The company recorded 27 failures around 5:00 am local time on August 8.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The first reported wildfire on Maui last week may have been caused by damaged power lines, according to newly published research by a power monitoring company.
On August 7, more than an hour before Maui authorities said the first fire broke out, according to authorities, a security camera at the Maui Bird Conservation Center in the Upcountry region of east Maui , captured a bright flash in the forest.
“It’s windy, and then there’s a flash, and I think it’s when a tree falls on a power line,” Jennifer Pribble, senior research coordinator at the Conservation Center, said in the video that was later released. “The power goes out, our generator comes on, the camera comes back online, and then the forest catches fire.”
Bob Marshall, chief executive of Whisker Labs, a company that sells home sensors to monitor for precursors of electrical fires, told ABC News this bright flash in the images is known as an “arc flash,” which occurs when a power line arrives. . in contact with something like a tree or vegetation.
Marshall said his company’s sensors on Upcountry homes, which document power grid failures, recorded a “very steep drop in electrical voltage” at precisely the same time the flash was seen on video.
“These two things are perfectly correlated in time. So this is a measure of the grid and the video showing the same event,” Marshall said. “One is a video image. The other is a measurement of electricity in the grid.”
The video was recorded at 10:47 p.m. on August 7. The fire was reported just after midnight, according to Maui County authorities.
Whisker Labs said it has 325,000 sensors in the US, 1,000 in Hawaii and 78 on Maui.
The company released a report Wednesday to ABC News that data from its Maui sensors recorded 122 failures from Aug. 7-8.
“What we do know is that the network was incredibly stressed Monday night and throughout the day on Tuesday,” Marshall said. “I was trying to deal with the winds that I was encountering and what our network clearly documents is that there were 122 faults that occurred during that time period, any one of which could have started a fire.”
The company recorded 27 failures around 5:00 am local time on August 8, before losing all connection to its sensors in Lahaina approximately 90 minutes later.
Marshall said that historical data from sensors in the region recorded an average of five power failures per day.
When asked about data from Whisker Labs, Hawaiian Electric, which is the subject of a class action lawsuit by Lahaina victims and survivors who allege the utility failed to properly turn off power during storms, told ABC News in a statement: “We will not comment on pending litigation.”
“At this early stage, the cause of the fire has not been determined and we will work with the state and county as they conduct their review,” Hawaiian Electric said in a statement.
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