Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui?
All over Maui, golf courses glisten emerald green, hotels manage to fill their pools and corporations stockpile water to sell to luxury estates. And yet, when it came time to fight the fires, some hoses ran dry. Why?
The reason is the long-running battle over west Maui’s most precious natural resource: water. That’s why, on Tuesday 8 August, when Tereari ځ i Chandler-ځ Īao was fleeing the fires in Lahaina, she grabbed a bag of clothes, some food – and something a little unconventional: a box filled with water use permit applications.
Despite her personal calamity, Tereari ځ i, a grassroots attorney, already knew that the fight for Maui’s future was about to intensify, and at its heart would not be fire, but another element entirely: water. Specifically, the water rights of Native Hawaiians, rights that a long parade of plantations, real estate developers, and luxury resorts have been stifling for nearly two centuries. As the flames approached, Tereari ځ i feared that, under cover of emergency, those large players might finally get their chance to grab west Maui’s water for good.
She also knew something else: that the only force with a hope of stopping that theft would be organized grassroots communities – even though those very communities were already stretched to breaking point saving lives and searching for lost loved ones.
Disaster capitalism – the well-worn tactic of exploiting moments of extreme collective trauma to rapidly push through unpopular laws that benefit a small elite – relies on this cruel dynamic. As Lee Cataluna, an Indigenous Maui-born journalist, observed recently, the people on the frontlines of disaster are necessarily focused on “survival stuff. Announcements. Services. Instructions. Help. Go here to get gas. Look at this list to see if your husband’s name is there” – not on coercive real estate deals or backroom policy moves. Which is exactly why the tactic too often succeeds.
Disaster capitalism has taken many forms in different contexts. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there was an immediate move to replace public schools with charter schools, and to bulldoze public housing projects to make way for gentrifying townhouses. In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017, the public schools were once again under siege, and there was a push to privatize the electricity grid before the storm had made landfall. In Thailand and Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, valuable beachfront land, previously stewarded by smallscale fishers and farmers, was seized by real estate developers while their rightful occupants were stuck in evacuation camps.
It’s always a little different, which is why some Native Hawaiians have taken to calling their unique version by a slightly different term: plantation disaster capitalism. It’s a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents who have been cold-calling Lahaina residents who have lost everything to the fire and prodding them to sell their ancestral lands rather than wait for compensation. But it also places these moves inside the long and ongoing history of settler colonial resource theft and trickery, making clear that while disaster capitalism might have some modern disguises, it’s a very old tactic. A tactic that Native Hawaiians have a great deal of experience resisting.
Which brings us back to what was in that box that Tereari ځ i rescued, and the place of water in this fateful moment. For over a century, water across Maui Komohana, the western region of the island, has been extracted to benefit outside interests: first large sugar plantations and, more recently, their corporate successors. The companies – including West Maui Land
Co (WML) and its subsidiaries, as well as Kaanapali Land Management and Maui Land & Pineapple Inc – have devoured the island’s natural resources to develop McMansions, colonial-style subdivisions, luxury resorts and golf courses where cane and pineapple once grew.
This historical and modern plantation economy has taken a tremendous toll on water in particular, draining Indigenous ecologies of their natural moisture. Lahaina, once known as the Venice of the Pacific, has been transformed into a parched desert, which is part of what has made it so vulnerable to fire. Plantation skimming wells dried up Mokuhinia, an at least 15-acre freshwater fishpond, that nourished Moku ځ ula, an island within the pond that was the seat of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the early 1900s, the plantation filled Mokuhinia with dirt, and eventually a baseball field and parking lot appeared over the sacred site.
Even long after most of those original plantations closed, the infrastructure and dynamics of water theft remained. Today, many Native Hawaiian communities, who have lived in Maui Komohana since time immemorial, remain cut off from water for their basic needs, including drinking, laundry and traditional crop irrigation. For instance, Lauren Palakiko, whose family has resided in Kaua ځ ula for centuries and has priority water rights under the law, last year testified at a state water commission hearing that she had to bathe her baby in a bucket because not enough water reached her home. That’s because the streams that once flowed through their valley are diverted for luxury subdivisions, which often occupy plantationcontrolled lands.
It’s a situation that has left many Native families with no access to county water lines (which also means no fire hydrants) as well as no paved roads to escape the fires that increasingly threaten their homes and lives. For example, the Native Hawaiian families of Kaua ځ ula valley, which flanks Lahaina, are beholden to Launiupoko Irrigation Co (LIC), a subsidiary of WML, because LIC owns the valley’s plantation-era water system. It takes nearly all of Kaua ځ ula Stream to service affluent estates in a neighboring valley and shuts off water completely to the Kaua ځ ula families’ homes when it alleges that there is not enough water to both sell to its customers and comply with the water commission’s stream protection standard.
The climate emergency has only deepened these tensions, worsening droughts and, as the world now knows, creating conditions ripe for wildfires. Over the last five years, fires have ravaged Kaua ځ ula valley, intensifying the wars over who has the right to access scarce water, including for critical firefighting uses.
In this high-stakes context, growing numbers of Native Hawaiian communities have organized to assert their water rights, which are supposed to have the highest protection under