Christopher Shuler
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Earth & Environmental Science
When wildfires burn through towns, heat can damage plastic plumbing and city water pipes. These pipes can then release contaminants into drinking water.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
wildfire
drinking water contamination
municipal water systems
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Develop methods to predict the extent and spread of wildfire-related contamination in municipal drinking water systems on Maui, especially for utilities that lack hydraulic models.
- Map wildfire risk for socially and economically vulnerable communities to support fair recovery efforts in Hawaiʻi.
- Build equity into decision-support tools for water policy, drawing on community partnerships and lessons from a prior contamination crisis on Oʻahu.
More about the research
How these contaminants spread through water systems is still very poorly understood worldwide. The August 2023 wildfires on Maui devastated Lāhainā and Kula. Unsafe-water advisories remained in place weeks later, adding to the hardship of communities already facing loss and trauma.
Why it matters
Faster ways to find, isolate and clean up fire-related contamination in drinking water could help Maui's communities recover. They could also help water utilities, health departments and emergency managers elsewhere, especially smaller utilities without hydraulic models. Risk maps for vulnerable communities could guide fairer recovery and water policy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Samuel Munoz
Northeastern University, MA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Establish a long-term floodplain observatory, using environmental sensors and sediment cores, to monitor how floods deposit sediment along a lowland river.
Sarah Fletcher
Stanford University, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Build a multi-scale systems model linking environmental, human and infrastructure dynamics across state, city and household scales to identify what drives household water affordability under climate change.
Ariane De Bremond
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Coordinate land system science worldwide through the Global Land Programme office by setting research agendas, leading synthesis of place-based case studies, and supporting core methods in modeling, monitoring and case study research.
The school
University of Hawaii at Manoa: 23 labs on PI Pages, $376M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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