Three strike teams from Team Rubicon are spending nine days cutting through five gulches in Upcountry Maui, hauling out trees and fire fuel in a push to shrink the island's flood and wildfire risk before conditions worsen. The volunteer-powered effort has also added a side project: clearing popular hiking trails, including Pineapple Express, so residents can get back to using them.
Team Rubicon describes itself as a veteran-led disaster response organization, and according to KHON2, it currently has three Maui strike teams working to clear debris across the island. The nine-day operation is specifically targeting the five Upcountry gulches, and crews have already been pulling trees and fire fuel away from areas of concern. On Tuesday morning, the organization added another assignment, putting all three teams to work clearing popular trails, Pineapple Express among them, the station reports.
Why Gulches Are the Priority
The focus on gulches is not incidental. Steep gulches in Hawaiʻi are often difficult and dangerous to access, which complicates both wildfire response and routine upkeep, according to the Pacific Fire Exchange. The organization notes that managing vegetation, stabilizing soils and restoring native plants in these drainages is considered critical to reducing wildfire risk and protecting nearby communities, drawing on lessons from seven case studies across the islands.
Leilani Magee, Team Rubicon's Maui administrator, told the station that spending on mitigation instead of response alone can save roughly $8. The project is also framed as part of something bigger: the organization has launched a national wildfire mitigation strategy that started in California and is meant to reach every state from Hawaiʻi to the East Coast, Magee said, per the same KHON2 report.
A Volunteer Force That Grew After Hurricane Lala
Hawaiʻi is home to around 1,400 Team Rubicon volunteers, known as Greyshirts, and Magee estimated that more than 100 of them are currently on Maui — a dramatic jump from the five or six active Greyshirts who were typically handling operations and service projects on the island before. Hurricane Lala swept past the Hawaiian Islands between August 14 and 16 with hurricane-strength winds and torrential rain, according to Team Rubicon. The storm knocked out power to at least 250,000 customers across the islands, the organization says.
In response, Team Rubicon stood up additional disaster response operations on Hawaiʻi Island and Maui, and nearly two dozen more Greyshirts began mobilizing on Maui on August 23 to run chainsaw operations clearing Lala's debris, according to the organization's own account of the midwest and Hawaiʻi relief operations. Magee said the organization can call in national support whenever local Maui or Hawaiʻi Greyshirts need extra hands — which appears to be exactly what has happened as the gulch-clearing project has scaled up.
Part of a Much Bigger Price Tag
Maui's gulch work sits inside a much larger statewide reckoning with disaster costs. Preliminary damage and future resilience needs tied to four major Hawaiʻi disasters in 2026 total approximately $1 billion, and the state has identified at least $319 million in proposed resilience and mitigation projects to prepare for what comes next, according to Maui Now. Existing Community Wildfire Protection Plans for West Maui, Upcountry Maui and South Maui already identify place-based projects still waiting on funding and implementation, per Maui Recovers, which also notes the Hawaiʻi Wildfire Management Organization received a $130,309 grant to update the Upcountry Maui plan specifically.
Team Rubicon's approach mirrors mitigation work it has done elsewhere after major fires. Following the January 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires, the organization conducted wildfire mitigation work in Ventura County and later ran a month-long Altadena recovery operation involving tree removal, roof tarping, sandbagging and flood protection, the group says on its site detailing the Los Angeles wildfires response. In the San Bernardino Mountains, a separate Team Rubicon deployment of about 28 volunteers targeted roughly 100 dangerous trees at Camp Tahquitz, thinning the tree population to keep a future fire from racing through too quickly, according to CBS News Los Angeles.
How to Get Involved on Maui
Magee said anyone interested in joining the Maui effort can reach out to her by email or sign up directly through Team Rubicon's website. The organization accepts volunteer registrations through teamrubiconusa.org, and given how quickly the Maui Greyshirt presence has grown since Hurricane Lala, organizers appear eager to keep that momentum going as the nine-day gulch operation continues.
