Measuring Wildfire Effects on  Lahaina

Lahaina is an historic town located on the Hawaiian island of Maui. In August 2023, a devastating wildfire tore through the city, leaving destruction in its wake. Tragically, dozens of people lost their lives. According to a November article from news outlet Honolulu Civil Beat, the death toll of the Lahaina fire reached 100 people.

In order to better understand the scope and scale of the fire damage in Lahaina, researchers from Microsoft’s AI for Good Research Lab used a machine learning (ML) model on Planet imagery to analyze building damage. Caleb Robinson, a senior applied research scientist at Microsoft, published a paper with Microsoft colleagues and American Red Cross personnel detailing how the model works. “This paper describes the methodology used. We worked with [the] American Red Cross to respond to the tornado that hit Rolling Fork, [Mississippi,] and followed an identical response with them for Lahaina,” Robinson said.

The visualization below compares pre-disaster imagery from September 15, 2022 with post-disaster imagery from August 9, 2023. The building footprints are colored according to the level of damage that the ML model estimated for each building using the post-disaster imagery from Planet.

Other news outlets also used Planet imagery to show their readers the effects of the fire’s destruction; such outlets included: The Washington Post (two articles, here and here), NBC News, Axios, and CNN, among others.

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