One-click Link to Report Smoke
Cane burning on Maui is getting worse as HC&S’s parent company A&B and other developers urbanize what used to be cane fields. Unlike the mainland where ag burning is conducted far from towns, Maui is a small island and the cane smoke is choking towns for 9 months out of the year. In 2011, due to HC&S’s reckless disregard of weather conditions, a number of new lung disease cases were diagnosed. Physicians put the blame on cane smoke. Because HC&S burned during inversion layers and on windless days, choking smoke descended on our towns causing residents to literally flee their homes.
Bumper stickers are here!
Write Dept of Health TODAY!
Ask them to deny the 2013 Open Air Burn Permit
Send to:
Nolan Harai – Dept of Heath
POB 3378
Honolulu, HI 96801-3378
And say:
1. Please do NOT grant HC&S an open air burning permit.
2. If you give a permit please specify that no smoke can go to ground level where homes, business, parks etc. are that will get into people’s lungs.
3. If a permit is given, please don’t let them start burning prior to the determination of whether this is a no burn day and on no account prior to 8:30am so that we have a chance to close up our homes and get our kids to school first.
Sign your name and address
The 2012 Sign Wave
See photos
In 2012, despite what HC&S says are its best efforts, most every smoke plume eventually collapsed over a population center. Ma’alaea and North Kihei were particularly hard hit. The Department of Health, which issues the open air burn permit annually, agrees that most every plume will collapse at the end of the burn and drop to ground level. And yet they continue to allow burns and tell us that HC&S met their standard of “miminization”. Minimization is a vague word that means nothing and most certainly does not mean that no smoke dropped down on our towns.
Maui has an epidemic of asthma and reactive airway disease, caused mostly by cane smoke. Not only does this affect our health and quality of life but it is literally killing our children. Asthma can be a dangerous disease and some of us have lost loved ones to an asthma attack. Most of us have watched over a loved one as they struggled to breathe from an attack.
Download Our Poster
It is not acceptable that HC&S continue these destructive farming practices. We call upon County, State and Federal regulators to end agricultural burning on Maui.
Please sign our petition and let us know if you have a story to tell for our contemplated lawsuit. Please also document any time you make a smoke complaint because it appears that HC&S has…er…missed several hundred complaints when they applied for their annual burning permit.