HONOLULU –
A wildfire on Hawaii’s Big Island grew overnight as firefighters worked to contain the massive blaze burning in a rural area between the Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea volcanoes.
No houses were at risk, but the flames reached miles from a critical highway on Friday. The area where the fire burns is dominated by shrubs and grasslands that are parched by the persistent drought in the region.
“The last two days, the fire has burned primarily at the invasive grass source,” said Steve Bergfeld, Hawaii Island branch manager for the Division of Forestry and Wildlife at the Department of Lands and Natural Resources. “Unfortunately, the fire has moved into a dryland forest that has native ōhiʻa lehua (trees), and we are trying to keep the flames away from this sensitive area.”
Gusty winds made it difficult to contain the fire that started on the western edge of the US Army’s Pohakuloa Training Area, which sits above the village of Waikoloa, a city of about 7,000 people.
The fire had burned more than 66 square kilometers as of Friday, authorities said. Earlier in the day, the state had estimated the fire had burned more than 40 square miles, but lowered that number after formal aerial mapping Friday afternoon. They estimated the fire had burned about 15 square miles as of Thursday.
Crews were using seven bulldozers to build fire lines around the fire and five military helicopters were dropping thousands of gallons of water on the hottest part of the fire on Friday, according to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The flames were largely contained to the military training area in a region bounded by Saddle Road, Highway 190 and an 1859 lava flow.
Fire managers hope the hardened lava rock field will act as a natural firebreak if it reaches that point, the department said.
Last year, the same region of the Big Island saw the largest wildfire in the state’s history, a fire that destroyed several homes and threatened thousands more. It burned more than 181 square kilometers on the slopes of Mauna Kea, the highest mountain in the state.
Like many Pacific islands, Hawaii’s dry seasons are becoming more extreme with climate change. The massive wildfires highlight the climate-related dangers of heat and drought for many communities in the US and other hotspots around the world. But experts say fires on typically wet tropical islands in the Pacific are also on the rise.
State land officials said the fire actually started several weeks ago and burned until strong winds this week reinvigorated the flames. Strong winds have been recorded throughout the area, some over 30 mph.
An Army spokesman told The Associated Press that while there is active military training in the area, the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
“There are units there training, I can neither confirm nor deny if it was being fired with live fire,” said Michael O. Donnelly, chief of external communications for the US Army Garrison in Hawaii. “It’s business as usual, but we don’t know the exact cause.”
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AP reporter Jennifer Sinco Kelleher contributed to this report.