2021-09-19 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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those helicopters to come in and respond as quickly as they could and they made that call early, which I think helped us out a lot. At one point I was talking to Chief Todd last week and this was also previous to Chief Bergin the west side battalion commander – this is at one point the fire was going so fast that the bulldozers couldn’t even keep up with it because the fire was spreading that fast. Puukapu – the Hawaiian Homes area – that was also being severely impacted and we had a bunch of issues going on there. About Saturday afternoon is when the community really started engaging – that’s when my phone really started to ring. At one point we had 27 bulldozers working the fire and a lot of those bulldozers are contractor bulldozers that called and said, hey, we can bring a dozer – what do you want us to do? And so my phone was ringing on that and I connected them to the fire chief or the battalion chief and let them direct because these are our – these all have to be directed. Last week – I have a radio show once a month – and I had Fire Chief Todd on there – it’s just a talk story – and we were talking about the fire. He says, you know, it’s one thing when you have maybe a couple thousand acres and 3 or 4 bulldozers, going, it’s another thing to have 40,000 acres and 20 bulldozers going and 9 helicopters \[unclear\] they had – very, very different – and you start almost running a battlefield, you know, I was interested in some of the comments that were made. So what happened was we started to shift very, very quickly. Puukapu – I tell you – that community jumped in and they worked really hard to start backing each other up and supporting each other going forward. The first bulldozer that went out – went to Puukapu, ah, Chief Bergin had sent it directly there, as well as, the first firefighting units started fighting fire in the Puukapu region and the reason for that is because that’s an area that has houses and the primary charge of the county is to save houses so that was the initial push to get that handled. But that’s when things started kind of going off the rails and in Puukapu they started to work very, very diligently to support each other, help each other out. We started to see the problems going on out there. One of the problems we encountered was not enough water and we also had trouble out there with the roads and also trouble with enough resources out there. And this is where the community jumped in and started volunteering and helping each other out. I know there’s some construction companies that went out to Puukapu and just started working. They hadn’t signed up officially with the county at that point – they just started to help and started to get things done. And, again, that was the community response to what needed to get done: pushing fire breaks, trying to haul water – and they’re using anything to haul water to put out the fire. They’re getting the fire breaks cut but some of those mounds of kikuyu grass as everybody on this call knows – those things can smolder for quite a long time and so they were trying to work on that while still cutting the fire breaks and now this was where the fire ebb and flows and it changed so much throughout the whole thing. The community was working there – my office – I started to realize that we didn’t have a great communication ongoing between everybody and so that’s when on Sunday we decided to start communicating – tried to get regular updates – now I was in direct communication with the county fire and also the military as far as helping give updates to the community so they would know what is going on – now conversely and it worked the other way pretty well – when we did that what was also happening was that the community started watching the fire and watching for 5