by Tan Jingjing, Gao Shan, Hazel Reyes
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- The catastrophic wildfires on Hawaii's Maui island were a huge blow to local tourism industry, said James Kunane Tokioka, director of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT) of the U.S. state of Hawaii.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua in Honolulu, capital of Hawaii, he said local people expect tourists to come back after the fires to help with their livelihood.
"It is devastating as you saw, and the impact has been incredible," Tokioka said.
The fires ravaged the historic seaside town of Lahaina on Maui on Aug. 8, home to about 12,000 people, leaving at least 115 fatalities.
Maui wildfires are the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than a century, and the worst natural disaster in Hawaii's history.
The fires have led to about 10,000 people losing their jobs, and about 9 million U.S. dollars of loss per day in total revenue, Tokioka told Xinhua. "That's big to the economy."
"For right now, we want to be as abundantly conscious as possible. We're not going to open it (Lahaina) up until we have surveyed all of the damaged areas, and make sure that it's safe to go back in," he said.
Teams have to go through gas lines, utility lines, and gas tanks in Lahaina town, to make sure it is absolutely safe before people are back in, according to Tokioka.
"Most importantly, there are as of this date over 300 people who have not been found. We want to be respectful of the families that have lost their loved ones. So we want to make sure that we can find the remains as much as possible before we open up," he said.
"It's important to the families that lost their members that we do it in a respectful way," he added.
Hawaii has seen a big drop in reservations to Maui since the fires.
"What's concerning to us is that we haven't seen an uptick on different islands (of Hawaii). So it is telling us that the people that had reservations on Maui are not coming to Hawaii," Tokioka said.
Part of the reason is that some social media posts from celebrities and community members tell tourists not to travel there, according to Tokioka.
"In my opinion, that's very selfish, because the people on Maui, the local people, they need tourists to come for their livelihood," he told Xinhua.
"We're trying to do everything we can to get some normality back into their lives," Tokioka said.
Currently the first task for Hawaii's tourism authority is to get people that are in the shelters into hotels, according to Tokioka. So far, about 3,000 displaced people in shelters have moved to hotels and airbnbs.
"The next phase is to move them into condos and timeshares... that's more like a normal living," Tokioka noted, adding the long-term plan is to help those displaced people rent homes.
"We are working with FEMA (U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) to work on getting them into those units and hopefully we can get that done within the next month," Tokioka told Xinhua.
As soon as the task of moving people into more permanent housing situation is done, a task force will focus on efforts to bring the economy and businesses back.
"We're gonna make sure that the voices are heard of the community on how they wanna see Lahaina rebuilt, getting the input of as many people as we can... we have to do it as quickly as we can," Tokioka noted.
There is a small section in Lahaina that is closed. Soon the rest of west Maui will be open. There was no damage to the rest of the state, he said.
Tokioka voiced his hope that tourists from the world, including Chinese tourists, continue to visit Hawaii in the wake of the Maui wildfires.
Hawaii has set up a sister-state relationship in 1992 with China's Hainan Province, a tropical island in southern China known as the "Hawaii of China."
A special event of the two localities was held in Honolulu in August, named "2023 China Hainan Night," to explore opportunities for future cooperation between the two sides.
"It was very impressive to see how engaging they (delegation from Hainan) were with us, how friendly they were, and how much they wanted to also have us join them in Hainan," Tokioka told Xinhua.
He expressed his hope for stronger cultural exchanges and economic bonds with China, as well as more Chinese tourists to visit Hawaii.
