A windblown inferno roared through Lahaina town a year ago, incinerating everything in its path. Starting on fallow former plantation lands choked with Guinea grass, the Lahaina tragedy was a wildfire that became an urban fire feeding primarily off of built structures.

Wildfires have consumed an immense swath of Manoa’s Waahila Ridge three times over the past decade. Helicopters and ground crews worked full days to contain these blazes. On Hipawai Place and Pamoa Road next to Saint Francis School, we watched, fascinated but terrified of what could happen if windblown embers found their way to our neighborhood rooftops.

The city Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP) is currently reviewing Avalon Group’s proposal to demolish and clear-cut the former Saint Francis campus in Manoa as part of a proposal to build 93 compact rowhouses, with the potential to total up to 172 units through optional accessory dwelling unit conversions. The project seeks to accommodate 378 cars, meaning 378 gasoline tanks. Avalon acknowledges in its high-density housing application that fire hydrant pressure available in the area is not adequate, so its dense development would need to rely on privately maintained interior fire sprinklers.

Will these prove adequate? If not would Avalon’s development compete with current residents of the area for scarce fire hydrant water?

Fire risk is not the only reason for DPP to deny the plan, which would lay waste to an exquisite historic sanctuary property. Site of a recorded heiau, iwi kupuna burials, and a century-old convent and chapel, it is also habitat for endangered manu-o-Ku (white tern) and migratory kolea that thrive among the campus’ many magnificent old cyprus, Cook pine, kukui, kiawe, banyan and plumeria trees.

In the ‘ili of Kauwala‘a, Saint Francis is historic for its connection to Kalaupapa, and the legacy of Mother Marianne Cope. Canonized in 2012 for her lifetime of service to Hansen’s disease patients on the Molokai peninsula, St. Marianne’s relics were displayed for many years in a beautiful koa and glass case in the Manoa convent’s entryway.

Because of the bottleneck caused by the extreme narrowness of Pamoa Road, its only entrance and exit, the so-called Aria Lane would wreak havoc on local traffic patterns at rush hour, night and day. With its 378 cars generating up to 1,000 additional vehicular trips per day, traffic would likely gridlock during evening rush hour, out beyond narrow Alaula Way, causing major backups daily of incoming traffic on University Avenue, Oahu Avenue and East Manoa Road. During the morning rush hour, Pamoa and Alaula residents would likely have difficulty even getting out of their driveways.

This unacceptable outcome for all who live, work or bring their children to school in Manoa would become evident as soon as rerouted demolition and construction traffic begins. Large heavy trucks, barred from Alaula Way because of its steep hill, would begin roaring up University Avenue, turning right on East Manoa Road, right again onto much-narrower Kolowalu Street near Noelani Elementary School, and right again, to roar down the three-block length of old, substandard, 20-foot-wide Pamoa Road.

On Aug. 7, the Manoa Neighborhood Board nearly unanimously approved a resolution asking DPP to deny Avalon’s PD-H (planned development housing) application.

Most residents of Pamoa Road are kupuna. Pedestrians and bicyclists, children and pets, tourists, students and University of Hawaii workers currently coexist peacefully with cars on Pamoa. A guardrail of vehicles parked daily along Pamoa’s makai side slows traffic and protects all users. The former dirt path to two heiau complexes has evolved to become an aloha lane.

This is how it should stay.

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Upcoming hearing: At 10:30 a.m. Oct. 7, the city Department of Planning and Permitting will hold a hearing on Avalon Group’s application for Aria Lane Manoa, at the Fasi Municipal Building, 6th floor conference room.

Ellen Sofio, M.D., is a Manoa resident.