Hawaiian Electric said it wasn’t sufficiently focused on wildfire risk before August’s deadly blaze on Maui and proposed nearly tripling the money it would now spend on the effort, the Wall Street Journal reported. The utility, in regulatory filings this week, said it had been more concerned with hurricanes than with wildfire risk before the Aug. 8 fire that killed 100 people and leveled the town of Lahaina. The company said it now wants to revise a plan to improve its power grid to focus more on wildfires. In the initial plan, issued last year, Hawaiian Electric proposed investing roughly $190 million to strengthen power lines and equipment to account for a range of risks across the islands. The new plan proposes spending the same amount of money, but shifts resources from other areas such as hazardous-tree removal to upgrades and technologies needed to address wildfire risk. The changes address multiple potential threats, the company said on Tuesday. “Hawaii has experienced a significant increase in damaging hurricane and tropical storm activity over the past 10 years, and our resilience work reflects that continuing threat, along with wildfires, tsunamis, floods and other extreme weather events,” it said. Hawaiian Electric’s acknowledgment that it hadn’t devoted enough resources to preventing wildfires comes as the utility faces continued scrutiny over its actions regarding the Lahaina blaze and whether its equipment sparked the inferno, which it denies.
