Regular inspections of hotels and other accommodations required by the state of Hawaii are being inconsistently carried out by most county fire departments.
Three people died in two structure fires in Hilo on Hawaii island in October and November in a downtown hotel and in a factory illegally converted to rentals, neither of which had ever been inspected, according to the county. Those buildings fall into the category for which state law calls for fire inspections at least every five years, with corrective actions issued where necessary.
In reality, staffing and resource limitations mean that all of the state’s county fire prevention bureaus only inspect a fraction of the state’s accommodations, leaving visitors and residents at risk. Hawaii County, for example, has three inspectors to oversee fire safety standards of an estimated 14,600 rental rooms spread out over 4,000 square miles.
Annual inspections are mandatory in some other states, including California and Missouri. But with no statutory requirement for annual inspections of Hawaii’s 1,700 registered hotels, motels or lodging houses, only one county — Maui — says it has been doing so since 2023.
Even so, Maui, like other counties in Hawaii, was unable to say exactly how many hotels have been inspected this year when Civil Beat requested a breakdown.
And while the appointment of the new state fire marshal — who will build a team of state inspectors — is a step in the right direction, the problem will not be addressed in the short-to-medium term, the late Hawaii County Fire Chief Kazuo Todd said in a phone interview three days before his unexpected death on Sunday at age 45.
“The system needs to be improved,” and county fire prevention bureaus need to be better funded, Todd told Civil Beat.
The governor’s director of communications, Makana McClellan, said the State Fire Marshal’s office is moving toward a major overhaul of the state’s fire inspection regime.
Initially, a statewide community-risk assessment process will identify “target hazards and risk concentrations,” she said in an email, including hotels, motels and other lodgings. The frequency of safety inspections, she said, would then be based on that risk and other factors, rather than “solely on complaints, requests or historical practice.”
But establishing that new benchmark will take about a year to complete, McClellan estimated, and then will require continual reevaluation.
Fires And Losses on the Rise
A register of Hawaii accommodations maintained by the U.S. General Services Administration currently says that 18% — 293 — of Hawaii’s registered hotels, motels and other accommodation businesses are complying with federal fire safety standards that require alarms, sprinklers, voice communication systems and visible emergency plans.
That leaves hundreds of hotels, motels and hostels — which provide an estimated 110,000 rooms in Hawaii, according to Hawaii Tourism Authority data — that may not meet national standards.
The tourism authority data does not include the estimated 31,000 private vacation properties rented through Airbnb. Private vacation rentals by owners must comply with residential zoning and fire codes but are not subject to fire department inspections.
While fires and related losses in Hawaii have steadily increased over the last decade, according to the 2024 State of Hawaii Data Book, they have largely plateaued elsewhere in the country over the same period, the National Fire Protection Association found.
Statewide, the most recent available data shows the number of building fires has increased by two-thirds since 2014, to 5,019 from 2,995 — more than half of them in Honolulu. Building fires killed an average of six people per year between 2014 and 2024, not including those who died in the Maui wildfires.