Early in the morning of November 8, 2018, a strong gust of wind blew down a power line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, the power utility that serves most of California. As the line hit the ground, it ignited a bed of dry pine needles, starting a fire that soon spiraled out of control. The blaze, which became known as the Camp Fire, would go on to destroy more than 18,000 structures and kill dozens of people — ranking it as the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history.

In the years after the fire, PG&E faced a barrage of civil and criminal lawsuits from fire victims, municipal governments, and insurance companies, seeking to hold the utility accountable for starting the blaze. As the company’s stock tanked, it filed for bankruptcy protection, and later pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter over fire deaths. In order to exit bankruptcy, the company paid out $23 billion to various plaintiffs and creditors.

PG&E has since drafted a plan to spend $50 billion by 2026 on grid protection and repairs, but it still has a ways to go. The utility can only borrow limited amounts of money thanks to its recent bankruptcy restructuring, and last year it laid off thousands of workers who trim trees around power lines to prevent fires. Starved for cash, the compan has raised rates: the average PG&E customer’s bill will rise 18 percent this year, and 32 percent by 2026. 

Power lines and other electrical infrastructure have ignited hundreds of fires in the American West over the past 10 years, and these wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and burned millions of acres. In just the latest example, the deadly wildfires in Maui this month appear to have been ignited by power infrastructure. In the aftermath of these events, victims and insurers have increasingly sued large investor-owned utilities for billions of dollars in damages, laying blame for the fires at the feet of the corporations who control the electrical infrastructure that kickstarted the blazes. 

“It seems like there’s this historic trend of utilities just paying for fires, paying for fires, and then there’s a catastrophic one and they get walloped,” said Todd Logan, an attorney at the law firm Edelson PC who has won lawsuits against PG&E and Pacificorp. “And then they actually start changing their practices.” 

The trend began in California, where state law makes it easy to hold utilities accountable for starting fires, but it is now spreading to other states like Oregon, where fire victims won a trial last month against the Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility Pacificorp over a devastating 2020 wildfire, and Colorado, where victims sued the utility Xcel last month over the 2021 Marshall Fire. The payouts that stem from these lawsuits could cost these companies billions of dollars.

While these lawsuit victories are helping victims to rebuild their homes, some experts also believe this wave of legal action and the massive payouts that have come with it have made it harder for utilities to fund grid upgrades that can prevent future fires. In many cases, as these investor-owned utilities work to fireproof their infrastructure, they’re passing the cost of system improvements and delayed maintenance down to their customers in a region where electricity rates are already high.

“Ratepayers definitely have to pay for the cost of the utility doing things” like burying power lines and trimming trees, said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford Law School and an expert on how climate change affects utilities. “With the lawsuits, too, there are significant penalties, and somebody’s going to have to pay for them — and the reality is it’s going to be the customers of the company and the shareholders.”

A large power company like PG&E presides over a vast network of wires and transformers, extending over thousands of square miles of service territory. Almost any part of that network can cause a fire if it falls over or scrapes against flammable wood. It’s almost impossible for a utility to eliminate risk altogether, but there are a number of measures they can take to reduce it. Until the last few years, though, few utilities had bothered to take them.

For a long time, most big utilities would keep energy flowing through their wires almost all the time, until a snowstorm or heat wave caused one of their lines to break or blow up. Instead of spending money to forecast weather disruptions or harden their power lines against those disruptions, they just spent money to fix them afterward. In the case of PG&E, this allowed legacy transmission lines to grow old and worn-down, increasing the risk of ignition. 

“They basically used to run the system until it would break and then repair the part that broke,” said Wara. “It’s a cheap way to maintain a system, and the benefit was to customers because it kept rates lower. It is much more expensive to do preventative maintenance.” 

But now that business model has come back to bite the utilities. The lawsuits against Pacificorp in Oregon and Xcel in Colorado both argue that the utilities should have cut power to vulnerable areas before the fire. The jury in the Pacificorp trial, for instance, found that the power company acted negligently when it didn’t shut off electricity to 600,000 customers on the dry Labor Day weekend of 2020. That decision caused multiple fires that destroyed thousands of structures and killed 11 people. Hawaiian Electric, the utility that supplies power to Maui, is also facing criticism for failing to shut off power during the high-wind event that fueled the wildfires on the island. Video and data obtained by the Washington Post appear to show that a power line caused the island’s first fire.

In the years since the record-breaking 2017 and 2018 fire seasons, California’s utilities have shifted away from that model, said Caroline Thomas Jacobs, the director of the state’s new Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, which was created in 2020 to prevent another Camp Fire-like blaze from devastating the region.

“We’re seeing exponential change in a short period of time,” said Thomas Jacobs. “Only five years ago, when I came into this whole space, it was fundamentally an analog business. They used paper to record everything, and they knew that your power was out because you called them.” Not only did they not plan for climate change, they didn’t assess fire risk at all.

Now, Thomas Jacobs says, the state’s utilities have entered the 21st century. Big power providers like PG&E and Southern California Edison have hired in-house meteorologists, invested millions in advanced fire modeling, and deployed hundreds of sensors across their grid networks so they can identify risky areas. They’ve also instituted a new regime for shutting off electricity when fire risk is high: PG&E can now cut power to precise areas with the flip of a switch. 

But the larger challenge facing utilities like PG&E is upgrading physical infrastructure itself, which can cost tens of billions of dollars — money that gets harder to raise as settlements add up. Most utility-caused wildfires happen when falling trees or dead branches scrape up against power lines, or when those power lines blow over onto dry ground. The surest way to reduce ignitions is to trim vegetation around power lines, as well as by insulating lines or burying them underground. All these measures, however, come at significant cost. 

In some cases, this “grid hardening” effort has proven difficult for California utilities. PG&E has trimmed thousands of trees and undergrounded more than 300 miles of power lines, but Thomas Jacobs’s department chastised the utility earlier this year for its growing backlog of asset repairs, saying the company “has not been able to show that it has adequate resources or proper planning to address its backlog given the continual increase.” (PG&E says it is working to accelerate the repairs.)

Meanwhile, SoCalEdison has opted to insulate its wires rather than bury them, which is faster and cheaper but may not provide the same level of long-term fire resilience, says Wara.

Furthermore, in PG&E’s case, it’s unclear just how effective these infrastructure efforts have been. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that PG&E scrapped its tree-trimming program altogether in the face of new evidence that it wasn’t reducing risk despite almost $2 billion in expenditures to date. (PG&E disputes this, saying that it is “focusing investment on programs to enable permanent risk reduction.”) Meanwhile, one recent study found that power line undergrounding in California tends to benefit wealthy communities and leave low-income areas behind. 

The key question utilities are asking themselves is how much of this infrastructure improvement work they need to do in order to avoid being found liable for starting fires, says Wara. The answer depends on where the utility is. In every state except California, plaintiffs must prove that a power provider acted with recklessness or negligence. That’s what happened in the Oregon trial against Pacificorp, and it’s the argument in the Colorado case as well.

In California, though, a legal standard known as “inverse condemnation” means that a utility is liable for a wildfire as long as any part of its infrastructure helped start the blaze, even if the utility tried to prevent ignition. This standard led to numerous settlements over the years against utilities like SoCal Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, but most of them were relatively small. That changed with the big lawsuits that followed the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons.

The threat of litigation imposes a dual financial obligation on utilities. On the one hand they have to pay out damages to victims and insurance companies, and on the other they have to spend on grid upgrades to avoid future lawsuits. PG&E is the most extreme example of this money crunch: The utility had to pay out a $23 billion settlement package to exit bankruptcy in 2020, and has since spent billions more on grid repairs, including ultra-expensive undergrounding. Meanwhile, in Oregon, Pacificorp may have to pay upwards of $1 billion in damages to victims of the 2020 fires that its infrastructure was found to have started.

As utilities spend to upgrade their grids and avoid future lawsuits, they also raise electricity prices on customers, making it more expensive for them to run their fridges and air conditioning units, says Logan. In order to raise rates, the companies must get permission from state regulators, but regulators tend to approve the increases without much hubbub. 

In addition to PG&E’s double-digit rate increase this year, Oregon’s Pacificorp raised rates by 14 percent as it worked to implement its wildfire mitigation plan. That increase came before the utility lost at trial against fire victims last month. SoCal Edison already raised rates in 2021 to finance the insulation of its power lines, leading to a $12.41 monthly increase for the average customer; the utility is also facing multiple fire lawsuits and may have to raise rates still further.

Experts disagree about just how necessary these rate increases are. Logan, the Edelson attorney, says companies like Pacificorp return plenty of money to their shareholders and don’t need to pass costs onto consumers. Logan is also leading the lawsuit against Xcel in Colorado.

“The notion that they’re financially constrained to me is completely absurd,” he told Grist. “Investor-owned utilities get a guaranteed 16 percent year-over-year yield, and when it dips down, you can just go back to the ratepayers like a tax. It’s one of the most unbelievable business offerings ever.” 

Logan points out that investment firms like Vanguard, Apollo, and Third Point have invested in PG&E. Meanwhile, Pacificorp is a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, a massive conglomerate led by one of the world’s richest men. 

In response to a request for comment, PG&E said its “system has never been safer, and we continue to make it safer every day.” The company also said that damages from previous legal settlements “were paid by shareholders and did not impact customer bills.” Pacificorp declined to comment.

Even so, the task of upgrading an entire grid network is enormous, and the capital costs of vegetation management and grid hardening are unprecedented for most big power companies, says Kevin Schneider, a utility expert at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

“It’s fair to say that these are big companies and they have a lot of money, but also, look at what they’re being expected to do,” he told Grist. “These are big ledger values, and they were not originally set up as organizations that were meant to be tackling climate change problems. Now they’re trying to rethink a system that needs to be designed to last another 50 years.” He added that utilities in the West are also trying to prepare for the increased energy demand that will accompany the coming transition away from fossil fuels.

Adapting to climate change will require rebuilding roads, water systems, and transit lines, and local governments across the country are already struggling to keep up. When it comes to power infrastructure, though, the adaptation effort in the West is being led not by governments but by some of the nation’s largest companies, investor-owned businesses that must also think about returning profit to shareholders.  This dynamic has meant that even when the law allows victims to wrest money away from the big utilities responsible for many of the region’s worst fires, it’s ordinary residents who end up footing the bill for adaptation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities are getting sued over wildfires. Who’s bearing the cost? on Aug 18, 2023.

When cities need to raise money for roads and water lines, they have a few options. They can raise taxes, for instance, or charge fees for city services. If that isn’t enough, though, they can also issue bonds, borrowing on a $4 trillion credit market to pay for new construction projects they can’t afford otherwise. These municipal bonds function like loans that banks and investors make to local governments, and they’re an essential tool for filling out city budgets.

“This is how your sewage gets funded, this is how your water gets funded, this is how public schools and public services are funded,” said Matthew Wynter, a research professor of finance at Stony Brook University.

But a growing body of research shows that this credit market is also helping perpetuate systemic racism. When Black towns and cities try to borrow money on the bond market, they pay higher interest rates than their white counterparts. A paper published last week in the science journal PLOS One finds that this “Black tax” amounts to as much as $900 million per year in the United States. These higher borrowing costs can prevent these towns from pursuing much-needed infrastructure upgrades, or push them toward default and bankruptcy if they fall behind on interest payments. 

While racial bias is accounted for in the municipal markets, climate change isn’t, according to the new research. 

Erika Smull, lead author of the paper and a research analyst at Breckinridge, an investment management company, said that both the racial bias she found and climate change represent, “two huge systemic risks to not just the [municipal] market, but kind of everything about the United States.” 

The inequality in the bond market perpetuates a cycle of debt and disinvestment in Black communities, but it also has huge implications for environmental justice and climate resilience. If local leaders can’t raise money to protect water lines and prepare for floods, their constituents will end up reliant on decaying and vulnerable public infrastructure. 

 “Race should certainly not affect the pricing of municipal bonds,” Smull told Grist. 

A growing body of research published in recent years has illuminated the role that municipal bonds have played in deepening racial inequality. Destin Jenkins, a historian of capitalism at Stanford University, has written that segregated white suburbs benefited from high credit ratings which entrenched municipal wealth in the period after World War II. Conversely, he argues, investors punished Black towns for their shoddy infrastructure and lack of access to capital. 

When bond rating agencies like Moody’s assessed the creditworthiness of cities, they would penalize Black towns for racial inequality that persisted from slavery. “Bond rating analysts participated” in the process of segregation, Jenkins writes, “by insisting that their ratings were reflections of objective economic conditions.”

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Even towns with a low percentage of Black residents suffered from what one political scientist called the “black tax”, wherein areas with a higher percentage of Black residents are unfairly penalized for nothing else but their demographics. 

Wynter, along with two colleagues, Ashleigh Eldemire and Kimberly F. Luchtenberg, co-authored a paper that delved into the issue of municipal bonds and racial discrimination. They found that even after controlling for all other variables, municipalities that were more racially diverse were offered municipal bonds with higher bond insurance rates and a lower credit rating, which led to higher interest rates and put the cities in a worse financial position.  

“It’s much harder for municipalities that are racially diverse, to raise funding or to raise capital, especially when it’s expected that minorities might be the beneficiaries of those services,”  said Wynter. “So we know that racial discrimination can affect the way that a municipality is able to access the credit market.”

One important point Wynter spoke to when discussing why racial discrimination persists in a relatively mundane part of the financial markets was geography. Because in-state bond investments are exempt from both state and federal taxes, many investors have pre existing prejudices against communities of color within their own state’s bond market.

“The counties, the cities, and counties, and municipalities with high percentages of Black residents pay more, even though there’s nothing to really kind of show that they are riskier,” said Wynter.

Smull also emphasized the role of implicit bias that people working to issue and rate bonds have could play a role in disparities between the types of municipal bonds offered to white and Black cities and towns. 

“They’re unaware that they hold that bias,” said Smull “And they just associate a city that is predominantly Black with images that have been curated in their mind over time.” 

Most of these images, said Smull, are the types of negative stereotypes that have been persistent in the American imagination. This includes the idea that it might be a risk to invest in a town with a higher percentage of Black residents, this is despite the fact that the credit risk might be the same for a white and Black town but their rating could be lower. 

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David Dubrow, an attorney with Arent Fox Schiff and an expert on municipal finance, says this racial inequality on the bond market can trap Black cities in a cycle of disinvestment.

“What we’re talking about is a reinforcing cycle of penalizing poor communities that are already poor,” he told Grist. “The impact on the community is higher taxes and less money for social services, because [the city is] spending more on paying interest on borrowing money.” 

The difference of a few percentage points in the interest rate of a bond can add up over the course of decades, placing a huge financial burden on cities. In a recent article, Dubrow’s firm estimated that because Milwaukee has a lower credit rating than other cities of its size, the city would pay an extra $477 million to borrow money on a 30-year bond. More than 40 percent of Milwaukee’s residents are Black.

Catherine Coleman Flowers is familiar with the lack of services that can follow decades of divestment and lack of access to resources. Flowers, who authored the book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, has spent a lot of her time working on sewage access in rural parts of Alabama, specifically in Lowndes County where for decades residents were unable to access sewage and often had to rely on “straight pipes” from their homes to dispel sewage, often only a few yards away from the entrance to those homes. Sewage and waste disposal is one of the main services that municipalities can provide but without adequate access to funding, they cannot maintain the upkeep needed to continue to provide basic services, or in some cases provide them in the first place.

Flowers, who has helped raise awareness of substandard waste and sewage services, says that these problems arise when cities lack the resources to invest in new infrastructure. The racial tilt of the municipal bond market is a key factor that contributes to this lack of resources.

“A lot of the poor communities remain poor, because the formula is written in such a way that it doesn’t allow them to even get in the game,” said Flowers. 

In many cases, when they can’t raise taxes or garner more money through bonds, cities are forced to resort to harsh and punitive measures to maintain their revenue and avoid default. The city government of Baltimore, for example, has imposed strict punishments on water customers in order to maintain revenue for the municipal water system. According to one estimate, the city shut off water deliveries to 42,000 customers in 2016 alone.

In the worst cases, a downward financial spiral can push cities toward bankruptcy. Earlier this year, for instance, the water utility for the city of Prichard, Alabama descended into crisis. The Prichard Water and Sewer Board provides drinking and sewer water to about 20,000 people in a predominantly Black suburb of Mobile, but the utility had long been facing financial headwinds. Thanks to leaks and holes in decades-old service lines, the utility loses more than half of all the water it purchases, which has left it unable to make ends meet.

Prichard’s median household income is less than half of the national average, and the board couldn’t raise rates on already struggling customers. Instead, it patched the financial hole by issuing a $55 million municipal bond to a bank called Synovus Bank, borrowing money to pay for infrastructure upgrades, but in December and January the board missed two payments on the bond. One board member warned that the utility could default. A few months later, in June, Synovus sued the board and demanded it resume payments, accusing the utility of financial mismanagement.

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Many local officials in Black towns and cities are wary of ending up in a situation like the Prichard water board, and they avoid the bond market out of a concern that they’ll end up with debt they can’t sustain. 

“I would say that debt service is an issue, because once you have that debt on your books, you know, you’ve got to pay it,” said Darryl Greene, the treasurer for the city of Inkster, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. “If you don’t have the necessary revenue stream to cover all of your major expenses in addition to covering the debt, you’re going to struggle.”  

Inkster has a population of about 25,000, and about 67 percent of residents are Black. A decade ago, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the state of Michigan declared that the city was experiencing “severe financial stress” in the face of declining revenue, but its budget has recovered somewhat since then. 

Greene says the city has had success using bonds for small construction projects, but he believes that increasing tax revenue is a more sustainable way for the city to grow than tapping the bond market. A neighboring city called Highland Park, also majority Black, has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for most of this year as it struggles to keep up with rising water costs and payments to bondholders.

Flowers says that climate change will compound the impacts of discrimination in the municipal bond market. As worsening droughts and floods cause more damage to roads, water pipes, and sewer systems, towns will need even more money to maintain public services. If Black cities and towns can’t access the capital they need on the bond market, their infrastructure will decay even further.

“It limits their ability to cope with climate change, because they don’t have the resources,” said Flowers. “You have to have the resources to build resilience, and you have to have the resources to build the type of storm drainage systems that will allow communities not to flood each and every time.” 

Sondra Collins, a senior economist at the University Research Center for the State of Mississippi, said that given the persistence of racial discrimination in the municipal bond market, the best thing to achieve equity is to rethink the system as a whole. Dubrow’s firm has suggested that Congress could offer more direct grants for infrastructure improvements, or that the U.S. Treasury could backstop local bonds, which might assuage investor fears of default.

“I think it’s gonna take an overhaul,” said Collins. “You have to have a bunch of different people at the table with different experiences, different backgrounds. You’ve got to help think through all the options, all the ways that a rule might unintentionally hurt some groups.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why it’s more expensive for Black towns to borrow money on Aug 18, 2023.

After three years, a climate lawsuit brought by 16 young people against the state of Montana has come to a stunning close. On Monday, a Montana district court judge ruled that the state government’s energy permitting policies violated the youth plaintiffs’ right to a healthy environment, which is enshrined in Montana’s state constitution. 

The ruling did not compel the state to take specific actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or fossil fuel production. But climate law experts say the verdict marks a monumental step forward for an emerging — and rapidly growing — body of climate litigation. By directly linking the state’s energy policies and resulting greenhouse gas emissions to the harms endured by young people, the decision established a strong legal argument that could be a model for other climate cases.

“The core logic of this case is going to arise again and again,” Sandra Nichols Thiam, an attorney and the director of the Environmental Law Institute’s climate judiciary project, told Grist. 

Over more than a hundred pages, District Judge Kathy Seeley laid out an unusually detailed finding of the state’s wrongdoing and its impacts on the mental health, physical health, and cultural resources of the youth plaintiffs. Seeley zeroed in on a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act, the state law that governs permitting of major infrastructure and energy projects, that explicitly prevented state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emissions when evaluating projects. The court resoundingly concluded that by not accounting for the climate impacts of its actions, the state of Montana — a major producer of coal, oil, and gas — directly harmed the plaintiffs.

“The state’s actions exacerbate anthropogenic climate change and cause further harms to Montana’s environment and its citizens, especially its youth,” Seeley wrote. 

The ruling could especially bolster cases in states that, like Montana, enshrine environmental rights in their constitutions, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Currently, six states grant a constitutional right to a healthy environment, which protects access to clean air and water much as the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech and religion.

A climate lawsuit in Hawaiʻi going to trial next summer leans on the state’s constitutional right to a healthy environment. (The plaintiffs in both Held v. Montana and Nawahine v. the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation are represented by the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust.) Gerrard said Montana’s finding that excess greenhouse gas emissions qualify as a breach of that fundamental right could easily be cited to strengthen legal arguments in Hawai‘i’s and similar constitutional cases. Plaintiffs could also use the ruling as a model for clarifying a specific government’s role in worsening the climate crisis. 

“What’s really important that the judge did here is say that a state’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is globally important,” said Gail Evans, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity and lead counsel on a climate lawsuit in New Mexico, which does not recognize a constitutional right to a healthy environment. New Mexico’s case instead targets a clause in the state constitution that directs the government to control pollution and protect clean air and water. Plaintiffs in that case say their state government failed to fulfill its constitutional duty when it authorized record levels of oil production in the Permian Basin. 

But even in cases that don’t involve constitutional rights, the Held v. Montana decision could help provide a clear factual basis for establishing climate impacts and their harms, Thiam said. Evans noted that the judge’s affirmation of climate change’s effects on youth and Indigenous plaintiffs provides “a powerful example for other cases around the country.” Gerrard added that in particular, the case could be cited for its factual findings of the unique climate vulnerabilities of children and the mental health impacts of a degrading environment.

Yet the Held v. Montana verdict is not without its limitations. In their initial complaint, the plaintiffs asked the court to order the government to develop “a remedial plan” to reduce statewide emissions — a request the court dismissed. That’s a fairly predictable response, according to Gerrard, since courts typically evade questions that could be seen as more political or better handled by the legislature. 

By declaring the state’s policy unconstitutional, the court essentially required the state of Montana to consider climate change impacts when permitting energy projects. But the court did not force the state to take any further measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as permitting fewer fossil fuel projects. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Montana state attorney general has stated that the office plans to appeal the case to Montana’s Supreme Court.

Thiam noted that for any emerging realm of environmental litigation, establishing key facts and securing greater wins in court takes time. Climate litigation worldwide has more than doubled over the last five years, with most cases brought in the U.S, according to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Sabin Center on Climate Change Law. As the number of cases continues to grow, environmental law experts say we can expect to see more court victories.

“The ruling will be inspirational in the United States and globally,” said Gerrard. “We’ve seen that when there has been a successful decision, that can spark other cases around the world.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A climate lawsuit won big in Montana. What will it mean for other cases? on Aug 18, 2023.

David woke suddenly in the mid-afternoon. The 56-year-old chef could hear commotion outside and scrambled up from his nap, finding his roommates on the roof of their shared home, holding garden hoses and spraying water on a raging inferno licking closer by the minute. 

“No, brah, we got to go,” he yelled. He couldn’t believe they hadn’t woken him up, or the dog who had been lounging in his room, that they were attempting to hose down the fast-growing flames instead of getting away from them as fast as possible. “We got to go!” He ran into the street. It was Tuesday, Aug. 8, and in the town of Lahaina in West Maui, people were screaming and running as the sky rained embers. 

There was no warning from anyone about the fast-moving fire — no text, no officials knocking on his door, no sirens. 

“It was just, boom!” he said later. “You saw a fire and you’re going to die. That’s how fast it happened. Run for your life.”

That’s what he did. 

He jumped in a car with a panicked driver who drove the wrong direction, straight into the flames, where she got stuck in back-to-back traffic along the two-lane highway. David clutched the door handle to get out but it was so hot that it burned his fingers. The flames were 60 feet high and five feet away on either side of them. The cars in front of them were on fire. He yelled that they should run but he was the only one in the car who jumped out. Everyone else was frozen. He threw open the door and ran until the flames were far behind.

In the days since, he hasn’t been able to stay still. Every day he cries and keeps moving, sleeping along the road, by the park, at a friend’s and in a shelter. He can’t stop thinking about what he saw and questioning if he could’ve done more.

No one he was with that day survived — not his roommates, none of the other passengers in the car, not even the dog with whom he had been sleeping before waking up to a literal nightmare.

Just over a week later, the depth and breadth of the fire is still only just growing clear. Dozens of cadaver-sniffing dogs have been flown in from the continent to scour the fire zone. Less than half of the burned area has been searched, and with more than 100 dead, the fire is already the deadliest in modern U.S. history, yet 1,000 people are still missing. Family members are submitting their saliva to identify loved-ones’ remains, many of which are so badly burnt that they crumble when touched. It may not even be possible to identify or recover all bodies as some drowned at sea trying to escape while others succumbed to the flames.

But while the inferno happened shockingly fast for the people of Lahaina, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been building for years, like the dry grasses that caught alight and fueled the blaze. The enormity of the catastrophe speaks to both the challenges of preparing for the unimaginable and the incredibly high stakes of inaction.

Susanne Moser, a New England-based climate change resilience expert, says communities and governments are going to have to confront that reality as climate change makes disasters like Maui’s more likely to occur. It may be expensive, but if people don’t pay for it upfront, they may pay later in lives. 

“I think what’s happening now is that climate change is essentially coming back at us with its bill much more ferociously and rapidly and in a much more integrated, systematic sort of way than we have tried to understand it,” Moser said.

Lahaina, in Hawaiian, translates to “cruel sun.” The area was once home to 14 acres of wetland, including a large fishpond and a one-acre sandbar where high chiefs, and, later, Hawaiian royalty lived.

Katie Kamelamela, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who specializes in forest restoration and Indigenous practices, says the tragedy in Lahaina can trace its origins to the privatization of land in 1848, known as the Great Mahele, that eventually led to huge swaths of land sold to large agricultural companies.

Sugar became the dominant industry in Lahaina in the latter part of the 19th century, and to irrigate their fields, plantation owners diverted streams that once flowed from the mountains to the sea. Lahaina’s royal fishpond devolved into a stagnant marsh, and plantation owners filled it in with coral rubble. 

When Lahaina burned last week, the former fishpond had long been buried under a baseball field and parking lot.

The dominance of the sugar industry was cemented with the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. American and European businessmen backed the removal of Queen Liliʻuokalani and succeeded with the support of United States Marines and Navy sailors. The last of Mauiʻs sugar plantations closed in 2016, as tourism and real estate superseded agriculture as the state’s most lucrative land uses. 

Water is still a finite resource. Firefighters battling the Lahaina flames found themselves pulling from dry hydrants until they were eventually overwhelmed. A state official has come under scrutiny for delaying the release of water in West Maui, though it’s not clear whether his decision actually affected the hydrants. 

What is clear is that instead of a wetland cultivated by Indigenous caretakers or a sugar plantation irrigated for crops, the Lahaina that the fire met last week was dry and primed to burn. A third of Maui was in drought and a hurricane passing south of the islands whipped up 80 mph winds. Non-native grasslands had proliferated after the closing of the sugar and pineapple fields, but many thinly walled wooden plantation homes still stood.

Local wildfire experts like Clay Trauernicht for years had been sounding the alarm on the risks. When brush fires scorched 10,000 acres in Maui in 2019, Trauernicht wrote articles, testified in public hearings, and held meetings letting people know that fires were getting worse and Hawaiʻi needed to be prepared.

It was difficult to get people to care about fires when the main casualties were native forests and structures, Trauernicht told Grist this week.

It didn’t help that the neighborhoods most likely to burn statewide were communities like Oahu’s Waianae, drier west side communities with lower property values and more Native Hawaiian residents, rather than the lush, green wealthier enclaves on the windward coasts. 

What’s frustrating to Trauernicht is how easy it would have been to prevent non-native grasslands from running rampant. “Almost anything other than what we are doing — which is nothing — will reduce fire risk,” he said.

But much easier than pinpointing problematic land use decisions is condemning whoever lit the spark. And so far, many are blaming the Hawaiian Electric Company. No official cause has yet been determined, but at least four lawsuits have already been filed against the utility, sending its stock value plunging by $1 billion and casting doubt on the future of the company established in 1891 – two years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Attorneys point out that the utility recognized in a public filing last year that its risk of sparking a wildfire was “significant” and argue that the company was too slow to implement reforms. “The need to adapt to climate change is undeniable and urgent,” the company acknowledged in a public filing.

Planning document after planning document suggests Hawaiʻi officials both knew this tragedy could happen, and yet couldn’t imagine it actually happening. A 2020 hazard mitigation plan identified Lahaina as a high risk area for wildfires. Maui’s draft climate change action plan notes that wildfire burn areas quadrupled in the last century. But in a state report on emergency planning, officials said wildfires were considered a “low risk” to human life. 

The more pressing concerns were hurricanes or tsunamis, so much so that although the state had invested in a state-of-the-art siren system — “the largest single integrated public safety outdoor siren warning system in the world” — local emergency officials didn’t turn it on even after learning that firefighters were being overwhelmed by the blaze.

On Wednesday, Herman Andaya, then Maui’s top emergency management official, defended that call, saying the system would not have saved lives because people would not have heard the sirens if they were indoors, and that the sirens may have prompted people to flee inland, toward the fire, as the blaring sound is intended to push people to find higher ground. Andaya resigned Thursday.

Instead, county officials sent out emergency phone and social media alerts – alerts that many, like David, never received.

The next day, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke told news media that officials hadn’t anticipated that a hurricane that never made landfall on the islands could have wrought such destruction. But five years before Lahaina’s historic Front Street was incinerated — almost to the date — the periphery of another hurricane was stirring up strong winds on Maui, fueling another conflagration that was stopped just yards away from homes.

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“There was a very, very strong possibility that the entire Lahaina town could have gone up in flames yesterday,” then-Mayor Alan Arakawa told a local news crew as rain poured down behind him on Aug. 26, 2018. The mayor said he’d been on the phone with federal emergency officials trying to figure out how to evacuate 20,000 people in the Lahaina area if needed. 

There was no guarantee such an evacuation was even possible. “If the hurricane had generated the kinds of winds and surf that we had been anticipating — 15 to 20 plus feet — it would’ve buried Honoapiʻilani Highway and we would not have had access in and out of Lahaina,” he said. 

Burned-out cars now line that same two-lane highway where people abandoned them in desperation or were caught by the roaring flames.

One cruel irony is Hawaiʻi has been a national leader in climate change preparedness. While states like Montana have banned agencies from considering climate change in their decisions, Hawaiʻi was the first state to set a 100% renewable energy goal, the first to declare a climate emergency, funding climate commissions and offices and pledging to go net-carbon neutral by 2045.

But what local officials may have overlooked was the incredible risk of what scientists call compound hazards, the intersection of multiple disasters — such as how hurricane-fueled winds can combine with a brush fire to erase an entire town. 

Even Trauernicht, the state’s Cassandra, describes what happened last week as “unimaginable.” Moser from New England says she hears that word over and over again when she works with emergency preparedness officials in the wake of a disaster. 

“The strong takeaway for me is that if you want to get prepared, you have to open the taboo, the unimaginable, to think about it,” said Moser. “Everybody should be thinking about multiple system failures at the same time and multiple hazards coinciding because that’s the kind of world that we live in.”

What has been heartening to her is seeing how on Maui, Native Hawaiians and other locals have come together to help one another emerge from the wreckage. She’s much more concerned about places where there’s not as much social cohesion, where people may go hungry longer without concerned neighbors knocking on their doors. 

But nothing can erase from David’s memory the scenes he keeps replaying over and over. After he ran from the car, he joined a caravan of survivors that walked south for miles until they hit the next town of Olowalu. A friend of his eventually picked him up, and they went to Costco where they drank alcohol, covered in soot, trying to comprehend what had just happened. 

He also replays the scenes of the Lahaina he knew. The waves and the harbor and the boats and the ocean. The chickens and birds he passed when riding his bike down Front Street to make loco moco and pancakes for patrons at the cafe where he worked.

“It was just the most beautiful place you’ve ever been,” he said. “All of a sudden it looks like literally a nuclear bomb went off.” 

He would give anything to go back. 

Grist climate solutions writer Gabriela Aoun Angueira contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Locals have been sounding the alarm for years about Lahaina wildfire risk on Aug 17, 2023.