Government officials developed a way to deal with tons of electric vehicle batteries left in the aftermath of wildfires and found at illegal dumpsites.

The 2023 wildfires left Maui with 400,000 tons of debris to clean up. Buried in that mess was an enormous amount of damaged and highly flammable lithium-ion car batteries that government officials had to figure out how to safely remove.

In the ensuring months, state, county and federal officials developed what’s been dubbed “the Maui method,” and now local authorities are modeling that lesson for state and federal agencies to learn for future disaster cleanups.

The Maui Emergency Management Agency recently invited representatives from various local and state fire, health, waste and emergency management departments in Hawaiʻi to observe a

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