Rising From the Ashes

A power line fell early on the morning of Aug. 8, 2023, sparking a fire in overgrown brush near the edge of the historic town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Crews responded and put the fire out, or so they thought. Later it flared back up and pressure gradient-driven winds from nearby Hurricane Dora pushed the wildfire down toward the sea, leaving the town of Lahaina devastated as a result. As if the fire damage alone was not bad enough, 102 people tragically perished in the conflagration, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in over 100 years.

Since that day, clean-up and rebuilding efforts have been steadily underway. FEMA has led the over-excavation and clean-up work, and a variety of federal, state, and local funds have helped pay for the recovery.

As anyone who comes in to survey after a disaster like this probably knows, one thing that is typically not subject to special funding or set asides, is the boundary surveying needed to get the rebuild started. For residential rebuilds, the foundation typically needs ties to front lot corners and if the clean-up work destroyed them, or if they were never there in the first place, then the homeowner will be paying for a survey before anything else can take place. And that brings us to an amazing development in Lahaina.

According to the Island News, October 22, 2024 edition, a Lahaina Homeowner Recovery Program (LHRP) has been established, and with the help of a 3 million dollar grant from the Maui Strong Fund of the Hawai’i Community Foundation, this recovery program is offering no-cost lot surveys for any Lahaina homeowners who lived in their homes before the wildfire devastated the town. That’s right – NO COST!

This is significant, (and tremendous!) for a variety of reasons but the one that might stick out for readers of this magazine is that finally, in some small way, Surveying has been recognized as a critical part of a post-disaster rebuilding effort. While FEMA routinely provides money and other forms of assistance to victims in the wake of natural disasters, they do not make money available, per se, for Surveying efforts. And neither do any states have any specific policies or funds to make such an important gesture of assistance to the hurting public. In Lahaina, a dedicated group has found a way around this problem by securing their own funding source. This program appears to have been envisioned, created, and implemented without the input or assistance of the Maui County Surveyor, the State of Hawai’i, or the Hawai’i Land Surveyor Association. That makes this program unique. So, how did it come about?

American Surveyor decided to find out as much as we could about this program and share that information with our readers. We started with a little research. We checked out the LHRP website, identified their director and sent in a blind email requesting an interview. Jeff Gilbreath, the Director of the Lahaina Homeowner Recovery Program responded with an email that afternoon and scheduled a half hour Zoom meeting for later in the week. In the meantime, American Surveyor chatted with members of the Hawai’i Land Surveyor Association like Joanne Wlliamson, the NSPS Director for Hawai’i, plus HLSA Legislative Liaison Meyer Cummins from the State of Hawai’i Survey Office and Craig Clouet, Data Scientist (GIS) with the Office of Governor State of Hawai’i and formulated some questions. Their concerns were simple – is this program on the up and up? It would seem that the Island News article referred to previously had taken them by surprise, too. One concern this writer had was how to not come off sounding like I was fishing for a work opportunity. The last thing Maui needs right now is a bunch of carpetbaggers.

First, we took a look at available photography of the clean-up process, which revealed that FEMA, the agency that is both overseeing and performing the dirty work, has taken great care while scraping and over-excavating the burned properties, to stay away from the sidelines of the most of the lots, meaning many monuments may actually be recoverable. (Editor’s note: this was not the case in the town of Paradise, California where the cleanup destroyed many, many lot corners.) It appears that various representatives from the State of Hawai’i, had at least enough influence with FEMA to engender some caution on the agency’s part with respect to lot cleanup. It is no mean feat influencing FEMA, so that work behind the scenes by State representatives should be appreciated.

Next up we engaged Jeff Gilbreath in a Zoom meeting and asked a few questions. He and his staff are pretty busy, as you might imagine, so American Surveyor felt privileged that he would take the time to talk to us. The “interview” quickly turned into more of a friendly conversation causing a certain writer to fail to take detailed notes until afterwards, therefore juicy quotes will be in short supply. Paraphrasing, intended to explain how this program came about, is used instead. (Writer’s note: Sorry about that, I’m not a journalist, I’m a surveyor with a word processor.)

American Surveyor

So Jeff, I’d love to know more about how this program came about. Someone actually realizing that Surveying can be a cost hurdle for rebuilders is a new experience for me – this wasn’t the case in Paradise or Santa Rosa or other California wildfire rebuilding efforts that I am familiar with.

JG: The Recovery Program team recognized the need after one event in particular drove home the need for this program – a rebuilding family initially paid for a survey only to have the pins destroyed when utility work was done after the survey.

The Program team reached out to the Lahaina Homeowner Recovery Foundation and made a case for a grant for Survey funds and received a generous amount. We then made contact with the Maui Survey community and got assistance in putting together an RFP along with some simple policies to help keep the cost of a survey down, such as banking the surveys until the surveyor can take care of 8 to 10 lots at one time. The team is trying to focus on having the bulk of the work done by local Maui surveyors and we’ll ask for

help from surveyors on the other islands if there ends up with a backlog. The team manages the requests for surveys and will assign blocks of surveys to the various consultants as they come in.

AS: Was FEMA or the State involved or Maui County or was this purely developed by you guys?

JG: No help from FEMA or State – money has mostly come from donations locally and around the world. Community rebuilding efforts like this are better done within the community – with local support, local money, and local workers, in this case Surveyors.

AS: Do you know if the surveys, which sound like they will be done in groups of 10 or so, in order to keep the actual costs down, will be public record once they are completed?¹

JG: There is an agreement to make the data available to each surveyor from each survey. Not the same as recording but at least publicly available.

AS: How can this program be repeated in other disasters, elsewhere?

JG: The program was established with funds from the local community foundation. When our team launched the program and started assessing homeowners impacted by the fire, it was clear that each homeowner had unique needs, but shared one need regardless of their financial situation: a lot survey. With the average cost for a survey at $6,000 and folks paying for the surveys before their lots were ready, we approached the Hawaii Community Foundation to fund a comprehensive effort to get this done. To repeat this program in other disaster areas, our organization would recommend this blueprint be shared with local community foundations. They typically receive the majority of donations after a disaster, are connected to the local community, and are flexible enough to move dollars out the door faster than government agencies. This would allow for action to be taken before families pay out for these costs, even if there are no organizations like HCL doing needs assessments of impacted homeowners. While foundations can move faster to fund this effort, Federal funding for this effort would ensure this work takes place in the event the local community foundation is unable to do so.

Conclusion

This wildly innovative and desperately needed program, which is completely community-driven and funded from donations taken in from around the world, can serve as a wakeup call to NSPS and to our legislators that FEMA, when stepping in to assist with a disaster, should establish a policy to allow for funds to be made explicitly available for the Surveys that everyone knows need to be completed before rebuilding can begin. NSPS took a big step in 2024 at their Day on the Hill event by including post-disaster survey funding as one of their three talking points. Hopefully, this program will allow them to strengthen that language even more and take it with them to the 2025 Lobby Day. And nothing is stopping any of you from calling your representative to talk about this topic!

In the meantime, Jeff Gilbreath and his staff are owed a huge debt of gratitude by the citizens of Lahaina!

Aloha!

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1. ¹ Author’s note: there is no law in Hawai’i requiring surveys to be recorded. Similarly, there is no requirement for corners set by a surveyor to be capped or tagged. These are two factors that might make resurveying Lahaina from the ground up more difficult or challenging. As a strategy for the impending Lahaina surveys, the Maui Director of Public Works has approved a local record of survey requirement, which I am confident will be beneficial to the resurveying and rebuilding efforts. In the bigger picture, the author hopes that our Hawai’i Surveying brothers and sisters will consider supporting some legislative efforts to enact recording laws in the future, thereby making such large-scale retracement easier in the aftermath of future disasters.