Keeping gutters clear of leaves and debris, installing metal mesh screening on eave and foundation vents, and keeping grass surrounding a home trimmed can make a difference in whether a house survives a wildfire. 

With Hawai‘i seeing bigger and more frequent fires, Kaua‘i County will launch a program on Aug. 1 to provide residents with free wildfire home assessments. The goal is to educate homeowners on how they can harden their homes and reduce their wildfire risk. 

“We’re just looking for everything that we can do to make our community safer,” said Kaua‘i Fire Chief Michael Gibson. 

Kaua‘i Planning Director Ka‘āina Hull said that most of the public, including himself before he learned about wildfire science, are under the impression that there’s nothing they can do against a wall of fire. But, in reality, embers — not that wall of fire — are the primary cause of home ignitions. 

The Hawa‘i Wildfire Management Organization will help the county roll out the program, as well as provide ongoing assessor trainings and connect it to additional prevention and preparedness resources. HWMO already operates a wildfire home assessment program that has conducted over 415 assessments over the last four years around the state. 

Reducing Wildfire Risk At Home

A group of roughly 30 county staff from the fire, planning, elderly affairs and other departments will provide the home assessments. Their training began at the beginning of this year when they took a two-day National Fire Protection Association class where they learned how and why structures are destroyed during wildfires, how loss can be minimized, and how to work with homeowners and communities on mitigation. Additional training is planned for later this spring. 

The county is planning to create a website where homeowners can sign up for assessments. Assessors will walk around each home’s exterior and yard, educating homeowners on potential changes they can make. The assessments will not be punitive, Gibson said. 

On the home, they’ll be looking at things like whether any tiles or shingles are missing from the roof, if gutters and roofs are clear of debris, whether any windows or screens are broken or loose, and whether any combustible materials are stored under or right next to the structure. Windows can be a weak point on a structure because curtains and other nearby items inside the home can catch on fire if there’s an accumulation of heat on the outside, Gibson said.

“Many of us just don’t understand what is a vulnerability and what isn’t,” Hull said.   

Assessors will also look at how landscaping and hardscaping can slow a fire’s spread, such as by spacing out vegetation and keeping tree canopies away from the home.   

“Even just one house doing this makes a difference in a neighborhood,” Gibson said, noting examples from the Palisades, Eaton and Lahaina fires where random houses stood untouched. “It’s for the most part because they had these conditions.”

County staff will be conducting the assessments on the county’s time. How they balance their roles as assessors with their primary duties in their departments will depend on how robust the public response is, Hull said. 

Sam Higgins, a Līhu‘e firefighter, was driven to participate in the two-day training by his experience responding to brushfires in Waimea, where he was stationed for five years. 

That includes the 1,000-acre brushfire between Hanapēpē and Kaumakani in July 2024. The Kaua‘i Police Department conducted door-to-door evacuations of over 200 homes. Ultimately, a shed in Kaumakani Camp was destroyed but no injuries were reported.

That fire, he said, helped affirm to him and others that such proximity to brush land could seriously harm neighborhoods. 

“Being a part of it was important to me to just help people from losing homes,” he said. 

Wildfire Prevention A Major County Focus

In 2025, KFD responded to 301 brushfires, slightly down from 2024’s 337 brushfires. Gibson said it’s not a notable decline because the number and frequency of wildfires fluctuate with the weather and season. 

One of its more notable recent responses occurred in December, when there was a 100-foot by 50-foot brushfire in Kōloa. The fire was caused by a large green waste pile spontaneously combusting and caused a lot of heavy smoke in the area. Gibson said that generated awareness in the surrounding community. 

“Thank goodness there was no wind that day,” said Jeri Di Pietro, president of the Kōloa Community Association. “I was driving down Kōloa Road and could see the smoke, and it was overwhelming.”

The association has been discussing wildfire prevention for years and has a subcommittee that’s worked with major landowners to create fire breaks and keep vegetation down. She thinks many Kōloa and Po‘ipū residents would be interested in getting home assessments. 

“For us, that haole koa is so dangerous,” she said, referring to the many areas in and around Kōloa and Po‘ipū with invasive grasses and shrubs that easily spread fire. “It gets to be such a tinderbox.”  

Kaua‘i’s wildfire home assessment program follows the county’s 2025 adoption of a law requiring the island’s five plantation camps to adhere to home hardening and landscaping rules. It was the state’s first Wildland Urban Interface ordinance. 

Recently, the Kaua‘i Planning Commission approved zoning permits for a Kōloa housing project with the condition that the homes incorporate those standards. Hull said that the mayor’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 budget includes a new wildfire prevention specialist that will work with larger proposed developments to make sure their projects are more resilient to wildfires. 

Hull said that residents have learned to live with water to a certain degree with the county’s flood plain management, sea level rise, shoreline setback and coastal regulations. He sees building homes less likely to ignite as the next step in climate resiliency. 

“Now we need to learn to live with fire,” he said.   

If created, the wildfire prevention specialist would also coordinate with the insurance industry to see what the county can do to help the industry keep premiums at a steady rate as climate change accelerate and climate disasters become more common and severe, Hull said. According to a December 2025 Hawai‘i Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice report, non-renewals for condominium insurance increased by 216% statewide between 2018 and 2023. 

Growing Wildfire Home Assessment Offerings

HWMO launched its home assessment program in 2022, starting with a cohort of 40 trained community members. It was meant to be another tool for its Firewise community leaders to use to get more community members involved in wildfire prevention, said Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of HWMO. 

Over 285 assessments have been conducted on Hawai‘i island, 65 on O‘ahu, 55 on Maui and five each on Kaua‘i and Moloka‘i. HWMO is the lead organization for all counties except Kaua‘i, though it also works closely with the fire departments and state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife statewide, Pickett said. 

Maui Assistant Fire Chief Ryan Otsubo said HWMO has trained about a dozen Maui-based volunteers and HWMO staff. Capt. Malcom Medrano in the Honolulu Fire Prevention Bureau’s Community Relations Office said six staffers participated in assessor training last fall. On Hawai‘i island, Hawai‘i Fire Department and HWMO in February 2025 hosted a wildfire summit that included a HWMO-led workshop for community members to learn more about home hardening, said acting Fire Chief Daniel Volpe. 

Pickett added that residents don’t necessarily need to get assessments to learn how to better protect their homes from wildfires. HWMO’s website, for example, has several resources. But she’s excited that more people are getting trained in the best practices and how they can share that information with others. 

“There’s been this cascading growth of wanting this knowledge,” she said. 

Civil Beat’s reporting on Kauaʻi is supported in part by a grant from the G. N. Wilcox Trust.