COLORADO, USA — In an interview with CNN this week, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said the fire that burned through a historic town on the island of Maui reminded her a lot of Colorado’s most destructive wildfire on record.
“Just the devastation itself is certainly going to bring challenges,” Chriswell said. “It reminds me very much of the fire that we saw in Boulder Colorado at the end of 2021 where an entire community was burned to the ground spread by excessive winds. Like we're seeing from this fire."
The similarities weren’t lost on Einar Jensen, risk reduction specialist with Evergreen Fire Rescue.
“[The Marshall Fire] was a grass fire that moved into an urban suburban area, because it was powered, energized, basically, by hurricane force winds,” Jensen said. “In the case of Maui, we have an actual hurricane driving these winds that are pushing these wildfires into these populated areas on the in Maui.”
Colorado is also no stranger to the kind of downsloping windstorm Maui experienced which drove the fire there. Colorado Assistant State Climatologist Becky Bolinger said the wind pattern in Hawaii moves east to west, which means the western side of the islands tend to have a similar climate to Colorado’s front range.
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“I think it's kind of surprising to some people that there are areas of Hawaii, that might look a lot more like our landscape on the Front Range, urban corridor and towards the eastern plains, as we see on the west side, have a lot of the Hawaiian Islands,” Bolinger said.
Bolinger said the area in the fire zone had also experienced drought leading up to the fire.
“They've been a bit below average for the last couple of months,” she said. “So that has resulted in them seeing increases on the U.S. Drought Monitor.”
But Bolinger said the prolonged abnormally dry conditions that fueled Colorado’s Marshall Fire were different.
Also different, according to Jensen, is the infrastructure of most buildings on the Hawaiian Islands, which are built to withstand natural disasters, but not necessarily wildfires.
“We’re familiar with living in a wildfire prone ecosystem, we tend to build homes, out of more fire resistant materials, we have separation between homes,” Jensen said. “In Hawaii, it's different. They build their homes based on other natural hazards like hurricanes, like big rain.”
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