By State › Hawaii

Hawaii: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Hawaii exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Hawaii go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 2023 Lahaina wildfire: the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century

On August 8, 2023, wind-driven fires fueled by dry invasive grasses tore through the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, killing at least 100-102 people and destroying more than 2,200 structures, roughly 81% of the town. It became the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than 100 years and Hawaii’s second-costliest disaster on record, behind only Hurricane Iniki in 1992. Unlike California and Oregon’s forest-fire case studies, Lahaina’s fire moved through a dense historic town built largely of wood, with limited evacuation routes, a combination that turned a fast-moving grass fire into a mass-casualty event. See the Risks page for the full data.

The 2018 Kilauea eruption: a hazard type new to this site

Beginning May 3, 2018, Kilauea’s lower East Rift Zone erupted for months, sending lava flows across the Puna District that destroyed 723 structures, cut 50 kilometers of public roads, and forced roughly 3,000 residents to evacuate. This is the first volcanic hazard covered anywhere on this site, and it behaves differently from every other disaster type covered here: lava flows are slow enough that death tolls are typically low, but they permanently and irreversibly destroy everything in their path, land included, in a way a flood or fire’s damaged structures can still be rebuilt on. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Hawaii: evacuation planning matters even more than usual given how few routes exist off many parts of the islands, as Lahaina’s fire demonstrated tragically, and residents on the Big Island near active rift zones face a genuinely different kind of long-term risk, permanent land loss, that this manual’s disaster-recovery guidance doesn’t fully address since most other hazards covered leave the underlying land intact.

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