The long-awaited report by Maui County and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concurs with a body of reports pointing to Hawaiian Electric Co. as the cause of the fires.

A fallen Hawaiian Electric Co. power line set dry grass on fire on the morning of Aug. 8, 2023, producing a smoldering ember that flared up in hurricane-driven winds later that day and grew to engulf the town of Lahaina, Maui officials said Wednesday while releasing long-awaited report produced in collaboration with federal investigators.

Brad Ventura, chief the Maui County Department of Fire and Public Safety, said the investigation by the county and Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had ruled out the possibility that there had been two separate fires, as some versions of events had suggested.

“This in fact was one fire,” Ventura said.

The county’s release of its long-awaited origin and cause report comes three months after the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which conducted the technical investigation supporting the report, first shared its findings with county officials.

Maui County’s report follows multiple, at times dueling, narratives of what happened on Aug. 8, 2023, when wildfires swept through Lahaina, killing 102 people. Insurance losses have already topped $2.3 billion and are expected to cost $1 billion more.

A central question has been whether there was only one fire, started by Hawaiian Electric Co. and reignited by afternoon winds, or two separate fires — a morning fire started by HECO that firefighters extinguished before it did much damage and another fire of unknown origin that destroyed much of Lahaina.

Also in question has been the responsibility of other parties, such as Kamehameha Schools, whose alleged failure to cut back grass known to be a fire hazard fed the wind-powered firestorm.

The report’s release comes three months after the ATF shared its findings with Maui County in a series of meetings in late June. After initially saying it was Maui’s decision when to publish the report, the ATF later said the agency needed to do “additional formatting” to complete the report. The agency never explained why the formatting took months.

But now the report is out: there was just one fire, caused by a fallen power line and dry grass.

Specifically, Ventura said, the morning fire was started after the downed power line was re-energized, sparking untended grass that caught fire. Firefighters contained the fire and stayed in the area for several hours to make sure the blaze was extinguished before firefighters left the scene, county and ATF officials said. But the prevailing hypothesis is that a piece of smoldering material was blown into a nearby gully, where strong winds rekindled the material in the afternoon.

“The hypothesis was overwhelmingly supported by the data,” Ventura said.

While the the report assigns cause of the fire, it doesn’t amount to a finding of legal liability for the deaths and property damage – or how much the liable parties would have to pay in damages. Such questions typically would be determined in a jury trial where lawyers for multiple parties present mountains of detailed evidence, which might include the ATF’s findings.

For the Maui fires, such a trial is unlikely because a pending $4.04 billion settlement would resolve hundreds of lawsuits filed by individual fire victims against HECO, Kamehameha Schools, Maui County and others. The Hawaii Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion in the next two months that will for all practical purposes determine whether that settlement can proceed.

If the court acts, there would be no trials.

One Fire Or two?

The new report adds to a body of work pointing to there being one fire, started by HECO and allowed to spread by allegedly negligent landowners.

Reports that a live electric wire was somehow to blame emerged almost immediately. Early news stories drawn from videos posted on social media and eyewitness accounts pointed to the fallen Hawaiian Electric Co. power line as the cause of the fire, throwing sparks that ignited dry grasses.

HECO offered its official narrative in a statement released 19 days after the fire. It acknowledged that a downed line had started a fire early in the morning but said that fire was declared extinguished by Maui firefighters before they left the scene at around 2 p.m.

According to HECO’s account, a different, afternoon fire started in the same area at around 3 p.m. The utility didn’t explain what caused that second fire, noting that its power lines had been de-energized for more than six hours by then.

As HECO promoted the idea of two separate fires, lawyers for fire victims were making the case that the afternoon fire was simply a continuation of the morning fire.

By January, the global insurance industry weighed in with a similar story.

According to a highly detailed complaint from lawyers for more than 140 of the world’s largest insurers, utilities including HECO and telecommunications firms that also used the power pole were at fault for the fallen line that sparked the blaze, and landowners such as Kamehameha Schools were to blame for fueling the fire by failing to cut back combustible grasses they knew posed a fire hazard.

The defendants “were well aware of the risks of wildfire associated with continuously operating energized powerlines during dry and windy weather conditions, overloading aged utility poles so as to further weaken them structurally, and disregarding the excessive overgrowth of invasive, highly flammable vegetation,” the insurers alleged. “Collectively, these oversight failures all contributed to the most destructive – and deadliest – human-caused disaster in State history.”

Attorney General Weighs In – Sort Of

Lawyers for the fire victims circulated pictures of fallen “Pole 7A,” showing what they said was termite damage that had allegedly weakened the pole. They blamed the afternoon fire on drifting embers from the morning fire, which they said reignited in high winds.

Investigators from the Fire Safety Research Institute declined to rule out that conclusion. In April, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez issued her timeline report based on the institute’s investigation. While Lopez’s report didn’t intend to show what caused the fire, it did show that the so-called afternoon fire flared up in the same location as the morning fire – less than an hour after the Maui Fire Department said the morning fire was extinguished.

“It was absolutely in the same area,” Steve Kerber, the research institute’s executive director, said at the time. But Kerber said it would be the ATF’s responsibility to determine the fire’s cause.

In August. Gov. Josh Green defended going forward with a settlement before Maui's report came out. The parties had been ordered by Maui Circuit Judge Peter Cahill to pursue a settlement through mediation. And Green noted that all the parties working on it, including plaintiffs’ attorneys, had already done extensive research into the cause of the fire. His goal was to get fire victims as much compensation as possible and as quickly as possible, Green added, and the contents of the ATF report would not have significantly changed the deal they reached.

“People love the idea of, ‘OK, the report will show who is, quote, guilty and therefore they will pay a fortune.’ That’s not how the world works,” Green said. “The report can show what happened, but the resources are still finite and no one that we were working on was trying to avoid responsibility, which was extraordinary, just some people said they didn’t have enough money to cover it.”

Earlier this week, Green said he anticipated that Maui County’s report would come as no surprise to many.

“I think you’re going to see what everyone has already expected,” Green told KHON on Monday. “The fire occurred. Some of the coals reignited and then went up in into the wind because of the, you know, hurricane-force winds that were 74 to 80 miles per hour. Very old wooden set of structures, and the town tragically burned.”

Lawyers for fire victims said the report vindicates their allegations.

"The ATF has confirmed that plaintiffs’ had it right all along: the fire was a single fire started by Hawaiian Electric and spread far and wide by unmaintained vegetation in a gully negligently maintained by Kamehameha Schools," Jesse Creed, a liaison counsel for more than 1,000 wildfire victims, said after Maui County's announcement. "Had Hawaiian Electric and Kamehameha Schools properly maintained their electric poles and vegetation, this fire would have never happened."

Civil Beat reporters Paula Dobbyn and Marcel Honore contributed to this story.

Civil Beat's coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.