HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Seven months after Maui police risked their lives attempting to evacuate fleeing residents and visitors from Lahaina town, their union claims department leadership has yet to provide officers with basic equipment to protect them against future fires.
The union’s ask is for respiratory protection. Things like masks — along with more fire training.
Officers say they’ve actually been asking for the equipment and training since a Lahaina fire five years ago that destroyed nearly two dozen homes.
“You can see on some of the body camera footage, the effects of the smoke attacking the lungs of our officers as they struggled to keep breathing while evacuating people,” said Nick Krau, Maui Chapter chair for the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers.
HNN Investigates
The body camera footage he’s referring to is from the Aug. 8 fire that consumed Lahaina and claimed the lives of more than 100 people.
The video showed some officers violently coughing and spitting as they worked to evacuate the town.
One officer could be overheard saying to his partner, “Oh God. We’re going to die 10 years earlier for that.”
Krau said, “Police work is already dangerous. Our employers shouldn’t make it more hazardous by not ensuring we have the proper safety equipment before we start each shift.”
And calls for basic protective equipment date back years.
Also from HNN Investigates:
In a July 2019 memo, the Hawaii Occupational Safety and Health Division notified MPD it received notice of a “safety and health hazard.” Specifically, that “there was no respiratory protection program established and implemented to protect emergency responders while carrying out their duties such as responding to wildfires.” The memo said there was also “no respiratory protection ... provided” to officers.
The following month, then MPD Chief Tivoli Faaumu sent a letter to HIOSH admitting that although the department did have some N95 particulate respirators not everyone knew they were available and some police stations didn’t have enough. The letter went on to say the “department will ensure each station is equipped with an adequate amount of N95 particulate respirators” and that it would provide training.
But Krau says that’s not what happened.
“N95 masks were made available after the 2018 fire,” he said. “But there was no consistent or sustained policy or program in place to continue issuing updated equipment to the officers.”
As for training, Krau told HNN Investigates, “I haven’t had any training in fire response or responding to fires since I was in the police academy and that was over 23 years ago. The same goes for all of our officers.”
When current MPD Chief John Pelletier took over in 2021, the issue persisted.
And on Aug. 8, as flames tore through Lahaina, body camera video shows officers struggled to breath as they warned residents of a fire that would later erase the town.
In the preliminary after-action report on the August wildfires, the department admits that “not all officers had proper personal protective equipment.”
The union says on top of not having adequate masks during the fire, the department also didn’t supply appropriate PPE in the first days of recovery efforts — when a higher level of protection is needed.
Krau says those masks were acquired by the union, “We don’t know what they were exposed to. And we probably won’t know for several years from now. And that’s what I worry about all the time.”
Last Thursday, HNN Investigates asked Pelletier to sit down for an interview to explain why his officers didn’t have appropriate masks while responding to the August fire and during initial recovery efforts.
The department didn’t answer the question. Instead a spokesperson said that MPD started a “voluntary” respiratory protection program in 2020. The email went on to say since last year’s disaster “respirator masks were made available to personnel who passed the required medical clearance.”
The union says that’s not enough.
Krau believes masks should be issued to all officers just like every other piece of safety equipment. “The department has a duty to protect them and give them the proper training and equipment,” he said.
Also, included in the after-action report was a recommendation to create “go-bags of personal protective equipment.” The union says to its knowledge no officer has been supplied with one and MPD confirmed they haven’t been distributed, though the department is seeking funding for the effort in next year’s budget.
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