That said,many things can spark a fire in the right conditions,including backfiring cars and trucks dragging chains along a road.
Sensors that monitor power flow into households detected a major grid fault just after 11.38pm local time on August 7,about 20 minutes before a fire was first reported in Maui,followed by dozens of faults overnight,said Bob Marshall,chief executive officer of Whisker Labs.
The company’s plug-in household devices determine whether a fault is taking place on utility equipment through the magnitude of voltage swings. In Maui,the strongest readings came around Lahaina.
While Marshall cautioned that it’s not clear whether the faults were the ignition sources,he said that fires need a spark and there is “clear data showing dozens of major grid faults in the area of the fires and around the start times of the fires”.
There was no reported lightning at the time and it’s unlikely people were camping with high winds and a red flag warning,he added.
Loading
Michael Wara,a wildfire expert who is director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University,said there is “no question” that the utility should have cut power to reduce wildfire risk with the forecast of gusty winds.
The controversial practice is now used by utilities in California,Nevada and Oregon after power lines sparked catastrophic fires during dry windstorms in California.
“We had a situation here with very high winds,very high heat,” said James Frantz,whose firm,Frantz Law Group,is looking at power lines as a culprit and has been signing up residents and businesses in Maui who lost their homes.
“And all those factors call for de-energising those lines when that event occurs. They did not do that and they had the power to do it.”
Frantz Law Group has an office in Honolulu and is working with a local law firm on the investigation.
Hawaii Electric doesn’t have a formal power shutoff program for fire risk,Pai said.
“Preemptive,short-notice power shutoffs have to be coordinated with first responders and in Lahaina,electricity powers the pumps that provide the water needed for firefighting,” Pai said. The utility has a “robust wildfire mitigation and grid resiliency program that includes vegetation management,grid hardening investments and regular inspection of our assets,” he added.
The blaze that razed Lahaina damaged or destroyed 2207 structures,the majority of them residential,with an estimated capital cost of approximately $US5.5 billion ($8.5 billion),according to a damage assessment released Saturday by the Pacific Disaster Centre and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Plaintiff lawyers often dispatch representatives of their offices to sign up clients in the wake of wildfire disasters. The plaintiff law firms now working in Maui represented fire victims in a $US13.5 billion settlement with PG&E,which was driven into bankruptcy in 2019 after its utility equipment sparked some of the deadliest wildfires in California history.
Attorney Gerald Singleton said his group,Singleton Schreiber,was flying investigators to Maui this weekend to look into witness accounts of falling power lines and then fires starting,although an actual cause has yet to be determined.
“This wasn’t something they couldn’t have predicted,” Singleton said of the high winds taking down lines. “It’s hard to understand why more precautions weren’t taken.”
If there is a link to power lines,Hawaiian Electric will have to be shown to be negligent or that it could have reasonably prevented a loss,a higher legal standard than the one applied to utilities in California,according to a note Friday by Guggenheim Securities.
Bloomberg
Get a note directly from our foreigncorrespondentson what’s making headlines around the world.Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.