(08-17-2023, 01:44 AM)HereOnThePrimalEdge Wrote: Housing Finance & Development Corp, The Bishop Estate, Maui County, and the State of Hawaii,
ironyak,
Do you know if any of those entities leased out their land to Pioneer Mill for sugar cane production? If not, did their holdings remain in a natural state? Did they burn anyway?
...
Makila Land owns most the property that I remember growing sugar cane before the mill closed.
So lots of cross-talk between the threads, but if we take dobanions post about the likely area of where the Lahaina fire started (which aligns well with other eye witnesses who spotted the fire early and resided about here on Lahainaluna Rd), this parcel is the one owned by the Bishop Estate that I mentioned. I don't know if it ever was used for sugar cane production and haven't been able to find a worthwhile historic map of the area to help figure that out. The answer may be in here but at 610 pages of mostly verbal parcel descriptions, I don't know the area well enough to translate into specific plots. That record does mention various plots Pioneer Mill leased/acquired from the Bishop Estate, but if that includes some or all of this parcel, and what was actually done with it is unclear to me. That plot did/does contain various land segmentations and ditches/channels & ruts/dirt roads at least back into the 1950s and sits very near the sugar mill so it likely played some roll. Regardless, a quick Google street view from various angles shows a lot of scrub grass conditions more recently.
The other landholders I mentioned are those that own the largest parcels immediately next to the developed areas and so would so candidates for serving as firebreaks at the WUI, regardless of their past use. If you're interested in looking at those details or farther mauka like the large Makila Land parcel you're familiar with, the Maui Tax Parcel viewer is pretty useful.