The federal government wants to hire Maui residents displaced by the Lahaina fire, but lack of expertise could mean specialized workers from outside Maui come in and end up competing for already tight housing along with fire survivors.
Both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Department of Labor last week announced separate programs to find jobs for Maui residents who lost their jobs in the aftermath of the Aug. 8 fire that killed 115 people and destroyed an estimated 2,200 structures, most of them homes.
The same thing happened in the aftermath the wildfire that destroyed the town of Paradise, Calif., and killed 85 people in November 2018 in America’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century before the Lahaina disaster.
Most of the federal jobs initially offered in Paradise ended up going to out-of-town contractors, said Colette Curtis, recovery and economic development director for the town.
“There was no way to ensure that the labor was local,” Curtis said. “Much of the work was pretty highly specialized and couldn’t be done by just any contractor.”
FEMA announced Wednesday that it wants to fill 65 jobs as part of Lahaina’s recovery: 46 on Maui and 19 on Oahu.
The jobs are initially designed to last four months, but FEMA said career FEMA employees often started as temporary, local hires following previous disasters.
On Maui the jobs include civil rights specialist and emergency management specialist, and environmental floodplain specialist and historic preservation specialist on Oahu.
They’re aimed at fire evacuees who lost their jobs. No housing will be provided for them.
Some of the positions are considered entry-level. And depending on applicants’ backgrounds, they could be trained for some of the jobs, said FEMA spokesperson Patrick Boland.
“It would be hard to parachute in,” Boland said. “There will not be any housing provided.”
In an effort to close gaps between job requirements and training, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement plans to provide free, in-person certification and job training courses to Maui residents beginning Friday.
CNHA said in a statement that the upcoming training follows “community concerns about keeping jobs in Hawai‘i for local businesses and workers.”
“We need to make sure that our Maui residents and Maui-based companies, are front and center when these job opportunities become available,” CNHA CEO Kuhio Lewis said in a statement. “Our classes will help to ensure that they are prepared to take on that task. These workforce development courses will provide opportunities for individuals who have lost their jobs as a result of the fires. We want to help empower the Maui community to move forward together.”
To sign up for classes, visit HawaiianCouncil.org/maui-workforce-dev.
The U.S. Department of Labor also announced $10.5 million this week to the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations toward a total request of $21 million to provide “temporary jobs focused on cleaning up debris and repairing damage caused by the fires, and providing humanitarian assistance to the wildfire survivors.”
The two-year program would provide jobs for dislocated Maui residents “who are impacted as a direct result of the disaster,” DLIR spokesperson Bill Kunstman said.
Although DLIR will hire for cleaning up debris, Kunstman said the Environmental Protection Agency will be responsible for the initial phase of clearing out the most hazardous materials.
The same thing happened in Paradise after the Camp fire broke out, but few displaced residents were hired.
“These are jobs that require some training, some credentialing that you need right off the bat,” Curtis said.
The first wave of cleanup in Paradise, overseen by the EPA, began in January 2019 and was done by crews wearing full hazardous-material suits, she said.
Even the next phase of cleanup, done by heavy equipment operators beginning in February 2019, also required “pretty highly specialized training,” Curtis said. “It couldn’t be just any old contractor.”
Asked whether local evacuees were often hired for openings either through FEMA or the U.S. Department of Labor, Curtis said, “That really didn’t happen very often. It’s not realistic because the people that did those jobs were already licensed and expert in very technical jobs.”
U.S. Sen Brian Schatz told Congress on Tuesday that the Lahaina waste removal will be one of the most complex in FEMA history.
“We’re talking about tons and tons of waste that we will need to safely clean up off the streets and transport out of Hawaii,” Schatz said.
The waste from Paradise was shipped to three different sites hours away, and each load was closely monitored and weighed, Curtis said.
Survivors who were allowed to return to their properties were encouraged to wear personal protective equipment “because we didn’t think it was safe to be around,” she said.
Colin Moore teaches public policy at the University of Hawaii and serves as associate professor at the University of Hawaii Economic Resource Organization, and helped draft UHERO’s first report after the Lahaina fire that outlined a long list of challenges, including finding workers to help in the recovery.
Long-term affordable housing “clearly is going to be a longtime challenge on Maui where 3% of the housing stock was destroyed in the fire,” Moore said. “Maui was a community that didn’t have a lot of housing to begin with.”
Maui does not have enough mental health and other health care workers and will need to import an unknown number. If workers also need to fly in to help with Lahaina’s recovery, Moore said, “the housing pressure will be immense.”
“I’m not sure people always understand that 2,000 homes were lost in the fire,” he said, “and those were often multiple-generational families. And then you’re housing relief workers on top of that? This is going to be a long process.”
