A Year After a Devastating Fire, Lahaina Is Ready to Rebuild. But How?

Much of the fire-ravaged community on the island of Maui has been cleared of debris. But for a town steeped in history, there are thorny questions about what the future should look like.

Across nine generations, Archie Kalepa’s family has seen the waterfront in Lahaina, a town on the island of Maui, undergo repeated transformation.

Once the home of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s royalty, Lahaina’s shores over the centuries became a stop for whalers plundering the seas, for missionaries spreading the Christian gospel, for plantation owners who opened canneries to prepare their bounty of pineapples for export. More recently, tourists packed high-end galleries and shoreline restaurants that offered sunset meals of ahi tuna and taro.

Relics of each of those layers of history were turned to ash a year ago, when an Aug. 8 inferno roared through Lahaina, killing at least 102 people. Now, as the task of rebuilding begins, Mr. Kalepa, a community leader who has organized fire-recovery efforts, is siding with many of those who see a chance to prioritize the town’s deeper history over the economic interests that have dominated for decades.

That would mean doing what for many has seemed unthinkable until now: transforming the famous waterfront by peeling back history, removing some of the gift shops, restaurants and beachwear boutiques that, before the fire, perched above the shoreline.

“All this has got to go,” Mr. Kalepa said as he looked over the building foundations, still jutting up from the beach and ocean.

Faced with a breadth of devastation and a depth of history unlike any other modern American community razed by wildfire, officials over the past year have strained to rehouse thousands of people, stabilize livelihoods and remove hundreds of millions of pounds of debris so that many lots sit like blank slates, topped with layers of fresh gravel.