Re: What?s driving Maui?s devastating fires, and how climate change is fueling those conditions

Then Hawaii is full of invasives [ ecosystem type not the people ]: >

> "Clay Trauernicht, a fire scientist at the University of Hawaii, said the w= > et season can spur plants like Guinea grass, a nonnative, invasive species = > found across parts of Maui, to grow as quickly as 6 inches (15 centimeters)= > a day and reach up to 10 feet (3 meters) tall. When it dries out, it creat= > es a tinderbox that=E2=80=99s ripe for wildfire. >

And there have been wildfires on the Hawaiian Islands before. The records are incomplete but prior to 2000 The average wildfire area burned was 3200 acres on Maui.

In 2003 there were 8000 acres burned in Maui. The latest 2023 fires burned 11,000.

There were fires after all...perhaps old newspapers can be scoured for records. The mid 1930s is always useful for comparisons with their massive heat waves, and the droughts of that period.

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The PDF from 2014 is interesting reading...

"For example, the degree of spatial colocation between fire ignitions and road networks was surprising..."

"The extent to which fires in Hawaii can be analyzed in a cohesive fire regime or regimes (Agee 1993) has never been ascertained, and wildfire in Hawaii outside of research on the grass-fire cycle (for example, by D?Antonio and others 2011) as a relevant landscape disturbance is rarely mentioned in the scholarly literature."

As development occurs the risk of fire increases and the attendant tragedies.

John :-#(#

Reply to
John Robertson
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No, that isn't surprising at all. A large number of people have a habit of throwing out refuse through the car window without second thought. That includes burning cigarette butts.

Try taking a hike along a road sometime. You'll be shocked by the quantity of litter on the roadside.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
jeroen

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