House Standing Committee on Public Safety

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, August 18, 2025 here at the State Capitol, 2:00pm in the Committee on Public Safety. My name is Della Belatti. I'm the Chair of the House Committee on Public Safety and we have a robust discussion in front of us today as we reflect on the two year anniversary of the Maui Wildfires.

I'm going to give an opportunity for my Members to introduce themselves. Starting first to my right and then ending with Representative Shimizu. Go ahead.

Thank you very much. Kim Koko Iwamoto representing District 25 Ala. Moana Konkongo in downtown Honolulu. Thank you so much for joining us. Marcasha Misanolu, Gardner Shimizu for district 32.

Thank you to Members as well as the public who are tuning in and who are here in the room with us.

We are in full swing of interim and so this Committee is going to be keeping itself busy as we prepare for the next legislative session for special session to make sure that we're informed about all of the things that we need to in this Committee which has jurisdiction over corrections, military affairs, but as related to this issue, emergency preparedness, recovery and disaster preparedness.

So as I stated, the purpose of this briefing is to receive information about the Maui Wildfires in response to the two year anniversary of those wildfires.

We have with us groups that have been working in community that have been helping us track the recovery of the community and are helping us build out what our responses are going to be for future disasters. As we know that this is something that we have to continue to prepare for and plan for.

So first up we have from the University Drs. Ruben Juarez, Dr. Alika Mauna Kea and Dr. Christopher Knightsbridge who are all part of the Maui Wildfire Exposure study.

I'm going to turn it over to them so that they can start and then Members, we will have questions at the end of their presentation before we move to the next presenters. Dr. Mauna Kea.

Aloha. Mahalo for having us. Thank you Representative Belatti for the invitation and for being a leader on this, both on the support for the fires but also for the wildfire exposure study and registry a couple of years ago. As you will see, we've been making great progress documenting the need and linking participant to services Maui West.

So I don't need to present this slide but we know that the Maui wildfires is the worst natural disaster in the State of Hawaii and the deadliest wildfire in us in over a century. Next. So Mawas began as a grassroots academic community partnership to track the health and social impacts of the wildfire.

We are based at the Lahaina Comprehensive Health center and the Department of Health TB Clinic in Wailuku, working directly with impacted residents to provide free health screenings, connect participants to services and deliver real time data to decision makers. Next, we provide comprehensive health and social assessments to include housing stability, employment, exposure, social support, health behaviors.

We also collect biomedical samples that include urine, saliva, blood to measure stress response, inflammation, environmental toxicants and we also provide a free health exam including lung health, cardiovascular health, metabolic health. At the end of the study they get to be linked with support including with Dr. Neisbridge here.

Actually next today we have enrolled over 2000 adults and Keiki with full health screenings making it the most comprehensive and ethnically diverse study ever done in the State of Hawaii. This is actually also one of the largest in the nation after a disaster.

Next about a year ago we published the first report, we send that to you guys too where we show elevated rates of mental and physical health conditions, persistent barriers to access healthcare and services, widespread housing instability and unemployment, and concerning level of exposure and heavy metals and environmental toxicants.

Next this year we saw some small but measurable improvements from last year, especially in mental health for adults as well as in self rated health. So basically it's getting better for adults. We also saw the uninsured rate cut in half at third. Sorry.

Thanks to actually some great programs that came up, including a Kaiser charitable insurance program that was offered to basically anyone who couldn't get insurance to a wildfire. What is new in this report we saw elevated rates of mental and physical health conditions for Keiki. This is the first time ever done in a wildfire setting in the nation.

Continuing on from that, I'm not going to have time to go over all the details on the data, but we reported about half of participants had worsening health since the fires. About 40% had direct or frequent fire exposures.

Those that were more exposed than others had a higher rate of common symptoms associated with the fires that are listed on this slide. There was also a pretty heavy burden of chronic disease conditions already emerging. About 43% adults reported hypertension, 20% with diabetes, high cholesterol, as well as heart disease. Respiratory health was also a problem.

What 25% adults showed low spirometry readouts from our measurements indicating lung obstruction and other conditions that might have emerged since the fires and other notable conditions listed here. About 12% reported receiving a new diagnosis since the fires or emerging worsening conditions of their preexisting condition.

We also found from other studies where we're able to actually show now that it's linked to the fires because we can stratify individuals that are most exposed.

From self reports combined with geospatial data about where they were during that time and also the time points that we've collected as part of the study, we're able to discern those that were more impacted, more acutely impacted by high exposures, had different experiences in recovery, about 20 more days of health issues they experienced over the course of the year during recovery, nine times higher chances of having depression, seven times higher of having respiratory symptoms and other issues here, including some of the mental health components that we're going to talk about.

The other concerning things that we are monitoring is the exposures to chemical toxins that might have been mobilized as a result of the fire. We know a lot of the ash and smoke contained toxic chemicals from just the buildings, the cars, things that burned down.

But in addition to that, of course, our state has a high cluster of industrial plantation era spread out, especially on Maui, that contains heavy metals and other toxins that's in the soil itself that could have been mobilized during the fires itself. We're concerned about potential acute exposures, but also potential long term RE exposures.

Collecting data from the specimens that we collected from participants, we were able to run a urine assessment of heavy metals in particular because that was first implicated by the Department of Health in the soil and in the ash left from the aftermath of the fires at high levels.

We were in particular focused on heavy metal concentrations in the urine. From participants in the study, we were able to actually screen 1,236 adult individuals. Urine samples collected from 612 months after the fires to learn about what types of concentrations they might have in terms of the heavy metals that we screened.

Working with a Columbia University lab that's focused solely on metal heavy metals analysis. These were the experts in the area. They do the same analysis for other disasters such as the LA wildfires recently as well as from 911.

The results here are clear that residents within the burn zones that had that immediate early acute exposures tend to have a very different signature of heavy metals. Even 612 months after the fires and those on the perimeter, those are outside and we can actually stratify the data that way. This is what this is showing.

In addition to that, we also see that the higher levels of heavy metals from the urine samples associates with displacement frequent ash RE exposures as well as the early recruitment period.

Those that were coming in as early as when we recruited individuals in the study, we tended to see a higher concentrations of those heavy metals than later in the study. That suggests that we can identify a particular wildfire specific metal fingerprint that we're still working on.

And that also contributes to potential evidence of ongoing re exposures even 12 months after the fires. A lot of this we're trying to understand how much of it associates with some of the health conditions that are popping up. This is just one example.

Showing that nickel levels in the urine samples negatively associate with lung function shows that these heavy metals connect with poor lung health. We're still again trying to understand how that might play out in the course of recovery.

In response to that, and because we're concerned about that issue, we can see that about 20% of our participants have higher than what you would expect levels of heavy metals 612 months after the fires. These health risks are real.

We're already showing links to respiratory issues like I mentioned, but also we know that these chemical toxins can have long term impacts on cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders and even cancer. So we, we hope that we can better understand this so that we can implement long term monitoring, better cleanup methodologies, as well as provide survival support.

And as part of that, we're actually offering a webinar that we're hosting this week, actually two days where we are gathering with our local experts here that can help us with assessing best practices and guidance on medical considerations for wildfire exposures.

In particular, sharing with some of the lessons learned in California recently and introducing the toxicology of metals. So this is a free webinar that is open to the public to join.

Yeah, some of the mental health outcomes that we are seeing in the study. We actually have a comparison cohort pre wildfire that we are able to compare the population in Maui with. We are seeing that half of the adult survivors reported depressive symptoms in comparison to about a third. Before the wildfire.

For the sick population, about a quarter had moderate to severe anxiety and more than 4% considered suicide last month. Rates that are far above pre wildfire levels. While there is some improvements since last year, progress has been slow, especially in mental health.

Next, PTSD remain widespread, so nearly one in four survivors affected have PTSD, including 8% with severe PTSD symptoms. The good news is that social support is providing protective factors. It reduces days impacted by illness and helps buffer against depression and anxiety. Next.

We have a cohort about 200 children and pretty disturbing finds. Also, I am both a psychology researcher with this study, but I also am a clinician that works on the ground with this population in Lahaina, that's the Lahaina Certified Community Behavioral Health Center. It's not just a community health center.

The reason I bring up that distinction is because in my opinion, it's the best model for behavioral health in a clinic that we have to combat all of this crisis. Everybody that comes into the clinic, nobody gets turned away. Doesn't matter if you have insurance or not.

Everybody gets a case manager, everybody gets a therapist, and everybody, if they need to, will get a psychiatric evaluation and we'll get medication management.

I just wanted to highlight that because if any of you or legislative Members are watching this and you ever see that CCHBC model come up, just please consider funding it, because it's truly an amazing clinic and I'd love for all of you to come and check it out.

And Dr. Knight. Thanks, Bridget. Let me just interrupt. That's a program of the Department of Health.

Health, yes. Okay.

That's a program of the Department of Health.

Right, so. zero, yeah, for sure. I mean, I'll go over, like, my shtick here, but then if you guys ever need to reach out to me at all, I'd love to answer any questions. We all would, of course. But I really would love to see everybody go over there and visit it, too.

I think that would be great. So, yes, as far as children. I'll. Focus on the mental health, right? So 50% of children showed depressive state symptoms. That's not just, like, depressed, like, I'm sad. This is like clinical depression, where it's like, you can't even function. Kid can't even get out of bed.

One in five showed severe depressive symptoms, and that means, like, suicidal ideology. So our Cohort started at 10 years of age. But in the clinic, I'm seeing kids as young as, like, six saying, I don't care if I live or die anymore. That's unacceptable. Right? And it's really horrible.

The good news is everybody, and I don't use that, exaggerate, like, exaggeratedly whatever whatever. Like 100% of people that are coming in and getting support are getting better. Right? So with support, they get better. But I don't think enough people know about the clinic, which is why our study is such a great pathway to it.

They come in and they get tested, and then at the very end, they'll get a medical and mental health consultation, and then we will direct them straight to services. There were some points I wanted to make, and normally I'll talk too long, so I wrote it down to try to read through it.

But it's really important to emphasize, I already explained, I serve in dual roles, so I get to see it through the research lens and on the ground. Unfortunately, the data does match what I see and my fellow Clinicians see on the ground. So there's three main points I want to emphasize here today.

Our study is unique as it is an interventionist style of data collection. And I believe this protocol and outreach efforts that we use could serve as the gold standard for data collection and future disasters. So what this means is when we collect data on people's medical and mental health, we don't simply analyze, publish and report.

We take action on site, like on the site when we see them. And then we do follow ups to ensure that our participants get the support that they need. So maybe from year one to year two, the reason we're seeing some improvement is because there are participants. So I'm not so concerned with our participants.

I'm concerned with the people we haven't been able to reach. And the reason we haven't been able to reach it is a lot of it's like funding restraints. But I mean, that's one of the things I'm hoping that the state will be able to help us and your Committee will be able to help us with.

We are not funded for intervention, but we just do so anyway because Dr. Juarez and Dr. Mauna Kea were adamant from day one that we're not just going to test these people for a mental health disorder or assess for mental health disorders and assess for medical problems and then be like, okay, see ya.

No, we're going to get them help using every resource we possibly can assemble. And they have been working relentlessly since the very beginning of this fire disaster.

So number two, I wanted to emphasize the need not to just get us help funding the current study, but possibly to expand the study as from what I have seen, our study has been one of the most effective forms of outreach to get people in the community support.

So many people are depressed, they just want to stay in bed all day, you know, I mean, the horrors that they've experienced, it's really, really hard to motivate them to even leave the house. Especially, especially our kupuna. Right. So one of the incentives we use is it's $100 and it's $100 cash, not an Amazon gift card.

That's what gets some of them out there. Another thing is what I've noticed is it's community service. They want to know if I'm exposed, are my kids okay? Is my community okay, so those are the two incentives that we've been able to use to get them into the study.

And then once we get them to study, then we hook them up with the support and the other resources. I think we all strongly feel that everyone who was impacted by the Lahaina wildfires, who wants to be tested for heavy metal toxic exposure, and receive medical and mental health consultations and referral services, should have the right to.

I think that should be just a right for everybody that was impacted by this disaster. But this would require expanded funding outside of the scope of what we're trying to just get back right now, which I believe expires in October. If we don't get it, especially the children. We have a cohort of 200.

We need to expand that. There's a lot more than 200 kids that are impacted. Again, interventionist data collection. Finally, I want to emphasize that from my perspective, Lahaina is still in a State of crisis. Research shows mental health is at its worst two years post disaster, and Lahaina's recovery will take years. I feel like it's an emergency.

I think you could justify asking for emergency funds to interject immediately. I don't necessarily know if it. If it has to go through a whole another legislative round, try to get more funding. I don't know who can do that. I think the Governor can. I don't think we've approached him yet with it.

But that's just something I want to. I really. And my patience when I told them I'm coming here so that they want me to emphasize things are not necessarily better. They're arguably worse. Many of them are worried about getting kicked out of their FEMA housing every month.

They have to prove to FEMA that they're actively looking for somewhere to stay, but they can't afford it. They're unemployed. I mean, I can't afford to live there. It's too much. Furthermore, regarding emergency and legislative funds, we need to ensure that it goes to programs that have proved effective.

I believe we have evidence that the Maui west study has proven very effective. The CCHB model is very effective. We even have a holistic model at the Lahaina Clinic that integrates, like, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, like culturally sensitive interventions, which research shows is far more effective than just a Western model.

Also, finally, if we're just thinking fiscals, prevention is always cheaper than treatment. I think investing in the study is going to save the state funding long term. I tried to find Hawaii data. I couldn't. But national data suggests that each ER visit for psychiatric. Just ER. Not even inpatient, just outpatient. It's like $2,264.

My major key point is just we cannot afford to lose one more person to this fire. And we really hope you'll support us and we're grateful for everything you guys are already doing for us.

Thank you. A few more slides left. What Dr. Nicebridge alluded to is that the impact of the study was far beyond just the study itself. We provided several wraparound services and referrals to care of the 2,000 affected individuals in the cohort. Many of them followed up with the healthcare provider.

It's important to note that this was the first time that people came in with a health screening of any kind since the fires, which was kind of alarming to us initially, especially if they even had insurance coverage and even if they had a provider and even if they were coming in with symptoms, this was their first health screening since the fire.

So that was kind of alerted us to like, okay, there's, you know, we have to make sure that they get the care that they need to. We also found that they made lifestyle changes after receiving our results initially at the wraparound service that we provide, as well as some of the mental health services that was mentioned.

To expand the study beyond the capacity of our cohort, we had launched with the support here from the state mauiregistry.com, which is a health registry that we're encouraging folks that have been affected by the disaster, either directly or indirectly, to go on and sign up for it. It's a free service.

It links individuals with, again, the same resources that we are aware of in the community that they might need. And they also can learn about some of the results from the study that might affect their health as well. This is just a very short summary. Dr. Neisburg has already covered a lot of this in his explanation.

But basically what we'd like to do is to call to action. The data that we collected, I think, is a call to action that we can prioritize health in addition to rebuilding structures. We can protect our future that way.

I think advocating for long term funding for addressing some of the health concerns is really an important aspect in recovery that we need to consider. Unfortunately, the hazard mitigation plan doesn't prioritize health.

I think having that incorporated just as much as housing and infrastructure is in rebuilding and resilience, again against other disasters, it's an important add onto the list. We also are again encouraging dissemination of this registry to link it to those that have been affected more broadly sustain and expand aspects of the work that we're doing as well.

I wish this wasn't true, but we're the only game out there. We're the only entity, effort, whatever you want to call it, that's actually monitoring these effects of exposure for the short and the long term for residents impacted by the fires.

And we're trying to, as much as we can, stay vigilant, collect this data in near real time so that it can be useful for policymakers like you all, as well as for our community partners that can help make our community healthier.

Also alluded to funding other programs that could help with addressing some of the trauma that individuals, especially our youth, experienced that might still impact them through schools and other alternative areas that could be lifted up. I want to end really briefly on this, reflecting on Ike Kupuna, one that I think is very relevant to this discussion.

Pu Ali kalo I kawai ole without water, the kalo grows misshapen. Even our taro, which is our life source, can't thrive without water. So our community cannot recover without sustained health, resources and surveillance as well as a healthy environment. And that includes of course, our land and our water.

The Maui Wildfire Exposure study that we've shown today I think kind of highlights that disaster recovery isn't just about rebuilding homes, although that's really important. It's about protecting the whole health of our community long after the smoke clears.

Our data shows rising depression and other mental health issues that we've documented, but also elevated risk for long term chronic diseases. We know that is particularly an issue in our community.

Without early sustained action, these risks will grow into another crisis, claiming more lives because of exposures to the fires long after, such as what we've experienced in other disasters like 911.

We're urging the state to take leadership in creating a centralized health surveillance system rooted in community to monitor and respond to the environmental and biological impacts before they become irreversible. So mahalo for your time here and really happy to answer any questions.

Thank you doctors. Before I open it up, I do want to just inform the Members and the public that we will have this PowerPoint presentation on our Committee website and available to everybody. I also want to let the public know that provided to the Members was the Uhero From Crisis to Recovery, Health and Resilience.

Two years after the Maui Wildfires report, as well as a JAMA article that kind of went over the medical findings of this and so there's a lot of information in front of the Committee in Addition to what was presented today.

So I wanted to open it up to questions to Members first on any of the issues or reports or anything that was before the Committee from the Maui west study.

Thank you, Chair. So are people still exposed to any kind of hazardous or toxic material?

It's a possibility. I think we just don't know much about the ongoing exposures and potentially the re exposures as rebuilding plays out and people returning back to their properties and recovering from all of that and rebuilding.

To my knowledge, there's no concerted effort to, after the cleanup had been done, to kind of continue monitoring for any potential environmental toxins that might be already leaching into the water supply, as well as being spread in different ways that people might have been impacted, that might have been impacted then, but also continue to be impacted by now.

So we're hoping that we can incorporate a much more concerted effort to identify whether there is a risk now for continued exposure going forward. And hopefully we can. If we do identify that risk, we can mitigate that. What I showed was actual human data.

These are actual heavy metals in individuals in the urine samples, not from the environment. We think it's associated with the initial exposures because of the signature of heavy metals that individuals had, especially those within the burn zone had.

That's consistent with what the state report have shown already in terms of the heavy metals in the ash and the smoke from the fires in the aftermath of it. So we suspect it could still be either present or potential sources of re exposures in the environment. We don't know.

That's the concern here is can we build capacity to go and learn about that? That has a much broader implication than beyond the scope of those impacted by the fires. If there's still ongoing risk for exposures, everybody is potentially impacted by that. We really want to know about that.

And that's part of this ask is to help us to really go out and start to provide that kind of capacity to learn about that.

Questions? Okay, I have a couple of questions, but I don't want to dominate, so I will ask some and then turn it over. You know, I'm always looking at these studies as a way to what can we do better next time?

And when I look at the timing of when Maui West went out, I think we had you folks going out. We only really started five to six months after. And then with the children cohort, you folks actually didn't start working with that cohort until 14 months after the fires.

So for me, one of the biggest lessons learned is that this Effort of collecting data needs to happen almost immediately and has to be integrated into the immediate response. Can you comment on that?

And then I really want you to emphasize, because it disturbs me that if people were coming to you folks 61214 months after, and that was the first time they had anyone do a real mental health screening, that is a big puka in our system at the moment. So can you comment on some of that?

I'll start.

I just want to. Yeah. So one of the things that we've been trying to do, the lessons learned right from this, is really building the infrastructure to be ready for the next disaster. So there is two big things that came out of this.

One of them is we've been helping LA as soon as basically the fires were there. We're hosting a workshop a month before actually LA happened. And they were able to develop this type of infrastructure within a few months just because of the learnings of Maios.

But the second thing is, as we are also building the infrastructure to do two things. One of them is have a baseline data collection, the state level, so we're able to compare what are the increases on mental health, increases on physical health.

We have the funding to do some of the mental health assessments because of the rapid survey that has been going on, but we don't have the funding right now to the physical health statewide. For instance, we don't know the pulmonary issues in the state. What is the prevalence rate? We're hoping to get some funding.

We have several applications going on to Nih. We don't think the Federal Government unfortunately is going to work at this time, but yeah, we're trying to prepare for that. The Office of Wellness and Resiliency as well has been very supportive of coming up with this, this the governor's office.

And thanks for that question, Representative Pilati. I think in addition to what Dr. War has mentioned, one of the pressing concerns that we've noticed, especially in our assistance of the LA wildfires, was some of the perishable elements involved. I mean, after the aftermath.

And that's what something that they were concerned about collecting as, as, you know, close to the fires, you know, itself so that they can learn how much of that is actually impacting individuals at the health level, but also what they can do about it in terms of mitigating it right away because people are coming back and rebuilding and, you know, there's chaos in terms of like, well, what are the best practices that we can implement at the time to mitigate any potential exposure risk for people, PPE for Example or other types of, you know, interventions that could have been deployed.

So a lot of lessons learned for sure. And I do think this type of assessment incorporating the environmental plus the sort of the health component assessments early on into the disaster is really critical.

But I think maybe, Chris, can you mention about sometimes for the mental health to manifest the duration of time it would really take for people to get a better sense of what's really happening. Can you comment on that?

Yeah. Right. So we had a convention about a year ago and we had experts from other disasters like 911 Hurricane Katrina, Flint, water, Michigan disaster. And there's other research that shows that the peak of the worst of the mental health, the suicidality, the PTSD, it's like basically two years.

So that's 10 days ago for us when it comes to like best clinical outcome, earlier the intervention, the better the outcome, especially amongst children, you know. So another thing to consider though is like as heartbreaking as the data that the study shows is that's best case scenario we live.

I mean, everybody that grew up here knows we don't like talking about our problems, right. We're kind of like told not to. We're a cultural melting pot. And a lot of the cultures, like, are really like, look, look at mental health as more of a weakness than an actual disorder. Right.

So people tend to minimize their mental health symptoms, especially kids. They. They do not like talking about their mental health. The situation is actually probably worse than we even think it is here. According to the data.

This is actually a nice segue for our next presenters. I have actually a series of more questions, but they were actually as I started to dig into your report and dig into the data and how one of your findings is that recovery is uneven from group to group.

And so I actually think before we dive into that, I'd like to bring up the second set of presenters. Okay. Is it? Go ahead. Is it? Yes.

Yeah. Thank you, Chair. First of all, thank you for all of your work. It's very important. So my question is beyond studies, which is a good indicator of what's going on and tracking what goes the next step as far as treatment and help to address the deficiencies. And do we have sufficient capacity?

No, we don't. I think one of the things that we've been trying to do is the way that we see this thing moving forward for the next five to 10 years, because that's what we need basically to be able to address the situation is really replicate what has happened in other disasters.

The obvious example that came to mind and they came actually in December is these clinics that were set up after 911 which are basically providing treatment for participants who were affected by the disaster.

We're hoping to replicate that model here, especially anyone who was affected, being able to be provided some type of support either on a yearly basis, come to the clinic, be connected to mental health services as well as physical health services. I think that's where we see this going forward.

In addition to the monitoring and the vigilance that we need to tie that into some of the ongoing exposures. Because it's probably a broader problem than what we can identify based off of our limited scope in the study, because it's just that capacity, unfortunately.

Follow up Chair.

Because I think you're actually heading in a direction that we are going to want to explore later about what are some of the concrete things that we're going to have to do. It goes beyond probably all of our scopes, the entire community.

But I want to dive a little bit more into the studies that we know to better understand where the needs, the greatest needs might be in the community.

So whereas the Maui west was really from a clinical, almost health perspective, we have another study that kind of, kind of drove down more into community and picked up, I think, on some of your findings. And so I want to turn it over to Nadezna Ortega and Ms. Kara Dibolo Carolis from Tang Nawa for their study.

Hi everyone. Thank you for having us. I also want to echo the work of Maui West. We have been in close partnership with them since the very beginning. We did three events with them, Tagnawa and Maui west to help them reach into the Filipino community who are 40% of Lahaina population, who weren't participating in the study.

So we're also going to be working closely with them in the future also to work with the health registry. So really important work. So I just wanted to briefly go over who Tugnawa is, what we do. We were founded in August 2023 after the Lahaina fires.

Tagnawa is currently the only women's rights centered disaster recovery and preparedness organization in Hawaii. I personally have personal ties to Lahaina because of my family. Immediately after the fires, my family who are recent immigrants to Lahaina, reached out to me for assistance because they didn't know where to go for, for resources, aid. They asked me for help.

And then I also have students, former students from UH and friends who also asked us to come in because of Filipino specific challenges that they were experiencing after the fires with recovery aid officials. Things like that.

Um, and then even state agencies also asked us for help because they didn't have their systems in place in regards to translations and interpretations with applications and stuff. So we started as frontline responders, organizing resource navigation and aid delivery in multiple Philippine languages such as Tagalog and Ilocano. We have grown into a research clearinghouse.

This is our second report that we're talking about today. An immigrant women's organizing center and a gender equity watchdog. We have two missions to redesign disaster preparedness systems to make sure that the needs of marginalized folks, women specifically immigrants, children, elderly, are equally addressed during disasters.

And second of all to strengthen polina between the Filipino community in west and Central Oahu and Maui. So our work is across the Pa', Ina, not just specifically in Maui. So our impetus for this report, none of the multi $1.0 billion organizations involved in the Lahaina recovery have conducted a forensics of the response.

Yes, there was RFI with FEMA asking what they could have done better and we sent in our response. But our organization. This is a preliminary look into an ongoing problem of the limitations of the disaster recovery, the one size fits all recovery response that was implemented in Lahaina.

FEMA has a playbook for racial and cultural inclusivity, but not for women. And many governments, including the Philippines, tailored disaster preparedness relief and recovery efforts to address the specific needs and vulnerabilities of women, men, girls and boys, recognizing that they experience disasters differently.

And last year, the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction, the lead agency within the UN on coordination of disasters, launched a blueprint for women and disasters. On November 15, 2023 FEMA issued a press release acknowledging domestic violence hotline calls doubled.

TAGNAWA was the first organization to successfully advocate for inclusion of gender based violence questions into needs assessments in Lahaina. So our first report, even though that was not the focus specifically on gender based violence or women, we had two questions in there about safety and sexual and physical violence.

So we have three goals with this report. One is to introduce gender integration into Hawaii's disaster preparedness, response and recovery. And number two, analyze the hidden impacts of the Lahaina wildfire disasters on gender equality. And number three, document lessons learned and provide concrete actions to mitigate gender impacts after the next emergency.

And so if you look at the report, we have pages of recommendations that are critical and doable and how we conducted the research. So we are Filipino researchers. Our background and expertise is on Filipino methodologies. Our lived experience is based on our Filipino experience, so we based it on Cuentuhan or Pacasaritaan.

We were already working in the Filipino community in Lahaina. So and using multiple languages based on our own, we place importance on collective storytelling and our context. As Filipinos, we hold ourselves accountable to participants and continuously engage them even after publication.

So we have conducted multiple report backs with the communities to ensure that they are integrated into the research process, that they know where the research has gone and what we intend to do with the research. So they're always included.

And our research team is led by Lahaina survivors and family Members, particularly our on the ground full time Maui organizer Cheryl Alcantara and also gender policy experts. This report was conducted by Filipino women for Filipino women. And again part of the report and research was specifically looking at Filipino women.

And so we also advocate for research for other women in different ethnic groups. So how we our recommendations in the report were formulated.

So we looked at comprehensive literature review to look at the historical and cultural context of the Lahaina fires that this is rooted in history of Hawaii and the Philippines, the theft of water and stolen land.

We did early consultation with scholars in Australia with experience with bushfires and gender information requests to the Hawaii Department of Human Services, Department of Prosecuting Attorney for Maui County and the Maui Police Department. And we also did confidential surveys with adult Filipino female fire survivors on Maui in multiple Philippine languages.

And then to kind of look at the research in multiple perspectives. We also interviewed key informant leaders and specialists in mental health, reproductive health care, criminal justice system, gender based violence. And we requested FEMA participation. And I'm going to pass it over to Kara to finish up the presentation.

Aloha Chair. Thank you Vice Chair and Rep. Shimizu. So a couple clarifications too about the data. I'm not going to go into all the findings. I hope you can retrieve the report.

It's easily accessible on kagnawa.org so first, just to clarify, most of the findings actually are related to women and feminized people of all indigenous and ethnic identities. Most of the findings are not Filipino specific. However, there is a case study within the report that has specific data related to Filipino women.

The reason why, Nadine explained, but also a lot of people can never guess this right, but when I asked them, what country did the United nations say is the model, the global model for gender responsive disaster planning and preparedness? They usually say Sweden or somewhere else in Scandinavia. And the answer is actually the Philippines.

So we brought this knowledge, having studied gender and development in the Philippines and disaster response there, decades of knowledge with us into this report. So I think it also challenges dominant narratives of Filipino women as downtrodden, as oppressed. We are also innovators with knowledge that can help in disaster response and bring the United States forward.

Another thing about the report is that we also studied men. What we learned from the folks in Australia who tragically are ahead of the curve because of their catastrophic bushfires is that wildfires are the only type of environmental disaster where men die more than women.

And this has to do with gender role stereotyping and ideas of masculinity and also fetishizing property and defending your property. And this doesn't just put men's lives at risk, but also prevents early evacuation. It puts their children at risk and their families.

So the other thing, too, a lot of you might have seen the news, what caught the eye was the statistic about commercial sexual exploitation of vulnerable displaced Filipino women. And I think the reason for that one, any of us who study trafficking, who study gender based violence, are not surprised.

But it speaks to the novelty of this report. It's just that, unfortunately, a comprehensive gender analysis of environmental disasters is not the norm in the United States. And so this was shocking, I think, to people, and of course media's gonna gravitate towards that.

But on one hand, right, we saw a couple folks in the Administration saying, this is happening all over Lahaina. We don't know that. On the other hand, we cannot minimize what this could mean. If one out of every six Filipino women who we thought probably weren't even gonna answer the question, decided that they trusted our organizer.

They were speaking community to community Member, survivor to survivor, and they told her they wanted to tell their story and they trusted that they would be De identified. This could really be the canary in the coal mine. It is entirely possible that this is more widespread.

We also know that from the Philippines, unfortunately, the Philippines has the ignominy of being the global epicenter for sex trafficking of minors, particularly to foreigners.

And because of that, we know within that statistic, the people in the Philippines, the Filipinos who are at highest risk of exploitation and trafficking are indigenous Filipinos and internally displaced Filipinos who have been displaced because of environmental disasters and conflict. Seeing this happen and replicate itself because environmental disasters don't care about borders was no surprise to us.

But it does mean that we need to take this seriously. I think that too. Another thing is that this is really. We have as hard to look at as the findings are for women. This is actually something that positions us to be ahead. Just like the Maui west information. It's groundbreaking.

Unfortunately, we are at the front of, we're at the tip of the spear. And so we have the opportunity to become, you know, to have a Hawaii effect on the rest of the country. If the Legislature wants to take this up and focus on how wildfires impact different genders differently because of how we're differently marginalized and positioned.

And then finally, I want to say, just like the Maui west study, it's very activist, it's very integrated, it's very much conscious of our host culture, integrated with Native Hawaiian and Filipino indigenous practices.

In that we are part of this community, we are not being extractive, we are trying to be incredibly intentional about that and provide solutions from the people who are most marginalized. Look to the masses, look to the women is really one of our core principles.

And so the solutions in this report were formulated by Maui only based folks who have survived the wildfire themselves or who are directly serving Lahaina survivors. I gotta watch my time. Okay, so synthesizing the findings, Right.

Obviously you know, domestic violence increasing, we saw that during COVID so probably not a surprise to most folks, but sexual violence within domestic violence was a startling finding. The increased exposure of child sexual abuse because families were disrupted in their home settings was a surprising to folks in the judiciary that weren't prepared for that necessarily.

And also of course, because you have a population moving around, you might have been startled by one of the statistics. Rape increased by over 400% in Kahului. Right. And so we don't know because we don't have the data of how the population moved at that point in time to make a direct correlation.

But this all raises questions and the need for deeper and longitudinal study of this. And that was one of the core asks of pretty much every expert who we interviewed is that you haven't seen nothing yet. Basically was what they said, that victims rarely even.

We all know this, people don't report sexual violence and gender based violence anyway in normal times. And There are now additional disincentives to report. So I think the biggest finding is that none of this was inevitable.

The way that certain applications and a delivery was structured actually stressed out families, more particularly families that were limited English proficiency, who were immigrants, who are people of color, that that ended up manifesting as aggression, misogyny, violence.

The early reopening of tourism, for example, is something that folks we talked to cited over and over as men feeling like a lack of control and engaging in online aggression, road rage, conflict at home, related to the sense of powerlessness. So those are all things that from every spectrum of the response could be redesigned.

Another thing, we also focus on women's health. So even though violence always and crime and all that always grabs the attention and headlines, please take a look at how it affected reproductive health care in particular in the report.

And finally, as the most, well, top five most populated immigrant states, immigrant heavy states, women don't have the option of calling the police right now. They are too afraid to do that.

So if that is what we're pushing on women or is that what they believe is their only way out of these forms of violence, then that means that that door is closed right now.

So we need to think of how we are going to reach immigrant women and Lahaina survivors who feel that they cannot go to any type of authorities, even mental health professionals they're viewing as authorities and are trying to downplay or not disclose violence to.

That's what we heard from a lot of the mental health care folks who participated to wrap up on the next couple of slides. So, of course there's this perception, right? Like nobody, it's unpredictable. At the federal level, people are getting even.

Legislators and congressional Members are getting their news with us on CNN a lot of the time about the Administration. And of course, Trump, since his very first term, has been trying to defund FEMA. It's part of Project 2025. It's part of the aggressive attempt to transfer public wealth upwards.

So any failure right of FEMA is going to be honed in on. But that does not mean we should desert women. That does not mean that we shouldn't seize back the narrative. It's very important because in particular, we've seen Texas, we've seen Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, these are red.

These are states also at the forefront of climate change who are bearing the brunt of climate change. And so we have heard over and over from our points of contact in the House on Transportation, on the House Committee on Transportation that oversees FEMA nationally, it's not Futile.

And so what we've done is we have, we're working with folks in D.C. and we've actually, we're inserting language into the bipartisan FEMA reauthorization Bill. This is just to give you some federal context, but I won't go into detail. So one example of this is one part of the Bill expands crisis counseling services.

So we have preferred language that it will include gender based violent victim advocacy and advocates. So we're just kind of subtly sliding this into the language of the Bill. And we're heading to D.C. next month to do a briefing there and meetings with folks on both sides of the aisle. But here's what I want to leave you.

Of course, women of color throughout time have had to face this dilemma because our communities are usually often spoken about in our most negative aspects. So how do we talk about harm while uplifting our community?

And I think the bravest thing to do is try to unite our community and heal our community and show that we're brave enough to say these things and try to overcome them.

And so even though there might be a perception that we're making the community look bad, what we found in Lahaina Nadine's led multiple meetings with the Mayor's Office of Recovery, Mayor's Office, hcf, a number of community organizations, Maui Rapid Response, Maui Mauna Medics, Roots Reborn. They're fantastic. Has been actually we're seeing this too.

This has happened in the Latino community. This is happening in our population. We've got to do something about it. Finally, here are some of the recommendations for state action. These were preferred by the folks in the study.

So these are not just from us, but one is to create a gender response plan and kind of toolkit so that there's some sort of gender fighting headquarters post disaster gender based violence. Folks on the ground said that it should be more structured like the aftermath of a mass shooting.

So that model, rather than a traditional FEMA or Red Cross model, invest in community intervention and peacekeeping. There are models of women being part of the peacekeeping process and gender based violence response in communities affected. Establish a legislative working group to improve coordination. There's more here.

I'll let you look at the full slide if you want to to refer to some other suggestions for state level action. And then here's just some of what Tognawa is doing forward and what has already been done. State level coordination is the next step and hopefully we'll have some champions step into that space.

And finally, what I just want to end with is a poem that is very important to feminists, Filipino feminists. Her name was Joy Barrios and she has this poem called Kasalo. And the poem says, Ang Baba E ay Hindi karne. Ang babae AI Hindi Kanin. Ang babae AI Hindi halaya. Women are not right. Women are not meat.

Women are not dessert. Women are not just for the sustenance and pleasure of the community or the men in our lives or our partners or our children. We have needs that deserve equal attention and love and care. And so I just want to leave you with that and hope that you take a deeper look into the report.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you. I want to comment on this because actually when I visited Lahaina shortly after the disaster and I visited Representative Ellie Cochran at the time, I was actually stunned as a Filipino myself, to learn how many Filipinos made up that community and how many immigrant families were there.

And then to see people struggling with language access at the community hubs that were created. It really, really spoke to me. And then to learn further, and I think this is echoed in the west study, the number of Latino, the Latino population and the huge immigrant population in Maui.

I had not, you know, someone from Honolulu and, you know, being Oahu centric, it was really important to see the diversity and then to know that we have to redesign our responsibility.

And maybe we didn't get it right this time entirely, but we have to get it right next time because we've seen fires popping up all over the island chain now. And so we know our communities and we know how we can structure a response so that we immediately have language resources like the next disaster.

We have to have things translated in Filipino, in Hawaiian, in Micronesian, in the Kofa languages. Because we just have to. We know that. And we can do that, right? We can do that now. We can prepare. I want to open it up to questions, but I do want.

I'm going to assert myself on this one because I actually thought that this was the live and learn. The fact that this was a fee. You folks did a female centered report, but that one of your biggest findings that popped out to me was that finding that men need to be trained how to really evacuate.

Because I remember watching the LA fires and seeing men say that they were going to just stay there. And I was just like, no, you need to leave. You have time. They're giving you time to evacuate. You need to leave. So can you speak to that?

And if some of that has already been starting to be integrated, because that's a very specific program from Australia that they're talking about. I don't know if you can speak to that.

So that's why we say that this report is not just about women. Right. Through a gendered lens, you can see that the specific impact on men too, that the staying the is hurting them specifically, but also their loved ones, their community.

And you can also see that through the mental health aspect of how they have coped in the fires as well. Like overworking, substance abuse, there's different ways that they are coping. So this report really highlights that specific issue.

Just to the point about Australia. So Australia has launched a national campaign called Leave and Live and it's gender based messaging that specifically targets. Yeah, to. Targets men to leave early. And the main, one of the main challenges is also that the media incentivizes and lionizes men who stay as heroes.

And so that's another issue that they have done media training on to not, you know, do these singular stories of the one man who stayed and saved the house. Because that's such a popular story and trope that we see. But yeah, Australia has an actual formal campaign led by government called Leave and Live.

I have a few more questions on this area, but I want to open it up. Representative Iwamoto or Representative Shimizu. Another thing that I was looking at was the recommendations about activating youth in high fire hazard areas with age specific conversations about disaster preparedness plans and practicing these plans.

Actually I think that's a finding that aligns with some of what you folks are making recommendations about how schools need to be better training folks. So can we have a cross conversation and maybe you can speak to some of your recommendations about the schools and what, what can be done with youth?

Because I think as we, you know, we for so long have been preparing for hurricanes. Like I train my kids, what do you do in hurricanes? But we don't necessarily have the training for. And you build resilience when you talk about things, you build resilience when you practice things.

So I found that an interesting kind of cross between both of your studies and if anyone wants to comment on any of things of what can be done specifically with youth, either through the report from Tanganhua or from Maui West, I'll open it up.

So I mean that's why it's important to not just look at it, look at recovery from an able bodied adult male perspective. Right. We need it in multiple levels, like from Keiki youth, grown adults to elderly Kupuna and multiple marginalized and different abled bodies. Right. To make sure that nobody falls through the cracks.

And that's why we also thought about this recommendation and pushed forward because we need to allow youth to have agency and work with their age group to see what they can also do.

Yeah, and I think it's really important. I think the role of education can play in terms of not just responding to the recovery, not responding only to the disaster, and then playing a role in recovery of traumatized youth returning to schools, but also a big role in building the resilience against disasters that happen again. Right.

Because if there was some more education about the planning, the types of impacts that it has, part of the system, the climate change discussions on our own science, I mean there's a lot of opportunities, I think that educators can play in terms of preparing our youth for these situations.

But we do have some recommendations specifically around trauma informed care at the school level that could help with addressing some of the recovery aspects of the disaster.

I think it would be relatively inexpensive to just have every teacher go through. We just go in there and teach them about trauma informed care. Another thing though, I don't understand why we haven't done like the screeners that we use are public, open source and sometimes they're very short. It's like five questions on depression, anxiety, ptsd.

Like why doesn't every single child in the entire State of like Hawaii just take that screener and you know, with promise of only your teacher knowing and then if you flag high then we can help you. You know, we should have a database of that kind of stuff so we can get everybody help.

I don't understand why that hasn't happened. I brought it up a long time ago when I was on the State Council on Mental Health. Just, it doesn't seem to happen. But I think, yeah, it's going to come from the teachers. But also the teachers are still pretty traumatized and they don't, they need support. It trickles down. Right.

It's like the same at home. The golden rule is like if you're, if your parents aren't okay, then the kids aren't okay. And like they spend arguably more time sometimes with the teachers at school. So the teachers aren't okay. Kids might not be okay too. So we got to make sure they're okay too.

I'll just point to the like in your report. So at page 25 of your report. Right. The three bullet points, school based mental health teams staffed by trauma informed.

You already spoke to that routine pediatric screening, which we can try to do on the youth surveys or on the medical side, but it's the community led peer support programs and family strengthening activities. Activities. That's where I think there's that crossover between the study that you're doing and the findings of the Tag Nga Wa study.

I guess I'll ask one last question. Is there any questions from you folks? My colleagues. So I really appreciate also the recommendation from the Equality in Flames report that from the very beginning we should have a gendered response and that should even be integrated in I think you folks call it at the very beginning.

But it's like in the eoc, it's where when decisions are being made because if you have that gendered lens and you're thinking about the family and the community as a whole, you actually do capture everybody in the actions that you take and move forward.

So did you want to speak a little bit to that recommendation, either Desna or Akara?

So one of the main themes that came up because there were women serving organizations and gender based violence organizations certainly, but they would find out accidentally that, let's say a government entity had spoken to somebody over at the other org and it was just there was no centralized response. There was no one patriarchy proofing the disaster.

There was no one in that coordination role. And so it's really the coordination that's needed immediately. And there has to be an infrastructure ready to do that and there has to be an entity designated to do that.

So, you know, it's not like you're saying, right, if we make a mistake and we know we made a mistake and we don't correct our mistake, we've made our second mistake. We can be prepared. And these solutions are not complicated and there are many models for them.

But I think fundamentally coordination is needed just as the bare minimum.

I have a question from my colleague here. And then actually we might have a good segue into our final presenter because she might be tying everything together for us.

Go ahead. Representative Iwamoto, thank you. It's for my. Wes, thank you for your presentation. Well, thank you all for your presentation. But you mentioned suicidal ideation going up specifically among young people, but I think you also referenced it for everyone, all the survivors. Did we.

Did we track the last two years about the actual suicide rates across each county and did it go up substantially?

In Maui County.

Yes. So we do know that there were several. There was significantly increased number of deaths due to suicide after my wildfire. That's a report that was published just recently. But the second thing is our suicidal ideation for the first year. So it was about 4% compared to less than 1% before the wildfires.

So we are seeing that on the second year of Maui west that was cut down to about between 2 and 3%. So that was great. We don't know about the number of suicides.

Yeah. Because the trauma, if I can ask a follow up. Yes, please. The trauma that's manifested, if it's a third degree burn, the trauma is all the physical damage, the trauma mentally, you know, so we would count somebody who passes away from burns three months later because their burns got infected and they died.

We would count them as a mortality fatality of the wildfires. Did we give that same kind of acknowledgement of anyone who may have committed suicide due to the mental health trauma that they suffered as part of the count?

Probably not.

Yeah, unfortunately.

And that's obviously the lessons from LA.

Seems to be that there are some degree of associating the suicidality with the trauma that they experienced through the course of the, I mean, recovery process. Right. And so there is a potentially a way to identify that, but we haven't done that for our study.

Thank you for.

But I think also. Right. Like we, we see rises in self medicating, but we don't necessarily. If somebody dies of a fentanyl overdose, is that, was that a suicide? Was that not, you know, like that's something to consider too. Right.

And so when you go through something that horrible, I mean, it's kind of natural that you just don't want to feel that way anymore. And so that will lead you into like, you know, drug addiction and all that. So I think it's something we should think about too.

So can we connect? I mean, I, it's really important because I flagged the same point, the same data point in the, in the report about the suicide ideation. But your solution is what? Right, so you've identified the problem and then what are you calling for more in your report?

Well, I think for Lahaina. So like at our clinic we only have two. Basically there's only two of us left there. It's like people and I, we both, we both live in Oahu. So we fly out like you know, Monday morning and then we fly back out to our families on like Wednesday night.

So we need more like Clinicians to go over There problem is is our state can't compete with California. Like, we'd make more money just sitting here on the beach getting licensed in California and doing telehealth to California patients and seeing our own people here. Right. The insurance reimbursement rates don't match up.

So we're seeing like the people that are in Lahaina. We're in it for the cause. We're not in front of money, so it's fine. But if we're going to try to recruit more things, we're going to have to make things cheaper.

I think that the quickest solution, if you just gave us in the Lahaina side workforce housing, so we can just fly over there, we can stay there. I think it would be really easy to recruit. Another thing would be to allow licensed Clinicians to Bill if they have supervisees, right? So that's like how normally. How so?

For example, for me, right? So I graduated, I got my doctorate, but I'm pre licensed. Because you need to have so many hours, insurance companies in Hawaii make it very, very, very, very hard for you to Bill underneath the supervisor. We would be the perfect recruitment spot for people trying to get their hours.

Everybody would love to come to Hawaii and finish their postdoc hours or their master's level hours. So if that could be some kind of law passed, and there has been some attempts in the past two legislative sessions, but it hasn't gone through, at least for a psychologist, I'm not sure if it was all.

I think we were successful this year and we have been more successful now. It's about implementation. Right. Okay.

And I think one of the things that we're learning from the study, from the emerging results, as well as our partners that we worked with on the ground from the day of the fires, right?

Like noticing that the community's already doing some really great best practices around helping people get what they need early into the recovery and maintaining that trust and support throughout the duration of the recovery.

So I think what we've learned is that that community social support from organizations already there actually can offset some of the issues, the mental health challenges, even some of the physical health challenges that they are facing to some degree.

And I think if we were able to smartly think about how to invest in building that capacity out in the communities already, with instituting best practices out there, not just in Maui, but across the state, we can build that resilience that we need against future disasters.

Representative.

Thank you, Chair. Kind of segueing on what you just said. My thought and question as far as support, community support is the faith based community. You know, being a believer myself, I cannot.

I'd like to see the faith based community be part of the solution because I really believe that is the answer or a big part of the answer. And have we seen that or are we able to communicate with them on that?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we had several examples where our best recruitment days for MYOs actually happened when we targeted some of the Catholic churches, and not only Catholic, but all the churches like in Lahaina. So, yeah, absolutely. It's a great point to especially get culturally, both cultural diversity. Definitely. I think that there is definitely a way to incorporate that.

Not the only way, but there is definitely.

It's kind of funny, I just talked to. I had a patient today who just brought this up and she helps with a church and the biggest problem they're having is permits. These permits are taking forever despite, like early promises that these permits would be fast tracked. I mean, their church wants to do a lot for the community.

They want to build like lodging and everything. And it's just that taking the permits. Forever. Maybe that's something you guys can help with. I'm not sure this is going a.

Little bit beyond our scope, but there's. But we certainly can share a lot. There's a lot of information here that's been provided just that we can share with other committees. I think the Committee on Health here, housing. I mean, we hear some of these issues time and time again.

But I think it's important to understand that it's part of a larger kind of continued response to the recovery. I want to turn it over now. We're kind of at the. We've gone for about an hour and 15 minutes. I want to turn it over now to State Fire Marshal Dorothy Booth.

I want to let everyone know she's only been on the job for less than 60 days. So her coming before this Committee is a real treat. We're going to let her just kind of give kind of an overview because she's literally again just been on the ground for less than 60 days.

So we cannot expect that she has all the answers, maybe in another 30 days. But no. I think she brings a wealth of experience and has already hit the ground running with some of the wildfires that we've seen happen now and has some better responses now over putting a lot on you and your new office.

But if you wanted to comment on any of this. And again, we're going to be having many more conversations before this Committee. But I do want to give you an opening to respond to some of the things that we've learned today.

Perfect. Thank you for having me in the invitation. I'm happy to be here. And I'm sorry I missed the first half. I was actually meeting with the governor's office to help logistics and strategy for continuing to set up the office and the ways forward.

From what I've heard so far, I agree that especially in the gender based, women are kind of a lacking in not only disaster response, but just in General. So that's one of the initiatives around the world is getting all different genders, races, religions involved into the response agencies to be able to have those relationships with the community.

I know those initiatives are ongoing.

I was just at two conferences this past week that those very similar topics are of how do we recruit and retain not only your stereotypical firefighters, which your males are going back and forth, but we're having problems retaining our typical recruit classes too and recruiting so that message is heard and felt with or without disasters, unfortunately.

And so that's a big problem that everyone's working on trying to solve. See, activating youth, that's huge.

What we're finding, you know, that's another recruitment and retention situation is we have to get to them in those kindergarten and preschool years and let them know that they can, you know, and one thing that some of the things that we had done my past agencies is we integrated especially into the science and health and wellness classes into curriculum, disaster response capabilities and what is it like to be a firefighter, what is it like to be a police officer or even emergency management and having those classes as part of the curriculum, but also understanding at age appropriate levels, what does it mean for wildfires, how do they start, what makes them, how can you help yourself stay safe, your family?

And that progresses throughout those curriculum. So really putting those types of information embedded into the specific types of courses, because then you're not taking away from the curriculum, which is another problem that a lot of people have with federal funding.

And you have to have spec curriculum for each group and you don't want to take away from it.

So there's a lot of different resources out there that are available to be able to seamlessly integrate these types of conversations in age appropriate times that incentivizes, I mean math and trigonometry, we start talking about rope rescue and how does that work.

And so it's a lot of fun for the firefighters and responders to also get into the schools in something other than in their turnout gear, but helping teach their Their additional crafts, resource organization, coordination. That's a big one. That's in the Act 302, at least for me, largely on the fire side, but resources in General.

One of the key findings, as you all have mentioned too, that was also in the Lahaina reports, was the coordination and tracking and what resources are on the ground.

Everyone wants to help, but we also need that person to take charge of all those resources that are volunteering and understanding who's on the ground and getting them into their specific emergency functions, working with Hyena and the counties and others, coming up with the resource typing lists of who's available, who's wanting to help, and ensuring that those that want to help don't go rogue and do things on their own, that they have those proper check ins and that they know where to go.

So before the events of if you're a mental health provider, any trauma provider, those types, getting them rostered, somehow, what that looks like, I'm not sure yet. Looking at other national models of how do they come in and so we do know who's on the ground and where they're needed to go from that perspective. Permits, yes.

And I've met with Maui County and actually all the counties the first two months. I've been able to go to each of the islands at least once or twice now to really get to know the departments, what they're doing, what they're having struggles with, you know, where they want to go.

And more importantly too is how I can help them and how they see me integrating into their organizations. Office of the State Fire Marshal, as I see it, is definitely a tool in the toolbox, kind of that resource hub to be able to bring all the spokes and the wheels together and make things move more smooth.

Qualified people getting the permits and the staffing that are involved, stereotypically permitting plan review across the country are some of the lowest staffed agencies around, but they're some of the most important.

So trying to find those qualified individuals to be that workload, getting those processes streamlined and also when a disaster happens, especially as Lahaina and Palisades is working through the same thing.

I got to meet with State Fire Marshal Berlant this week too, at the conference and making sure that we don't rush and build something back less safe than what it was. We want to get people back in their homes. We want to get people into the community that they've called home.

And as much as people want it to be the same again, when I've got a fire Department that has to use an ATV to get down streets because our multi generational homes now have cars to go.

With all those generations that are there, we can't survive on 12 foot streets anymore to be able to bring the proper apparatus down. Those with all the vehicles that are in place. We know that structure to structure fires because of the type of construction that was built contributed to the conflagration.

So now when we look at modern codes, we need to make sure that we're not doing less than the standard for fires, for hurricanes, any of that. We want to build back stronger and better where there are ways to be able to get people back and make it work.

But we have to do it strategically and not in a rush.

Getting that state building code council back, having my office now being able to support the counties and both from the fire side and the building side to make sure that we're doing everything that we can and getting the planners and zoning to really look at the land uses.

My understanding, and I'm still learning is some of the homes that were burned are now in an area that cannot be built upon again because of erosion of shores. And how do we handle that?

Those are some of those ticket items that we don't want to put somebody back in a condition that's going to be worse for them.

But we also want to do everything that we can to get them home again and get back to a sense of normalcy which will help with the mental health side of what is our new norm and how do we help them grow and be ready for the future.

Some of the things that Representative Lahti had asked is staffing. That was a big topic of conversation. I'm thankful to have now 49 other fire marshals across this country to really help look at what does the proper fire marshal's office look like.

If everybody in that room had the opportunity on a clean slate to build it, how would we do it? Right. So getting the proper people in place at the right time. So I've not yet onboarded, I'm working on job descriptions and organizational what that looks like.

Really want to try to get more of the strategic level and middle to senior leadership in the office so we can get a solid framework and really understand what we need and get that that built out. So when we do start onboarding staff, they're ready and there's not a lot of questions left.

We want to hit the ground running a little more smoothly. The leeward initiatives we've been working with the Department of Forestry and Wildlife.

Some of their grants they've been coordinating with the schools or at least we've branched some of the communication to help with the projects on other than Department of Forestry Wildlife Vegetation mitigation, Hawaiian homelands have quite a few projects.

HWMO Department of Forestry and Wildlife put over $1.2 million in grants awarded that are underway across all of the islands to help with fuel breaks, mitigation education. And we look to continue growing that as much as we can to spread that out. That's kind of the high level overview.

You have already given us way more information than I think any of us expected at this point in time. Given that you literally are just less than 60 days. And I do appreciate that you can respond to many of the comments already that were shared, the findings that were shared in these reports.

Members, I wanted to leave you folks with any questions, if you have any other questions.

You know, they brought up some really important aspects of data collection and I was just wondering beyond what you presented, do you have a deeper dive into whether it's sexual or domestic abuse or substance abuse that is related to the data collecting that you folks have already done?

We have some data collected on the surveys, self reported and then some of the focus group follow ups with the discussions. But to like it's, you know, the components that we use for the survey is quite broad.

So we try to capture as much as we can from not only that personal information on abuse and either drug or alcohol abuse or anything like that, but also the social context, food security, housing, job security, all of that information is contextualized so that we can better understand.

Do you see in the future if you're able to take the next level question that could capture some of this data? Zero, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think one of the important things is, I mean we're hoping, you know, we can strengthen the partnership with Technawa and a few of the other organizations, you know, moving forward to be able to do more dives into the data. Focus groups in particular.

I think that's where you start seeing some of these issues coming up rather than a survey, you know.

Right. And then more tailored to the different communities. I mean, there's some effort sort of nationally to kind of identify sort of core domains that could be common data elements that's captured in these types of disasters.

So that what are the type of, you know, not only the samples, but information from people that you collect and do you have a standard questionnaire survey tool to use to deploy amongst residents that have been affected? So there's an effort along those lines.

But I think what we'd like to work together on, we've been seeing like improving on that and adding to like understand more of the context of the community that we're working with. And that's giving us a much better idea of what's potentially the issues they're facing.

It also takes trust to, you have to develop trust with the participant in order for them to disclose something that, that, you know, like that horrible in their life, you know, which is why it's like so amazing that you guys were able to get that, you know, so quickly.

That's a really good point though because in the first, remember Nadine mentioned in that first study, just broad, it was super broad. And there were a couple questions on sexual violence, but the numbers were super low. Right. Because it wasn't.

And so we spent a lot of time consulting even folks, you know, who work with, you know, civil rights here. How do you frame these discrimination, you know, questions and talk like explain what these abuses are inside of a survey so people even know what you're talking about.

Because one of the biggest problems we have is especially for Filipino women, the data before this showed us they don't even think a lot of the violence is violence. It's just men being stressed out. So it also takes a lot of not just trust, but educating the community.

And so nice anecdote is to end on is some of the Lolas, the grandmas who participate in the study have requested like martial arts training and we're going to do like a women's political medical conscious, you know, so that they get like an idea of what they've experienced is not just their fault or them.

So that's one of the next things coming up.

Question. Yeah, you know, as far as you folks data, do you have like a baseline? Because I guess what, what comes to mind is those, those situations were pre existing. Of course it got, probably got worse. But have a comparative baseline to like.

See that was the toughest part. That was the toughest part, like how the state doesn't have a base, any type of measurement. Right. For measuring gender equality and progress. And that is also something really contentious because there's all sorts of different models how to index that. But so we tried to start with.

That's why we honed in on gender based violence because there are hard statistics. Right. So we looked at HPD data, we looked at prosecutors data and that's what we tried to use as the baseline for the violence, whether they increased or not.

And so yeah, I won't misstate Any report or statistics, but you can look in and see the baseline within the report. So that was how we kind of tried to create a baseline is through previous year's data.

I guess like what Christopher said, if we just ask basic five questions to children and various demographics, we could get those baselines. Yeah.

Thank you.

I think one of the important things is again, kind of cross walking the studies and understanding where some of the findings actually are reinforcing each other. And then to ask, then we saw that recovery is uneven in certain demographics. We saw that also echoed in the equality in flames reports. And I guess we can recognize that.

But then I also think we have to keep asking ourselves what are the lessons learned? And then what are some of the solutions? What are some of the proactive things we can do in community?

Whether it's from the immediate response to the disaster and all the way through all the support services that we can provide from day one to year two, because as you said, we know that those are going to persist. And so we have to keep looking at this.

I remember someone saying to me, it's not just the short term crisis that we're facing, this is a human services crisis into the future. And so we have to focus on that.

I really want to thank everyone for being here and helping us elevate the conversation, understanding the data more, understanding what some of the needs of the community are more. I know we could spend probably another two hours here and I see the advocate for AARP in here.

We didn't even really delve into what could be done to address some of the elderly population that we know was also very much people were very concerned about how were the elderly moving out of the fire zone, how were they receiving services. So we could go into a whole other informational briefing.

We will take that topic up in another time. Again, I want to thank all of our presenters, thank my colleagues for joining us. We will have all of this great information available through the Committee and please continue to keep doing the work that you're doing and know that you have support from the Committee on this side. Mahalo.

And we are adjourned.