Early Lessons From the Maui Wildfires
A new report from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety offers preliminary takeaways about building materials and methods that stood up—or didn’t—to the wildfires that burned through Hawaii’s island of Maui in August. The devastating blazes killed more people than any U.S. wildfire in a century and caused more than $6 billion in damages.
The IBHS report focuses specifically on the Maui town of Lahaina, where more than 2,200 structures were destroyed—but where a recently built housing development withstood the inferno. These outcomes were due to several factors, according to IBHS, including:
Lahaina’s building stock was approximately 80% residential single-family construction built from the 1960s to the 1980s; the open-air design of structures in the coastal area allowed for embers to get inside them.
Tall, dense vegetation and other “connective fuels” near homes led to catastrophic fire spread.
The most notable success story was a new development, built in 2019–2020, where no single-family structures were lost. Four multifamily structures ignited, but a more catastrophic building-to-building fire spread was avoided.
Construction Workers Led Fatal Overdoses During COVID
Drug overdoses registered a far larger death toll in the construction industry than in other sectors during the height of the pandemic, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Studying mortality rates for drug overdoses by occupation and industry for U.S. employees ages 16 to 64 in 2020, the CDC found 162.6 deaths per 100,000 workers in “construction and excavation.” The industry with the second-highest mortality rate was “food preparation and serving-related,” at 119.9 deaths per 100,000 workers, followed by “personal care and service,” at 74.0 deaths. Rounding out the top six were three construction-adjacent sectors: “transportation and material moving” (70.7 deaths), “building and grounds cleaning and maintenance” (70.0 deaths) and “installation, maintenance and repair” (69.9 deaths).
While the numbers are startling, they reflect a long-observed trend. As the CDC notes: “Construction and extraction workers are more likely to report recent drug use than workers in many other occupations and industries and have been repeatedly found to experience high mortality from drug overdoses. Drug overdose mortality in these workers has been partially attributed to work-related injuries and subsequent pain management practices. … Construction workers who have experienced work-related injuries are nearly four times more likely than uninjured workers to use prescription opioids, and workers in construction and mining industries are more likely to be prescribed opioids after a work-related injury than workers in other industries.”
