A trip to Maui to help with restoration efforts inspires students and faculty with hope to return
By Kim Lamb GregoryA trip to Maui to help with the Lahaina restoration efforts had such an impact on 91Ƶ students, faculty, and the residents of Lahaina that planning is already underway to return next year.
The 20 students on the 10-day service-learning trip say the experience changed them.
“The services we provided to the communities affected by the fires in Lahaina were life-changing,” said Anthropology and Environmental Science & Resource Management (ESRM) double major Charla Robertson. “What the people there continue to endure is sobering, and I wish we could’ve stayed even longer to volunteer with them.”
91Ƶ has a long relationship with Lahaina, with faculty-led research trips to Maui going back more than a decade. Much of the research was conducted under the direction of 91Ƶ biologist and whale expert Rachel Cartwright, in cooperation with a whale research organization in Maui called the Keiki Kohala Project (KKP).
In fact, research conducted by Cartwright and the KKP with the help of 91Ƶ students
has been cited internationally in publications such as Smithsonian Magazine and The
Guardian.
“We’ve been surveying the whales in this area and collecting their fluke (whale’s tail) images all the way back to 2008, so we know these whales well,” Cartwright said. “And our images were quite key as we collected a lot from student trips.”
When fires tore through Maui in August of 2023 causing billions of dollars of damage, the faculty and students who had been to Maui on research trips were heartsick. The fire destroyed 3,000 structures, reducing the historic town of Lahaina to blackened ruins.
The boat captain students always worked with had lost his vessel and many of 91Ƶ’s non-government organization (NGO) partners had lost their homes.
91Ƶ students and faculty have helped with restoration efforts around New Orleans for years following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, so they knew years of cleanup and restoration lay ahead for the citizens of Lahaina.
Volunteers clean up the forest after the burn.
Besides helping with restoration, the students could gather valuable research on how the whales, water and environment were affected by such a catastrophic fire.
“The services we provided to the communities affected by the fires in Lahaina were
life-changing.”
-Charla Robertson
Professor of Mathematics Cynthia Wyels, Professor of Environmental Science & Resource Management (ESRM) Sean Anderson, Associate Professor of ESRM Clare Steele, ESRM Lecturer Dorothy Horn, and Cartwright put their heads together and arranged the service-learning trip.
During the 10 days, the students did whatever was needed—handed out supplies, planted or removed vegetation and cleaned up debris—while also engaging in research.
The 91Ƶ volunteer group gathers for instruction.
“I think you can’t just parachute in after the disaster, but we have data going back years. We also have necessary skills,” Wyels said. “During the Thomas Fire, our students used drones to do archaeological mapping, for example. And this is super relative to the climate change research we’ve been doing, too.”
Once they arrived in Maui, the students got to work. Three teams of students rotated each day, with one team monitoring terrestrial fire impact and checking water quality.
“The second team lent their backs for anything local that the NGOs needed,” Anderson said. “It could be demolition or planting, babysitting or handing out water.”
The third team took boats out to see how the fire had affected the whales and calves off the coast.
“The experience was above and beyond our expectations,” Steele said. “We had two separate boats launching from two locations, and it was complicated by the lack of a harbor (because of the fire), but we were able to do a good job of looking at the whale population.”
After the team returned home, the students got to work analyzing images and samples
they had collected in Maui, and Anderson had Lahaina volunteers speak to his Spring
semester class called “Disaster Recovery and Environmental Modeling.”
The students also created their own WhatsApp group to find opportunities to volunteer locally—especially for work involving helping the environment.
Before long, a thank you letter arrived from the Mauna Kahālāwai Watershed Partnership, thanking the students for their hard work, weeding and planting local Hawaiian plants in the Olowalu Valley.
“Your actions have echoed the essence of ‘Aloha ʻĀina’ – love of the land,” the letter read, in part, “and we are deeply appreciative of your enthusiasm.”