HI County Agrees to Pay $150K for Safety Violations in Firefighter's Drowning Death

Major missteps led to the death of a Maui firefighter earlier this year, state officials say.

Tre' Evans-Durmaran 24, was swept out to sea in January after being sucked into a storm drain, according to Hawaii News Now. 

Evans-Durmaran, who was not wearing a personal flotation device, was among a group ordered to remove a chain link fence to relieve flooding. The fire department supervisor on the scene "was not adequately trained to recognize the hazards," an investigator with Hawaii Occupational Safety and Health (HIOSH) wrote. "The fire department was maybe not the best group of people to be doing that kind of work.”

The fence, they said, was the only thing preventing someone from falling into the drain. 

Evans-Durmaran was sucked into a the opening where there was a missing grate. He traveled 1,350 feet and into a spillway. He was rescued about 50 feet offshore. He died in a hospital eight days later.

“The county has chosen to not challenge the findings of the HIOSH reports. This is such a tragic incident, overall, and we as a county and each of our involved departments, we’ve cooperated with the investigation that HIOSH did,” Mahina Martin, Maui County Chief of Communications told reporters. 

They'll pay the fines assessed -- $150,000.

Martin added that expanded guidelines are being initiated: "Preventing it going forward is a big part of our focus right now..."

Walter Chun, a Safety and Health official told the media: “We wait until somebody gets hurt or killed before we decide we’re gonna do stuff. We have laws, rules, standards, to prevent injury, and unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”