Hawaii lawmakers say Congress should replenish disaster relief fund to help Maui

HONOLULU -- Hawaii's congressional representatives on Wednesday said the nation’s disaster relief fund needs to be replenished so the U.S. government can continue to help survivors of Maui’s deadly wildfires and other disasters around the country.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Case called on Congress to appropriate $20.9 billion to the fund. Case, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, said he hopes Congress will allocate the funding by the Sept. 30 end of the current fiscal year.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency uses the fund to help communities after hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters. Congress most recently added to the disaster relief fund when it appropriated $16 billion last September.

“We’ve had a lot of disasters, not just Maui — across the country. We’ve had a lot of draws on that," Case said at a field hearing of a House congressional oversight and accountability subcommittee.

The fund was “now exhausted and we’re down to the last limits of it,” Case said, noting the depleted balance prompted FEMA on Aug. 7 to began using the fund to address immediate needs only.

Bob Fenton, the administrator for the FEMA region that includes Hawaii, said that means the agency was prioritizing life saving and life-sustaining disaster response and was not putting money toward longer-term work.

“It delays long-term recovery. It delays building, rebuilding of infrastructure,” Fenton told the field hearing, which was held in Lahaina and livestreamed online.

The agency currently has funds to help people with housing and other immediate needs, but Fenton said: “That, too, is starting to be threatened.”

The hearing was held more than a year after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century killed at least 102 people and displaced 12,000 people on Aug. 8, 2023.

FEMA has so far spent more than $3 billion on Lahaina recovery, Fenton said.

Separately, a new report on the fire detailed steps communities can take to reduce the likelihood that grassland wildfires will turn into urban conflagrations like the one that engulfed Lahaina.

The report by a nonprofit scientific research group backed by insurance companies found steps like establishing fuel breaks, using fire-resistant building materials and reducing flammable connections between homes such as wooden fences can help prevent the spread of flames.

The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety released the executive summary of the report Wednesday.

“We can start by hardening homes on the edge of the community,” said Faraz Hedayati, the institute’s lead researcher and report author. That will help ensure that a fast-moving grass fire never gets the opportunity to become an ember-driven fire, as happened in Lahaina, Hedayati said.

Grass fires grow quickly but typically only send embers a few feet in the air and a short distance along the ground, Hedayati said. Burning buildings, however, create large embers with a lot of buoyancy that can travel long distances, he said.

It was building embers, combined with high winds that were buffeting Maui the day of the fire, that allowed the flames in Lahaina to spread in all directions, according to the report. The embers started new spot fires throughout the town. The winds lengthened the flames — allowing them to extend more than 20 feet (6.1 meters) at times — and bent them toward the ground, where they could ignite vehicles, landscaping and other flammable material.

More than 2,100 structures were destroyed in Lahaina, with reconstruction costs estimated at about $5.5 billion according to the report. Still, some homes were left mostly or partly unburned in the midst of the devastation. The researchers used those homes as case studies, examining factors that helped to protect the structures.

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Boone reported from Boise, Idaho.