RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM
Betty Magee, left, and George Baker were among a crowd of onlookers who watched from Lanai Lookout as the Air 1 fire helicopter dropped water on a brush fire on Koko Crater.
Fire scars
Koko CraterHouses are narrowly spared
from flames that cast a smoky
pall over East Oahu
With flames as high as 20 feet whipped by shifting winds, a fire on the slopes of Koko Crater yesterday burned more than 100 acres of dry brush and trees and threatened more than a dozen homes.
The blaze was reported at 11:45 a.m. by personnel at the Koko Head Shooting Range. By noon, winds were pushing the blaze up over the crater's top and toward a cluster of homes on Kekupua Street.
An hour later, residents were beside fire crews and battling the blaze with garden hoses as flames inched within yards of their property.
About 45 firefighters worked for more than five hours to get the blaze under control. They were expected to monitor the blaze -- by late last night a string of mostly inaccessible flames headed toward Sandy Beach -- into the morning.
Battalion Chief Thomas Perkins said the cause of the fire is unknown. But a dry summer and yesterday's erratic winds are being blamed for creating favorable conditions for the flames to spread quickly toward a small community behind Kaiser High School.
The fire threatened about a dozen homes on Kekupua Street -- at one point singeing bushes and low grasses within feet of Polly Sodoka's backyard.
Sodoka was napping late yesterday morning when she smelled smoke and assumed that a neighbor was barbecuing. When the smell got stronger, she looked outside a back window and saw the flames.
"Then I knew it was a fire, and I thought of California and all their homes," she said. "I thought, 'I hope I have insurance to rebuild.'"
The raging California fires -- a series of blazes that destroyed thousands of homes, have burned about 750,000 acres and are still threatening some areas -- were in other homeowners' minds as well.
"It really looked threatening," said resident Gerald Gakiya, whose home is right behind the Hawaii Kai high school. "It reminded me of the California fire."
The fire started near the shooting range and then split, Perkins said, with flames spreading both toward Lunalilo Home Road and the Halona Blowhole.
A line of fire also traveled straight up the crater, but eventually petered out.
Jeff Merz, a Honolulu urban planner, got to within 20 feet of the flames on the Ewa side of Koko Head while hiking with a group of friends yesterday afternoon on Koko Crater Trail.
He said he and two others had seen a small brush fire about the "size of someone's back yard" erupt near the shooting range while they were at the top of the trail.
"We started hiking down, I looked over and this little brush fire had turned into this raging thing," he said.
"It was like the equivalent of water gushing uphill."
RONEN ZILBERMAN / RZILBERMAN@STARBULLETIN.COM
Firefighters finished extinguishing part of a fire that burned through dry scrub along the flanks of Koko Crater yesterday.The three, one of whom had sprained his ankle on his way up, started sprinting down the trail through smoke so heavy that at one point they were running blindly. No one from the group was injured, he said.
"It was literally a question of 10 minutes," Merz said. That much longer, he said, and the fire would have gotten so strong that they would not have been able to get through safely.
Firefighters concentrated on the fire that threatened the Kekupua Street homes.
Helping them were dozens of the street's residents and their neighbors and friends who took up garden hoses to stop the flames from spreading.
"This is the first time I see everybody working together on their yard on a Sunday," resident Wayne Fujihara joked.
Fujihara said he took up a "running position" as he sprayed water on dry mulch in a neighbor's garden patch, ready to flee if the flames got too high or too close.
Mike Schulman, Sodoka's son-in-law, stood at the fence that separates Sodoka's yard and the beginning of the crater's brush with a hose, watering down the landscape and watching nearby flames crawl nearer.
"I don't want to see any houses get lost," he said.
When the smell of smoke started to crawl into the neighborhood, high school student Alyssa Ching looked outside and saw trees near her home engulfed in flames.
"I started packing up," she said. Her father, away at the time, rushed home and started watering the roof and dry grasses in their back yard.
They did not evacuate, but some residents voluntarily chose to leave their homes.
American Red Cross officials set up an evacuation center at Koko Head District Park yesterday but never opened it because no homes were evacuated by fire personnel.
RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM
A crowd gathered at Lanai Lookout to watch a blaze advance above the shooting range along Kalanianaole Highway.
