The car tires, propane tanks, gas generators and rusty appliances heaped on the side of a dirt road waiting to be hauled away filled Desiree Graham with relief.
“That means all that stuff is not in people’s yards,” she said on a blustery July day in Kahikinui, a remote Native Hawaiian homestead community in southeast Maui where wildfire is a top concern.
In June, neighbors and volunteers spent four weekends clearing rubbish from their properties in a community-wide effort to create “defensible space,” or areas around homes free of ignitable vegetation and debris. They purged 12 tons of waste.
“It’s ugly, but it’s pretty beautiful to me,” said Graham, a member of Kahikinui’s Firewise committee, part of a rapidly growing program from the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association that