2019 01-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 29, 2019 Restoration Area is an area that DLNR is trying to restore as native forest – but because they’re keeping all the grazers out – the grasses are growing and that was in December. I’ve not been up there recently – but I suspect that a lot of that is brown and that’s a very large area. The second picture is on fire break five and that’s probably three miles up the road from Kilohana check-in station and that’s four to five feet tall and very difficult to walk through. When my dog and I were doing this bird survey, I mean, she got burned out. I got burned out just trying to get through a lot of this grass and, as I said, it’s probably a lot browner now. The next page is the Puunana area out by the Parker cabin and you can see we were up there hunting – Brian back here was in the picture but, again, four to five feet tall – we’re on the road and it’s not like just on the road, you know, like you drive on the public highways – paved highways and you see a lot of grass next to the road and then it shortens out... That’s not what’s happening here – this is what it looks like throughout a lot of the area – so there’s a lot of fire load up there. The reason this is important and it hasn’t hit us yet, OK, I’m gonna switch topics – I lived in Santa Rosa, California in the early 2000s – now in October 2017 Santa Rosa burned and it’s a city of 172,000 people – Sonoma County – the similarity is that like a lot of West Hawaii there’s a lot of grasslands backed by – in California those are hills, but, you know, could be mountains that are pretty much inaccessible. The started back in the mountains – very difficult to fight and so it grew large, intense – then you had strong winds that blew it into the inhabited areas and it couldn’t be stopped – it was so wide and it wasn’t just that a lot of homes burned – 32 people died and in analyzing why that happened – part of it was the speed of the fire – it was getting blown by forty to fifty mile-an-hour winds. And fortunately, our fires haven’t seen that yet – but we get 40 to 50 an hour winds, you know, where we are. Secondly, the fire spread – it branched out – and it was very fast. They were saying that the fire was jumping 150 yards at a time because of burning embers that were being blown by the wind and Santa Rosa did not have a very good alert system so a lot of people A) didn’t know the fire was coming, B) when they knew it they didn’t realize how fast it was coming. A lot of people who died were trying to get their stuff together to get out but ended up being trapped. If you think about the communities here like Waikii Ranch – just below the Kaohe area – has two exits – both of them on the mauka side of the subdivision on Old Saddle Road. Waikoloa has one road in and out. We do have an emergency exit down to the coast but it’s a locked gate. Puuanahulu, you know, if the fire branches out and surrounds Puuanahulu – they’re trapped. So these are issues dealing with West Hawaii but, you know, they’re issues of life and death potentially and the shame of it is that it’s being caused in large part by the efforts on the part of the State – they’re spending money to do that. Now attachment three is last year’s study that is just a summary of last year’s study on the palila population done by the U.S.G.S. and the University of Hawaii – Hilo. And, as you can see, the chart – the last twenty years there’s been an intense effort to eradicate the sheep on Mauna Kea and in spite of that effort you see the palila population going down – in fact – 3