2021-09-19 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

side and we had a lot of smoke going down that side, of course, the concern came up – are we going to jump the mauka road 190 and pose a problem for Waikoloa Village. And again, lots of concern, lots of communication going on. We have those winds, yes, in fact, and we all know this the fires did jump and, again, communication I have to give a lot of credit to our county fire department – they were watching the weather reports – the predictions of the wind reports and seeing how they could best manage this. When the thing jumped there was a concern that it was going to sweep all the way down to Waikoloa Village and there was a concern whether or not that might happen. The winds were able to die back a little bit and I believe that would have been Sunday night and so they were able to set a back fire which, again, to burn some of the fire load to get it out of the way of the fire so we wouldn’t have to worry about that coming back and flurry back up later and possibly jumping the Waikoloa Road to jump onto the Kona side of that and this was all done – I think it did jump in one place but they were able to put that out. Cause everyone knows we had that Waikoloa evacuation, again, talking to the Chief on this – this was something they were watching very, very closely because it depended upon our weather patterns. If we had had more gentler trade winds the call for evacuation probably would have not come – the problem was that 60 mph winds that were gusting and it was predicted if we got a good fire started on the makai side of Mamalahoa Highway it would be less than 2 hours to the Waikoloa Village and if we got to the Waikoloa Village that’s where the deep concern – we had so much fire load down in there and the concern was if we got it into the village it would be very, very difficult to stop it. That is what triggered the concern for evacuation – that’s why the Fire Chief issued the evacuation order. Many people evacuated but a lot of people didn’t and we’re actually going back and having to talk story about that – because of the concern if you didn’t evacuate – that could pose a problem. I’ll come back to talk about that in a second. After action report of how everyone discussed this – this is something the Fire Chief and I talked story on – what happened was – I think it was noon he actually made the call. The evacuation route in the Waikoloa Village – which is at the end of Hulu Street that goes straight down to the Queen Kaahumanu Highway – that was opened up about 10:00 in the morning. In the cautious position – that if we needed to evacuate the road would be open and it’s a partially paved mainly graded gravel road that’s easy for all cars to go through. Anyway, that road was opened and they Fire Chief, I think it as at noon, made the determination to evacuate. We learned a lot through this evacuation. The police learned a lot as far as how we’re gonna manage the intersections coming forth – we had 3 intersections to manage – the one right by the helicopter – right above Waikoloa Resort – they one coming down from the Waikoloa Road – we had the evacuation which is right near the fire station and then we had the Kawaihae Road intersection because we ran into a problem with all these cars coming out – we started running into traffic problems. Major Bird who is the relatively new major for the west side – she was the captain in Waimea previously – this came under her command and I talked to her about and they realized very, very quickly that we were running into some bottlenecks as far as the evacuation. So that was corrected actually quite quickly and they were able to get more officers on the scene to better direct traffic but we learned about that – talking to the chief said, you know what it probably would have worked 7