to be careful about how we approach these communities. They’re not thinking about climate; they’re thinking about how to feed their family and how they will get their kids to school or if school is even available. You have to meet them where they are.
Then you go from there. You start to have conversations with them, and they will support getting the polluters out and not being taken advantage of by corporate utilities. You don’t have to talk to them about climate like we always do among advocates; you shouldn’t. If you want to build power in a community, you’ve got to have a different approach. These people, their power is ultimately that they’re survivors, not activists. The public doesn’t perceive them as having an agenda other than just surviving and showing up for their community.
There’s still a lot of work to be done. How do you plan to keep up the forward momentum heading into this fall and the election season?
Visibility and outreach. There’s that old saying that politics is downstream from culture, and our group has been really political, especially during the legislative session. So we’re trying to show up for the community in more direct ways. Today, we paddled with the canoe clubs to honor the first anniversary of the fire. We’re showing up in these more community-based ways so we grow in cultural power, too — not just as an advocacy group, but as a holistic community.
Do you think anything has been missing from the media narrative about Lahaina?
Some of the media that came out today was like, “A year later, people are still without homes.” But if you look at the numbers, the per capita investments from the federal government, and the commitment from FEMA — I mean, it wasn’t great at first, I’ll admit that, but we’ve won quite a bit. We’re winning. The momentum is on our side, and I think it’s important for folks to understand that. They have to feel like it’s worth it and that there’s hope to keep going. I know it’s not the sexiest media narrative and it’s easier to draw criticism, but this is the rise of self-determination. The survivors, to me, are the real story.
And it’s going to take a long time. The fact that it’s like, “Oh, we can’t rebuild a year later.” It was still toxic just a few months ago! There’s debris everywhere. The focus should be less on charity and more on the change and how the power structures have shifted. That’s been really positive.
Do you feel optimistic about the Harris-Walz ticket heading into this fall?
I do. Many reporters have asked me, “Why Harris and not Biden?” Politics is all about coalitions; our movement did a lot of work to become part of the Biden coalition, which was great. But Big Oil was also a part of the coalition he needed to win, so there was always that tension, from my perspective, during his presidency. But with Harris, we’ll have the opportunity to build a dual coalition — perhaps with us and labor, and not Big Oil.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “super soaker” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the super soaker collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the super soaker collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the super soaker, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
Get our best story delivered to your inbox every day:
Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.