Volunteers set to return to Kahoolawe

KIRC hopes to resume planting after fire, pandemic cause delays

After a large brush fire that burned about a quarter of the island and a pandemic that postponed planting efforts, Kahoolawe will be welcoming back its first group of volunteers this month.

Mike Nahoopii, executive director of the Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission, said that staff have been preparing base camp to meet social distancing requirements and will be hosting a group of about seven employees from the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea on Sept. 18.

"We spent the last couple months revamping the camp and installing new COVID procedures, and we did a practice run last month in August just before the interisland quarantine," Nahoopii said.

He explained that KIRC will only be taking over groups of five to eight and only from Maui. After the Four Seasons staff, the Sierra Club Maui Group is also slated to make a trip to the island.

"We just need to get that going because the planting season is coming up, and we can't lose any more of the planting season," Nahoopii said.

The small organization that oversees restoration of Kahoolawe has faced a litany of challenges over the past several months.

On the morning of Feb. 24, a brush fire broke out on the southwest end of the island. Fire crews were unable to fight the blaze because of the dangers posed by unexploded ordnance left by the U.S. military, and over the course of a week, the fire burned nearly 9,000 acres.

While it spared KIRC's base camp and photovoltaic field, it did destroy a storage facility; planting equipment that included a large chipper, hand tools, chainsaws and weedwhackers; two jet skis, three Polaris vehicles; four 2,000-gallon water tanks; and old vehicles that KIRC used for scrap parts. All told, the damage was around $500,000, Nahoopii said.

In the wake of the fire, state lawmakers introduced emergency measures to help KIRC restore what it lost. But when the state Legislature was suspended and business and travel began shutting down in March and April, KIRC's hopes for funding went out the window.

For the most part, the organization has been "just surviving with what we got right now," Nahoopii said. They still have some trucks and have bought new equipment but haven't replaced everything they've lost.

"We're just doing smaller-scale plantings right now, and it's more labor intensive but we're still moving forward," he said.

The fire also wiped out many of the invasive grasses that sprouted up waist high after goats were eradicated from the island in the 1990s. Nahoopii said KIRC staff have been trying to get native plants growing in place of the grass because they're more "fire hardy," but the invasive grasses are coming back and have a tendency to "really choke out everything else."

"One good thing is that we don't think we're going to have a major fire for a while because it burned so much of the fuel that it'll take years before the fuel builds up again," Nahoopii said.

He said that restoration and native planting efforts will continue as they previously did, though on a smaller scale and with people social distancing and wearing masks.

The base camp has been set up to accommodate smaller, safely distanced groups. The two huts at base camp have more than 50 beds in total, but KIRC is limiting capacity to five people in one hut and eight in the other. Tables in the dining hall have been spread out, and meals will be plated by staff instead of self-serve. Washing and hand sanitizing stations have also been installed.

Volunteers must also fill out the interisland travel form and have their temperatures checked before boarding the boat to Kahoolawe. Groups typically stay four days.

"We won't be able to plant as much. That's going to be the hard part," Nahoopii said. "We have to keep social distancing and we have to keep people apart. But I think the biggest thing that's going to happen is the funding is going to start dwindling. . . . So we'll have to see how we can survive in the next few years."

He said KIRC is looking at federal grants as well as private donations and benefactors.

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.