lahaina yacht club after fire

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'It's time to go': Boat crew member recalls moment fire reached Hawaii's Lahaina pier – video

Footage recorded by a charter boat crew member, Dustin Johnson, shows the moment he ran along the Lahaina pier in Hawaii's Maui island, calling for individuals to leave as wildfires raged across the tourist town. Johnson recalled running along the beach 'helping people along the way' once flames engulfed the pier. At least 36 people have died from the flames as crews continued mass evacuation efforts and searched for survivors. Officials warned that the death toll could rise

Hawaii fires: Biden approves disaster declaration amid fears Maui death toll could rise – latest updates

Desperate search for survivors in Maui after 36 people die in Hawaii fires

Source: Reuters

Thu 10 Aug 2023 21.16 BST Last modified on Fri 11 Aug 2023 10.57 BST

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The hunt for bones and closure in Maui’s burn fields

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LAHAINA, Hawaii — In a scorched, gray landscape of ash and rubble — between the jagged green ridges of the ancient Puʻu Kukui volcano and the sparkling blue waters of the Pacific — Eric Bartelink stepped carefully around the perimeter of what was once a home.

With hundreds missing after the most destructive U.S. wildfire in a century blazed Aug. 8 through the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, the forensic anthropologist at Chico State, was searching for bone — a femur, a skull, a rib — any identifiable skeletal human remains .

The first scene he and his team surveyed after a callout from searchers with cadaver-sniffing canines turned out to be a false lead: the remains of two dogs.

But as Bartelink and his partner scoured the debris of more structures, they spotted a concentration of bones that was recognizably human : a pelvis, a femur, ribs, vertebrae.

They put on white Tyvek suits and protective gloves, in addition to P100 respirators. Then they bent down with trowels and brushes to sieve the debris through fine mesh screens with holes no wider than one-eighth of an inch. Carefully, they collected tiny fragments — shards of finger and toe bones and tooth roots — and put them inside paper evidence bags.

Their goal was to leave no speck of human remains behind.

“We owe it to the families to locate their loved ones, to recover them as complete as possible and to make sure that they all get identified,” Bartelink said. “Not knowing what happened to a loved one is devastating.”

In Lahaina’s torched rubble, a morbid task falls to tireless L.A. cadaver dogs

Human searchers have little chance of detecting the tiny fragments that remain of wildfire victims in the ashes of Lahaina. Hope rests with trained cadaver dogs.

Aug. 23, 2023

Three weeks after wildfires burned through Lahaina , the search for human bones — or iwi, as they are known in Hawaiian — has wrapped up, and officials are shifting to clearing toxic debris . But only 115 bodies have been recovered, with fewer than half of them identified.

Still, an unknown number of people remain unaccounted for, with numbers varying depending on the source. The highest is the FBI’s verified list of 388, though questions surround that figure.

Linda Vaikeli, 69, a transplant from Thousand Oaks who settled in Lahaina 26 years ago after falling in love during a vacation, is missing. So is Angelica Baclig, a 31-year-old Filipina immigrant who moved to Maui with her family as a teen and worked in customer service at Foodland grocery store. John “Thumper” McCarthy, 75, a retired sea captain and 40-year fixture of the Lahaina Yacht Club, is also on the FBI’s list. They’re just three of the many, with family and friends waiting to learn their fates.

We owe it to the families to locate their loved ones, to recover them as complete as possible and to make sure that they all get identified.

— Eric Bartelink, forensic anthropologist

Local and state officials have warned that the process of discovering who is safe and recovering and identifying the bodies of those who died will take time — and that not all will be accounted for.

“We do have extreme concerns that because of the temperature of the fire, the remains of those who have died, in some cases, may be impossible to recover meaningfully,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “There are going to be people that are lost forever.”

“We’re not recovering whole bodies,” Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said last week at a news conference. “We’re picking up ash. Some of it’s crumbling.”

But many experts who have worked on fire disasters in California and traveled to Maui to help with the recovery are hopeful that the remains of most, if not all, victims can ultimately be found and identified.

Five years ago, when the Camp fire destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise, local officials openly wondered whether they would be able to recover the remains of all the victims. “It is possible the temperatures were high enough to completely consume the body,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said on Day 4.

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In the end, 85 bodies were recovered and 84 identified, most of them with rapid DNA technology.

“Regardless of how hot the fire is, or how long it burns, there will always be something remaining — if you know what you’re looking for,” said Ashley Kendell, an associate professor of forensic anthropology at Chico State who took part in the search on Maui.

The challenge of finding remains

Some bodies were found early on, on roadways and in cars on Front Street.

Over the last few weeks, nearly 350 emergency personnel, plus 50 canines, have taken part in a mammoth search of the rubble of single-family homes and multistory apartments. Day after day, more than 40 firefighters and ocean safety officers donned snorkel gear to conduct grid searches of four miles of sea near the Lahaina harbor and Front Street after reports that some who fled from the flames into the ocean may have died there.

But the official death toll has not risen since Aug. 21.

On Monday, Green said he did not expect to find survivors in the burn zone or see the toll rise significantly. “The search and rescue, at least on land, is done,” the governor said.

Some who are searching for their loved ones are angry.

“If there are 115 bodies, 388 missing and ‘no survivors to be found,’ how does that list not go up?” said Nichol Simpson, who flew from Thailand to Maui last week to submit a DNA sample and search for her brother, Tony, a 43-year-old emergency medical technician. “Even if you are unable to recover the remains, those people existed and they are not to be accounted for amongst the dead?”

The eventual number of the missing could be significantly lower than 388. Last week, when officials released names — a sharp drop from their previous estimate of 1,100 — they urged anyone who knew a person was safe to contact them. In one day, more than 100 people reported someone on the list as safe , but officials have yet to verify that information and publicly update the list.

Even if you are unable to recover the remains, those people existed and they are not to be accounted for amongst the dead?

— Nichol Simpson, whose brother is missing

The task of compiling a list of the missing is complex: Many people have offered partial names or names of people they have not kept in touch with and could have moved out of the area. Some names are duplicated.

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“The number of unaccounted persons tends to start high and then will drop over time as duplicated names are resolved and additional people are located alive,” Bartelink said.

Pelletier said Tuesday that 110 “valid” reports of missing persons have been filed with Maui police. Some have emerged alive and well; some have been found dead. More than 50 open cases are being worked on.

California expertise

California has played a pivotal role in the Lahaina operation, deploying a team of more than 100 search and recovery experts. California is not just Maui’s closest neighboring state; it is well practiced in finding and identifying bodies after a mass fire disaster.

Bartelink has helped recover and identify human remains in some of the world’s most gruesome disaster zones, from mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the rubble of the World Trade Center towers in New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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But it was not until five years ago that his focus pivoted to wildfires. He and his team at Chico State spent 21 consecutive days recovering bodies in Paradise, just 14 miles east of their campus. They worked on the 2020 Bear fire and LNU Lightning Complex fires, then the McKinney fire in 2022.

“ It just wasn’t something I expected would be a routine part of my job,” said Kendell, who had never responded to a fire until Paradise, the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.

As wildfires scorch ever larger swaths of California as human-made climate change creates warmer, drier conditions, Kendell now conducts annual search and rescue trainings on wildfire response and victim recovery and is the co-editor of a new book, “ The Path of Flames: Understanding and Responding to Fatal Wildfires ,” a manual for first responders.

“There are more and more widespread wildland fires , not only in California, but in Texas, Colorado, Oregon, in parts of Canada, South Africa and Australia,” Bartelink said.

The risk of wildfires has increased in Hawaii too as global temperatures rise and highly flammable, nonnative grasses spread on former sugar and pineapple plantations.

The fire that tore through Lahaina burned roughly 3.39 square miles and destroyed 2,200 structures — far less than the 239 square miles and 18,800 structures in Paradise.

Mapping how the Maui fires destroyed Lahaina

The Lahaina fire in West Maui ignited as firefighters focused on the Upcountry fire. What happened next — the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century — left the historic town in ashes.

Aug. 14, 2023

But the death toll is higher in Lahaina because the coastal Hawaiian town is a dense urban environment, with tiny lots crammed with clusters of residences housing multiple generations of families. Officials also gave fewer warnings and allegedly blocked roads because of downed power lines, slowing or stopping people trying to flee the flames.

It’s a painstaking process. ...You want to make sure that you are making those IDs, you are recovering everyone who perished in the fire. It’s just not something that you can speed up, unfortunately

— Kendell, forensic anthropologist

In the aftermath, Kendell said, it is important to be diligent about recovering remains and not rush.

“It’s a painstaking process that involves gathering so much information, gathering reference samples for DNA,” Kendell said. “You want to make sure that you are making those IDs, you are recovering everyone who perished in the fire. It’s just not something that you can speed up, unfortunately.”

The anthropologists have worked in so many disaster zones, they’re used to compartmentalizing. They focus on the debris, not the toll of human suffering.

“When you’re out at a scene, you’re not really thinking too much about it,” Bartelink said. “You’re just trying to do your job and making sure that you aren’t missing any victims.”

Still, he said, it felt jarring to work on a disaster on a tropical island. After working long hours in the charred ruins, he drove back to a hotel, past golden beaches with palm trees and an ocean dotted with surfers and luxury catamarans.

“You see tourists doing their things and that just looks weird,” Bartelink said. “You’re like, ‘OK, I was just in this kind of hellscape.’ ”

The science of recovering bones

The fire that ravaged Lahaina flattened one-story homes to 6 inches.

Everything turned grayscale, with few landmarks left other than charred metal shells of cars and cinder block walls jutting out of the debris like gravestones.

To the untrained eye, bone can resemble drywall or foam and insulation and other building materials.

“Burn bone, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for, looks just like everything around it,” Kendell said.

A forensic anthropologist can usually spot human remains from a few feet away by circling a residence, looking for coiled metal bed springs or bathroom tiles — anything that might indicate known places of refuge such as bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms — that could lead to a concentration of bone. “We have never found anyone in a kitchen,” Bartelink said.

Contrary to popular belief, bones do not turn to ashes in extreme heat.

When a person receives ashes of a loved one from a funeral home, the bones have been cremated in a furnace for two hours at up to 1,600 degrees. That leaves bone fragments that are then put in a mechanical mill and pulverized to dust, said Vyto Babrauskas, a researcher in fire safety science and president of consulting firm Fire Science & Technology Inc.

In a wildfire, a house burns for about an hour at 1,800 degrees at its hottest point, near the ceiling, Babrauskas said. But human remains would probably be found near the floor level, which is closer to 1,300 degrees — cooler than a funeral furnace.

“We would expect to get some reasonable recovery of the remains — probably enough to identify them,” Babrauskas said.

Depending on the intensity and longevity of the fire, burnt bone tends to be black or white.

First, bone blackens or chars. Charred bone starts to lose its organic matter but will sometimes yield DNA. Then it turns into calcine bone that’s grayish white and brittle with no organic matter.

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Over a week after fire incinerated Lahaina, locals are pressing for a return to work as they seek some sense of normalcy.

Some parts of the skeleton are likely to yield more DNA than others. Thicker bones, like the femur and humerus, tend to better withstand heat. Bones around the torso — the lower spine and pelvis area — are more protected by tissues, fats and muscles that are good for DNA sampling.

How do you identify bones?

After recovery comes identification.

With new rapid DNA technology, investigators no longer have to send all their material to labs with sophisticated equipment, highly skilled technical operators and huge backlogs — a process that can take months or years.

For the record:

10:08 a.m. Sept. 1, 2023 An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that 23 people died in the Conception dive boat fire in 2019. The total was 34.

Among the experts whom California deployed to Maui are Kim Gin, the former Sacramento County coroner who used rapid DNA technology to identify Camp fire victims, and Lt. Jarrett Morris of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, who used the same method after the Conception dive boat fire killed 34 people in 2019.

The Camp fire was the first mass casualty disaster to use the ANDE Rapid DNA system to compare the DNA of remains with the DNA of close family members.

A sample — a tiny fragment of bone or an oral swab — is put into a chip a little bigger than a computer hard drive, which is then inserted into a black box that is an air compressor and computer that performs data interpretation. Within 96 minutes, the system can develop a DNA profile.

Only 22 Camp fire victims were identified using conventional methods, including fingerprints, dental records and surgical devices, such as knee replacements, breast implants and pacer machines, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. A far greater number, 62, generated DNA IDs.

“If there’s bones or tissue available, DNA can be abstracted from it,” Morris said.

After the Conception fire, officials were able to identify all the victims within 10 days.

“We knew who was on that boat, we had a manifest, so we knew where to start,” Morris said. “In this incident, we don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with. We don’t know exactly where they were, where they came from, if they had moved from one place to another.”

Lahaina is also a more complicated site for identification than Paradise because its historic downtown on the water’s edge was a bustling tourist site with a harbor, museums, galleries, bars and souvenir stores.

Ultimately, Morris said, not all the bodies may be identified by rapid DNA technology. In challenging cases, in which bones are severely burned, traditional labs can carry out more advanced abstraction of the DNA.

The final challenge is getting family members to provide DNA samples.

Collecting a DNA sample is a straightforward process, requiring a simple buccal swab rubbing a Q-tip six times on the inside of each cheek.

So far, just over 120 relatives of the Lahaina missing have come forward to provide DNA samples — significantly lower than in other major disasters. After the Camp fire, 255 people provided DNA.

“We are still below where we had hoped to be,” said Maui Prosecuting Atty. Andrew Martin, who is running the Family Assistance Center in Kaanapali. The more family members who provide samples, he said, the more chance officials have of identifying a body.

Lahaina is home to a high number of immigrants — nearly a third of residents are foreign-born and 40% are Filipino — which means a significant proportion of family members who can provide DNA samples live abroad and face hurdles in getting swabs to the island.

Some family members may be displaced and unaware of the need to provide samples. Others may fear their DNA will go into state and federal databases.

Martin and other officials have stressed repeatedly on local news that DNA samples will be used only to identify those who perished in the wildfire.

“The only thing that their DNA is used for is identifying their loved ones,” he said. “That’s it.”

After days scouring the burn zone, Bartelink said, he hoped that the remains yielded genetic DNA and that more families come forward to provide swabs. Only then can the missing be accounted for.

“The closure process often starts with just knowing what happened, where were they found, making sure that they’re identified,” he said. “We really are doing this for the families.”

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Jenny Jarvie is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Atlanta.

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A Journey Through Lahaina’s Endless Streets of Suffering

A historic Hawaiian town that was once home to 13,000 people is now a desolate ruin. With the death toll rising, the true scope of the tragedy is still unfolding.

As residents slowly returned and sifted through the debris of their homes, many were finding little to salvage. Credit...

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By Mike Baker

Photographs by Philip Cheung

Mike Baker and Philip Cheung reported from Lahaina, Hawaii, after the bulk of it was destroyed by fire.

• Published Aug. 11, 2023 Updated Aug. 15, 2023

Along the empty streets of Lahaina, the warped shells of vehicles sit as if frozen in time, some of them still in the middle of the road, pointed toward escapes that were cut short. Others stand in driveways next to houses that are now piles of ash, many still smoldering with acrid smoke.

A few agitated myna birds chirp from their perches on palm trees that have been singed into matchsticks, the carcasses of other birds and several cats scattered below them in the streets.

Across the town that was once home to 13,000 people, residents are slowly returning and sifting through the debris of their homes, some of them in tears, finding little to salvage.

New York Times Correspondent Reports on the Wildfires in Maui

Mike baker, the seattle bureau chief for the new york times, visited lahaina, hawaii, where raging wildfires have decimated the area..

We spent several hours walking through Lahaina, and, really, it’s a scene of immense devastation. I mean, it’s a mile-long spread of destroyed homes and rubble and ashes. There’s still properties that are smoldering. It was really just difficult to comprehend what we were looking at yesterday in Lahaina. It’s really a place that brings a lot of joy to a lot of people. For the locals, they have a really cherished sense of community in Lahaina. For the tourists, it’s a place where many people have some of their fondest life memories. Some of them had minutes or even just seconds before they realized they needed to get out. We met one man who was there and realized he didn’t have really any chance to evacuate, and he ended up lying face down in the dirt at a baseball field and spent hours as embers were flying overhead and around him. He called it like a, you know, a sandstorm of heat that he could not get away from. There’s so much work left to be done there. I think a lot of residents are pretty alarmed at how little support they’ve seen so far. The community has really stood up to fend for itself, driving pickup trucks out of town to get bottles of water, driving boats out to pick up gas for the community. To see the level of suffering and devastation and grief there, it’s, you know, it was really difficult to process, and it’s hard to think about where Lahaina is going to go from here.

In a neighborhood along the burned hillside, Shelly and Avi Ronen were searching the rubble of their home for a safe that held $50,000 of savings, left behind with the rest of their belongings when they fled the fire. They considered themselves lucky to have made it out at all: A man just up the hill did not survive, and neighbors told them that several children who had ventured outside to get a look when the fire was approaching were now missing.

“A lot of people died,” Ms. Ronen said, her voice breaking. “People couldn’t get out.”

As she spoke, her husband emerged from the rubble of the house with the safe in his hands, seriously charred, but intact. There were no signs of the key, so he bashed it with a rock until it broke open.

Inside it was a pile of ash.

In the wake of the fire that tore with stunning velocity through Lahaina this week, killing at least 67 people, much of the small, historic town was cut off for days from the rest of the island of Maui by downed power lines and police checkpoints. It sat in lonely desolation, the houses uninhabitable, the search for victims slowed by a lack of personnel and a growing conviction that no one would be found alive.

For centuries, Lahaina has been a focal point of Hawaiian history and culture , a former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom and a booming center of modern tourism that had managed to preserve its old-world charm. It was home to both vital relics that connected people to the island’s Indigenous history and a downtown of island-chic art shops and restaurants with astonishing views.

Now those treasures are gone, replaced by scenes that locals and officials have repeatedly likened to a war zone. As residents return to their homes, some are making reluctant but unavoidable plans for life elsewhere. With more bodies likely to be found as the searches continue, their town has become the scene of one of the nation’s deadliest wildfires of the past century.

It had all happened so fast, residents said. A brush fire on Tuesday morning had been contained, but then fire flared up once again in the afternoon. Stoked by hurricane-force gusts of wind, it was soon rushing down the hillside through town, tearing across a drought-parched landscape with little to stop it until it reached the ocean.

At the shoreline, where the fire had run out of room, waves lapped up to beachfront properties that had few discernible features of a home — a singed mailbox, a metal gate, a water heater poking up through the debris. An orange cat slipped out from behind the husk of a vehicle and then darted away.

A man could be seen pedaling his bike near the waterfront, checking on the homes of people he knew. With no power and limited cellphone coverage, he did not know how many people had died. When he learned it was in the dozens, he grew emotional, looking upward and blinking back tears.

Several blocks to the north, past the school buildings gutted by flames, the town’s prized banyan tree sat wounded, its leaves curled and crispy. Sitting alone below its inadequate shade was a man named Anthony Garcia.

When the fire began raging, some people had only minutes to flee, jumping into cars or simply running as fast as they could as the inferno spit embers onto their necks.

Mr. Garcia, 80, said he had been eating chips and salsa and sipping on a beer in a local restaurant when smoke suddenly began to billow through town. He made it back to his apartment to grab medications but then ran out of time. He sought refuge on a nearby baseball field. For what seemed like hours, he lay face down in the dirt, his throat burning, his skin baking. “It was like a sandstorm of heat and embers,” he said.

Somehow, the fire spared him. But with his apartment and all his belongings gone, he has been sleeping outside, unsure of where to go.

“I really don’t know what I’m going to do,” Mr. Garcia said. “I’m in God’s hands.”

On nearby Front Street, a small group of firefighters and work crews were moving debris to clear the roadway, but few were navigating through the broad devastation further east. Many there said little help was being sent; locals had taken matters into their own hands, shuttling in water bottles in pickup trucks and gas by boat. Some drove cautiously through the streets, offering food or aid to those in need.

In the Lahainaluna neighborhood along the hillside, Lanny Daise, 71, pulled up to the house that had been built by his wife’s grandfather decades ago. Now it was a pile of twisted metal atop a charred foundation. As he navigated the debris, he kept stopping, sighing and taking photos on his phone. Nothing was salvageable, save for a couple of wrenches.

Two blocks further up, Benzon and Bella Dres were hunting for jewelry and not having any luck. Their rented house was gone and they had lost everything. Ms. Dres was wearing a pink shirt given to her by a manager at the hotel where she worked. For now, they were staying at another hotel where Mr. Dres worked, but, with no money or belongings, they were uncertain of the future. Eventually, they stopped searching.

“Everything’s gone,” Ms. Dres said.

As they drove away, traveling past downed power lines, Felina De La Cruz and her family were arriving at a house nearby, a property with multiple units that was home to 17 people from four families. Ms. De La Cruz said that when they moved from the Philippines to Lahaina two decades ago, they knew upon arriving that it was where they wanted their home to be. It was a community where everyone took care of each other, she said.

The neighborhood, perched on a hillside with a picturesque view of the town, the waterfront and the sunsets beyond, had a different view now: Ms. De La Cruz looked out on nearly a mile of charred homes below, the smoke still rising into the sky and casting a haze over the town.

Nothing was clear. With no belongings and no permanent place to live, it was a mystery where she and her husband would go with their three children. When would anyone be able to live here again?

“It’s so, so sad,” she said. “I love this place. I love Lahaina. I want to live here. But, I don’t know.”

Mike Baker is the Seattle bureau chief, reporting primarily from the Northwest and Alaska. More about Mike Baker

Advertisement

Lahaina, After the Fire

• Alan Taylor
• August 14, 2023

Residents of Lahaina, Hawaii, were recently allowed to return to their homes to recover what they could after wildfires burned across western Maui last week, killing at least 96 people. The historic town was overtaken by a swift-moving wildfire, which destroyed almost all of its buildings. More than 1,000 people remain missing as teams continue to search house to house and fire crews work to contain the last of the fires. Gathered below, images of the early recovery work, and the community of volunteers who are mobilizing to help those in need.

• Email/span>

A woman cradles her cat after finding him in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaii, on August 11, 2023. #

Burned cars sit on a road alongside destroyed buildings after a wildfire burned through Lahaina, on August 11, 2023. #

Davilynn Severson ( left ) and Hano Ganer search for their belongings in the ashes of their family's burned home in Lahaina on August 11, 2023. #

Members of the Hawaii National Guard assist Maui County and state officials in search-and-recovery efforts after a wildfire devastated the historic town of Lahaina, on August 10, 2023. #

A man sits on the historic Lahaina banyan tree, damaged by a wildfire, on August 11, 2023. #

An aerial photo of the destroyed Old Lahaina Courthouse building, which had housed a museum, an art gallery, a gift shop, and a visitor center, seen in Lahaina on August 11, 2023 #

Survivors and churchgoers gather for a Sunday service held by Pastor Arza Brown of Lahaina's Grace Baptist Church at Maui Coffee Attic in Wailuku, central Maui, on August 13, 2023. In 60 years of ministry, Pastor Brown had never said Mass in sandals. But he had no choice this Sunday, after the raging wildfire that decimated a community in Hawaii left him with nothing but his faith and the clothes on his body. The Baptist church where Brown ministered for five decades was reduced to ashes, as was his house, from which he managed to escape with his wife. A member of his congregation opened the doors of his coffee shop to gather the community of this church in Lahaina, which is trying to process the tragedy. #

Volunteers load water onto a boat to be transported to West Maui from the Kihei boat landing on August 13, 2023, in Kihei, Hawaii. #

Mercy Worldwide volunteers unload supplies for West Maui towns affected by wildfires at Black Rock Beach in Lahaina on August 12, 2023. #

Volunteers sort out donations for distribution in a parking lot in Lahaina on August 12, 2023. #

A destroyed boat floats off Lahaina Small Boat Harbor on August 10, 2023. #

People walk along Main Street past wildfire damage on August 11, 2023, in Lahaina. #

A man walks through wildfire wreckage in Lahaina on August 11, 2023. #

A sign is displayed in a neighborhood on August 13, 2023, in Lahaina. #

Sydney Carney walks through her destroyed home in Lahaina on August 11, 2023. #

Davilynn Severson holds a burned page from a yearbook as she looks for belongings in the ashes of her family home in Lahaina on August 11, 2023. #

The burned remains of a house on Lahaina's Front Street, seen on August 12, 2023. A Google Street View image of this same house from 2019 can be seen here . #

A scorched coconut tree is seen in Lahaina on August 12, 2023. #

Maui residents John Rey Serrano and Lexie Lara look from a road above Lahaina in the aftermath of the wildfire, on August 11, 2023. #

Destroyed homes and cars are seen in Lahaina on August 13, 2023. #

Women hug after digging through the rubble of a home destroyed by the wildfire, on August 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. #

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Much Of Historic Lahaina Town Believed Destroyed By Overwhelming Fire

There have been 6 fatalities confirmed so far, according to Mayor Richard Bissen.

LAHAINA – Eyewitnesses described an apocalyptic scene Tuesday in Lahaina town, where residents were forced to jump into the harbor waters to avoid fast-moving flames from a massive brush fire that’s destroyed much of the historic area — and continues to burn.

Residents say an overwhelmed fire force — fighting flames all day amid powerful winds — could do little as flames ripped through the historic community, destroying dozens of homes and businesses in what onlookers believe is the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history since Hurricane Iniki.

Acting Gov. Sylvia Luke confirmed that the Hawaii National Guard had been activated to help respond to the sprawling fire crisis, which also includes other raging wildfires. The flames have forced thousands to their homes, and many aren’t sure what they’ll find when they return.

Officials confirmed to Hawaii News Now that the Coast Guard deployed a helicopter and boat to Front Street Beach and the Lahaina Small Boat Harbor to rescue a number of people from the water.

About 10:50 p.m., the Coast Guard said it had rescued a dozen people from waters off Lahaina.

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The full scope of the devastation in Lahaina isn’t known, but videos on social media show a terrifying wall of flames descending on Front Street in Lahaina and destroying everything in its path. One heartstopping video posted by fleeing residents shows uncontrolled flames in all directions.

The video also shows burned out cars, but there was no immediate word on injuries.

Lahaina resident Tiare Lawrence compared the scene to something out of the apocalypse, with people running for their lives.

“It’s just so hard. I’m currently Upcountry and just knowing I can’t get a hold of any of my family members. I still don’t know where my little brother is. I don’t know where my stepdad is,” she said.

“Everyone I know in Lahaina, their homes have burned down.”

Front Street business owner Alan Dickar says he watched business after business in the historic district going up in flames.

“Buildings on both sides were engulfed. There were no fire trucks at that point; I think the fire department was overwhelmed,” Dickar said. “That is the most important business street on Maui.”

A Maui County spokesperson confirmed there were “multiple” structure fires in addition to “extensive evacuations” in the Lahaina area, but authorities said they were unlikely to ascertain the full extent until well into Wednesday — when winds are expected to die down.

The county also said it wasn’t immediately clear just how many people jumped into the water off Lahaina to avoid smoke and flames, though they indicated rescue operations were ongoing.

“The Coast Guard has been responding to impacted areas where residents are entering the ocean due to smoke and fire conditions,” the county said, in a news release about 10 p.m. Tuesday.

“Individuals were transported by the Coast Guard to safe areas.”

The brush fire in Lahaina is one of at least seven sizable wildfires that firefighters are battling statewide amid treacherous conditions — powerful winds, low humidity and dry brush.

The winds — fueled by Hurricane Dora as it passes south of the state — have topped 55 mph in many spots, with gusts to 70 to 80 mph. In addition to wildfires, first responders are grappling with downed trees and damaged structures. Also on Maui,  thousands remain without power .

And while the Lahaina fire appears by fire to have wrought the most devastation, widespread damage is also being reported in Kihei and Kula, where evacuation orders also remain in place.

Another concern for first responders is the thick smoke blanketing parts of Maui.

Earlier in the day, officials confirmed that a firefighter in West Maui suffered smoke inhalation and was taken to Maui Memorial Medical Center in stable condition.

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Photos: A closer look at the heart of Lahaina 4 months after deadly wildfire

The heart of Lahaina, the historic town on Maui that burned in a deadly wildfire that killed at least 100 people, reopened Monday to residents and business owners holding day passes.

The renewed access marks an important emotional milestone for victims of the Aug. 8 fire, but much work remains to be done to safely clear properties of burned debris and rebuild.

The reopened areas include Banyan Tree Park, home to a 150-year-old tree that burned in the fire but that is now sprouting new leaves, Lahaina Public Library, King Kamehameha III Elementary School and popular restaurants.

An oceanfront section of Front Street, where the fire ripped through a traffic jam of cars trying to escape town, reopened Friday.

Officials have finished reopening all 83 zones established in the 5-mile Lahaina impact area ahead of schedule. The reopening process started with the first residential zone on Sept. 25.

These photos share what the town looks like four months after the fire.

Authorities are continuing to recommend that people entering scorched lots wear protective gear to shield them from hazards.

On Sunday, the state Department of Health released test results confirming the ash and dust left by the fire is toxic and that arsenic is the biggest concern. Arsenic is a heavy metal that adheres to wildfire dust and ash, the department said.

The tests examined ash samples collected Nov. 7-8 from 100 properties built from the 1900s to the 2000s. Samples also showed high levels of lead, which was used to paint houses built before 1978.

The clean-up is still in its early stages. For the past few months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been removing batteries, propane tanks, pesticides and other hazards from the town's more than 2,000 destroyed buildings.

Residents and business owners have been able to visit their properties after the EPA has finished clearing their lots.

In some cases, residents — often wearing white full-body suits, masks and gloves — have found family heirlooms and mementos after sifting through the charred rubble of their homes.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin hauling away the remaining debris and take it to a landfill after it gets permission from property owners .

False rumors have claimed that signing up for disaster assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency can give the government control of your land. Signing a right-of-entry form does not transfer ownership of the property.

Construction of a temporary elementary school continues for students and teachers of King Kamehameha III Elementary. Crews completed clearing and grading the site. Modular units for the first classroom arrived last week.

Students have been sharing campus facilities with Princess Nāhiʻenaʻena Elementary since October. Enrollment on the first day back for Kamehameha III students was 380 — a roughly 40% decrease from 624 students before the fire.

Handover to the Department of Education is expected by the end of February 2024. The department will install furniture and telecommunications.

The EPA and the state's health department have installed 53 air monitors in Lahaina and Upcountry Maui, where a separate fire burned homes in early August.

The department is urging people to avoid outdoor activity when monitor levels show elevated air pollution and to close windows and doors.

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The hunt for bones and closure in Maui’s burn field

Search and recovery team members check charred buildings and cars in the aftermath of the Maui wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Aug. 18, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

LAHAINA, Hawaii — In a scorched, gray landscape of ash and rubble — between the jagged green ridges of the ancient Puʻu Kukui volcano and the sparkling blue waters of the Pacific — Eric Bartelink stepped carefully around the perimeter of what was once a home.

With hundreds missing after the most destructive U.S. wildfire in a century blazed Aug. 8 through the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, the forensic anthropologist at Chico State, was searching for bone — a femur, a skull, a rib — any identifiable skeletal human remains.

The first scene he and his team surveyed after a callout from searchers with  cadaver-sniffing canines  turned out to be a false lead: the remains of two dogs.

But as Bartelink and his partner scoured the debris of more structures, they spotted a concentration of  bones that was recognizably human : a pelvis, a femur, ribs, vertebrae.

They put on white Tyvek suits and protective gloves, in addition to P100 respirators. Then they bent down with trowels and brushes to sieve the debris through fine mesh screens with holes no wider than one-eighth of an inch. Carefully, they collected tiny fragments — shards of finger and toe bones and tooth roots — and put them inside paper evidence bags.

Their goal was to leave no speck of human remains behind.

“We owe it to the families to locate their loved ones, to recover them as complete as possible and to make sure that they all get identified,” Bartelink said. “Not knowing what happened to a loved one is devastating.”

Three weeks after  wildfires burned through Lahaina , the search for human bones — or  iwi,  as they are known in Hawaiian — has wrapped up, and officials are shifting to clearing toxic debris .  But only 115 bodies have been recovered, with fewer than half of them identified.

Still, an unknown number of people remain unaccounted for, with numbers varying depending on the source. The highest is the FBI’s  verified list  of 388, though questions surround that figure.

Linda Vaikeli, 69, a transplant from Thousand Oaks who settled in Lahaina 26 years ago after falling in love during a vacation, is missing. So is Angelica Baclig, a 31-year-old Filipina immigrant who moved to Maui with her family as a teen and worked in customer service at Foodland grocery store. John “Thumper” McCarthy, 75, a retired sea captain and 40-year fixture of the Lahaina Yacht Club, is also on the FBI’s list. They’re just three of the many, with family and friends waiting to learn their fates.

Local and state officials have warned that the process of discovering who is safe and recovering and identifying the bodies of those who died will take time — and that not all will be accounted for.

“We do have extreme concerns that because of the temperature of the fire, the remains of those who have died, in some cases, may be impossible to recover meaningfully,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green  said on  CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “There are going to be people that are lost forever.”

“We’re not recovering whole bodies,” Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said last week at a news conference. “We’re picking up ash, some of it’s crumbling.”

But many experts who have worked on fire disasters in California and traveled to Maui to help with the recovery are hopeful that the remains of most, if not all, victims can ultimately be found and identified.

Five years ago, when the  Camp fire destroyed  the Northern California town of Paradise, local officials openly wondered whether they would be able to recover the remains of all the victims. “It is possible the temperatures were high enough to completely consume the body,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea  said  on day four.

In the end, 85 bodies were recovered and 84 identified, most of them with rapid DNA technology.

“Regardless of how hot the fire is, or how long it burns, there will always be something remaining — if you know what you’re looking for,” said Ashley Kendell, an associate professor of forensic anthropology at Chico State who took part in the search on Maui.

FILE - Members of a search-and-rescue team walk along a street, Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii, following heavy damage caused by wildfire. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

The challenge of finding remains

Some bodies were found early on, on roadways and in cars on Front Street.

Over the last few weeks, nearly 350 emergency personnel, plus 50 canines, have taken part in a mammoth search of the rubble of single-family homes and multistory apartments. Day after day, more than 40 firefighters and ocean safety officers donned snorkel gear to conduct grid searches of four miles of sea near the Lahaina harbor and Front Street after reports that some who fled from the flames into the ocean may have died there.

But the official death toll has not risen since Aug. 21.

On Monday, Green said he did not expect to find survivors in the burn zone or see the toll rise significantly. “The search and rescue, at least on land, is done,” the governor said.

Some who are searching for their loved ones are angry.

“If there are 115 bodies, 388 missing and ‘no survivors to be found,’ how does that list not go up?” said Nichol Simpson, who flew from Thailand to Maui last week to submit a DNA sample and search for her brother, Tony, a 43-year-old EMT. “Even if you are unable to recover the remains, those people existed and they are not to be accounted for amongst the dead?”

The eventual number of the missing could be significantly lower than 388. Last week, when officials released names — a sharp drop from their previous estimate of 1,100 — they urged anyone who knew a person was safe to contact them. In one day, more than 100 people  reported someone on the list as safe , but officials have yet to verify that information and publicly update the list.

The task of compiling a list of the missing is complex: Many people have offered partial names or names of people they have not kept in touch with and could have moved out of the area. Some names are duplicated.

“The number of unaccounted persons tends to start high and then will drop over time as duplicated names are resolved and additional people are located alive,” Bartelink said.

Pelletier said Tuesday that 110 “valid” reports of missing persons have been filed with Maui police. Some have emerged alive and well, some have been found dead. More than 50 open cases are actively being worked on.

California expertise

California has played a pivotal role in the Lahaina operation,  deploying  a team of more than 100 search and recovery experts. California is not just Maui’s closest neighboring state; it is well practiced in finding and identifying bodies after a mass fire disaster.

Bartelink has helped recover and identify human remains in some of the world’s most gruesome disaster zones, from mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the rubble of the World Trade Center towers in New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But it was not until five years ago that his focus pivoted to wildfires. He and his team at Chico State spent 21 consecutive days recovering bodies in Paradise, just 14 miles east of their campus. Then they worked on the 2020 Bear fire and LNU Lightning Complex fires, then the McKinney fire in 2022.

“ It just wasn’t something I expected would be a routine part of my job,” said Kendell, who had never responded to a fire until Paradise, the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.

As wildfires scorch ever larger swaths of California as manmade climate change creates warmer, drier conditions, Kendell now conducts annual search and rescue trainings on wildfire response and victim recovery and is the co-editor of a new book, “ The Path of Flames: Understanding and Responding to Fatal Wildfires ,” a manual for first responders.

“There are  more and more widespread wildland fires , not only in California, but in Texas, Colorado, Oregon, in parts of Canada, South Africa and Australia,” Bartelink said.

The risk of wildfires has increased in Hawaii, too, as global temperatures rise and highly flammable, non-native grasses spread on former sugar and pineapple plantations.

FILE - A vehicle sits in front of a home leveled by the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., Dec. 3, 2018. The Camp Fire bears many similarities to the deadly wildfire in Hawaii. Both fires moved so quickly residents had little time to escape. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

The fire that tore through Lahaina  burned roughly 3.39 square miles  and destroyed 2,200 structures — far less than the 239 square miles and 18,800 structures in Paradise.

But the  death toll is higher in Lahaina  because the coastal Hawaiian town is a dense urban environment, with tiny lots crammed with clusters of residences housing multiple generations of families. Officials also gave  fewer warnings  and allegedly  blocked roads  because of downed power lines, slowing or stopping people trying to flee the flames.

In the aftermath, Kendell said, it is important to be diligent about recovering remains and not rush.

“It’s a painstaking process that involves gathering so much information, gathering reference samples for DNA,” Kendell said. “You want to make sure that you are making those IDs, you are recovering everyone who perished in the fire. It’s just not something that you can speed up, unfortunately.”

The anthropologists have worked in so many disaster zones, they’re used to compartmentalizing. They focus on the debris, not the toll of human suffering.

“When you’re out at a scene, you’re not really thinking too much about it,” Bartelink said. “You’re just trying to do your job and making sure that you aren’t missing any victims.”

Still, he said, it felt jarring to work on a disaster on a tropical island. After working long hours in the charred ruins, he drove back to a hotel, past golden beaches with palm trees and an ocean dotted with surfers and luxury catamarans.

“You see tourists doing their things and that that just looks weird,” Bartelink said. “You’re like, ‘OK, I was just in this kind of hellscape.’ "

FILE - A general view shows the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, Monday, Aug. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

The science of recovering bones

The fire that ravaged Lahaina flattened one-story homes to 6 inches.

Everything turned grayscale, with few landmarks left other than charred metal shells of cars and cinder block walls jutting out of the debris like gravestones.

To the untrained eye, bone can resemble drywall or foam and insulation and other building materials.

“Burn bone, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for, looks just like everything around it,” Kendell said.

A forensic anthropologist can usually spot human remains from a few feet away by circling a residence, looking for coiled metal bed springs or bathroom tiles — anything that might indicate a known places of refuge like bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms — that could lead to a concentration of bone. “We have never found anyone in a kitchen,” Bartelink said.

Contrary to popular belief, bones do not turn to ashes in extreme heat.

When a person receives ashes of a loved one from a funeral home, the bones have been  cremated  in a furnace for two hours at up to 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. That leaves bone fragments that are then put in a mechanical mill and pulverized to dust, said Vyto Babrauskas, a researcher in fire safety science and president of consulting firm Fire Science and Technology Inc.

In a wildfire, a house burns for about an hour at 1800 degrees at its hottest point, near the ceiling, Babrauskas said. But human remains would likely be found near the floor level, which is closer to 1300 degrees — cooler than a funeral furnace.

“We would expect to get some reasonable recovery of the remains — probably enough to identify them,” Babrauskas said.

Depending on the intensity and longevity of the fire, burnt bone tends to be black or white.

First, bone blackens or chars. Charred bone starts to lose its organic matter but will sometimes yield DNA. Then it turns into calcine bone that’s grayish white and brittle with no organic matter.

Some parts of the skeleton are likely to yield more DNA than others. Thicker bones, like the femur and humerus, tend to better withstand heat. Bones around the torso — the lower spine and pelvis area — are more protected by tissues, fats and muscles that are good for DNA sampling.

How do you identify bones?

After recovery comes identification.

With new rapid DNA technology, investigators no longer have to send all their material to labs with sophisticated equipment, highly skilled technical operators and huge backlogs — a process that can take months or years.

Among the experts that California deployed to Maui are Kim Gin, the former Sacramento County coroner who used rapid DNA technology to identify Camp fire victims, and Lt. Jarrett Morris of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, who used the same method after the Conception dive boat fire killed 23 people in 2019.

The Camp fire was the first mass casualty disaster to use the ANDE Rapid DNA system to compare the DNA of remains with the DNA of close family members.

A sample — a tiny fragment of bone or an oral swab — is put into a chip a little bigger than a computer hard drive, which is then inserted into a black box that is an air compressor and computer that performs data interpretation. Within 96 minutes, the system can develop a DNA profile.

Only 22 Camp fire victims were identified using conventional methods, including fingerprints, dental records and surgical devices, such as knee replacements, breast implants and pacer machines, according to a 2020  study  in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. A far greater number, 62, generated DNA IDs.

“If there’s bones or tissue available, DNA can be abstracted from it,” said Morris.

After the Conception fire, officials were able to identify all the victims within 10 days.

“We knew who was on that boat, we had a manifest, so we knew where to start,” Morris said. “In this incident, we don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with. We don’t know exactly where they were, where they came from, if they had moved from one place to another.”

Lahaina is also a more complicated site for identification than Paradise because its historic downtown on the water’s edge was a bustling tourist site with a harbor, museums, galleries, bars and souvenir stores.

Ultimately, Morris said, not all the bodies may be identified by rapid DNA technology. In challenging cases, in which bones are severely burnt, traditional labs can carry out more advanced abstraction of the DNA.

The final challenge is getting family members to provide DNA samples.

Collecting a DNA sample is a straightforward process, requiring a simple buccal swab rubbing a Q tip six times on the inside of each cheek.

So far, just over 120 relatives of the Lahaina missing have come forward to provide DNA samples — significantly lower than in other major disasters. After the Camp fire, 255 people provided DNA.

“We are still below where we had hoped to be,” said Maui Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Martin, who is running the Family Assistance Center in Kaanapali. The more family members who provide samples, he said, the more chance officials have of identifying a body.

Lahaina is home to a high number of immigrants — nearly a third of residents are foreign born and 40% are Filipino — which means a significant proportion of family members who can provide DNA samples live abroad and face hurdles in getting swabs to the island.

Some family members may be displaced and unaware of the need to provide samples. Others may fear their DNA will go into state and federal databases.

Martin and other officials have stressed repeatedly on local news that DNA samples will be used only to identify those who perished in the wildfire.

“The only thing that their DNA is used for is identifying their loved ones,” he said. “That’s it.”

After days scouring the burn zone, Bartelink said he hoped the remains yielded genetic DNA and more families come forward to provide swabs. Only then can the missing be accounted for.

“The closure process often starts with just knowing what happened, where were they found, making sure that they’re identified,” he said. “We really are doing this for the families.”

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What We Lost in the Lahaina Fire

The fire razed Maui’s densest dining town, destroying the fifth-generation-owned Nagasako Okazuya Deli, Maui’s oldest dive bar, the pickle mango stand on Front Street, and so much more

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Throughout its centuries-long history, Lahaina has been many things to many people: a royal residence, a missionary post, a hard-partying harbor town, a tourist trap. For some, it was simply home.

The fire that reduced the historic town to ash on August 8, 2023 was unsparing. It took the lives and livelihoods of so many of our community members. Around 50 restaurants went up in smoke that day. As the former dining editor for Maui Nō Ka ‘Oi magazine, I can name 30 without even trying. It’s an unfathomable loss for the industry — one that feels particularly cruel after everyone worked so hard to survive the pandemic.

For many, it’s still too early to talk about rebuilding. Even apart from the grief and mourning that still hangs in the air, on a very practical and tangible level, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates it will take months just to clear away the literal toxic debris. Before the fire, Lahaina’s world-famous Front Street was little more than a patchwork of wooden shacks held together by layers of paint, cooking grease, crusty sea salt, banana sap, and gossip. Some restaurants will certainly reopen in new locations, but that unique patina that made the place so compelling is gone.

And some restaurants will never reopen, including Nagasako Okazuya Deli , the oldest and arguably most beloved eatery in Lahaina. For 120-plus years, the Nagasako family served the West Maui community, and it started with Mitsuzo Nagasako, who opened a candy store on the corner of Front Street and Lahainaluna Road in the early 1900s. With each successive generation the business evolved — into a supermarket, then a grocery, and finally an okazuya, or deli. Lahainaluna boarding students crowded the okazuya counter before school each day to stock up on the deli’s special Spam musubi: meat in the middle, fried in teriyaki sauce. Families stopped by before and after the beach for shoyu chicken and breaded teriyaki steak. A week after the fire, the Nagasakos announced through a heartfelt post featuring photos of all six generations of the family that they would not reopen. This is one of the many threads to Lahaina’s past that has now been lost.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nagasako Okazuya Deli (@nagasako.okazuya)

The Pioneer Inn was Lahaina’s first hotel, built in 1901. Over the years it housed a saloon, stage, and movie theater. Most recently it was home to Papa‘aina , chef Lee Anne Wong’s wharf-side restaurant. Originally from New York, Wong came to Maui by way of Honolulu. She learned to cook Hawai‘i-style cuisine at Koko Head Café, her brunch spot in Honolulu’s Kaimukī, and perfected it at Papa‘aina, where she served breakfast ramen and mapo tofu loco mocos. A few years ago, Wong hosted a dumpling workshop in the Inn’s courtyard, drawing lessons from her cookbook, Dumplings All Day Wong . With her son on her hip, she taught us to roll and pinch our dough into crescents and dip them into boiling broth, much as local cooks had for the past 100-plus years. Whether or not Papa‘aina will ever reopen is unknown — right now, Wong is focusing on relief efforts for the thousands of displaced people.

Not long ago, at Kimo’s Maui , I had lunch with Paris-born artist Guy Buffet, who had immortalized the Front Street restaurant in a painting that captures the euphoria of dining there on the waterfront. When Rob Thibaut and Sandy Saxten opened Kimo’s in 1977, it was the beginning of their T S Restaurants empire, which now includes Dukes Waikīkī, Hula Grill, and Leilani’s on the Beach, among others. A trip to Maui was hardly complete without tackling a mammoth slice of Hula Pie at sunset while surfers caught the last ankle biters of the day at Breakwall. The owners have already pledged to rebuild their landmark restaurant.

Two doors down from Kimo’s, passersby could peek through a porthole into the Lahaina Yacht Club . Lahaina’s second-oldest restaurant was invite-only — but more in the piratical than prissy sense. Before transpacific sailor Floyd Christenson opened the beloved Mama’s Fish House in Kū‘au, he and a few other old salts founded the mariner’s club in 1965. They transformed a Front Street laundry into a clubhouse and contracted Hawaiian artist Sam Ka‘ai to design the club’s pennant, or burgee: a white whale on red backing. Colorful burgees from yacht clubs worldwide hung over the open-air dining room, where commodores traded navigational tips and tossed back shots of Old Lahaina Rum. If you rang the ship’s bell, you were buying the whole restaurant a round.

Across Honoapi‘ilani Highway, the Sly Mongoose boasted no view whatsoever — instead, Maui’s oldest dive bar advertised air-conditioning. Since 1977, “the Goose” had lured patrons indoors with its jukebox, goldfish crackers, and happy hour featuring $2 Jager Spice and “free beer tomorrow.”

These are only a fraction of the restaurants lost; entire chapters could be written about Lahaina Grill, Pacific’o, Feast at Lele, and Fleetwood’s on Front Street, where the Mad Bagpiper serenaded the setting sun on the rooftop every night. Restaurants weren’t the only places to find sustenance in Lahaina, either. There were food trucks, farmer’s markets, and even temples that served specialty snacks. During Chinese New Year, the Wo Hing museum offered crispy gau gee samples and moon cakes imported from Hong Kong. During the summer Obon festival, Lahaina Hongwanji and Jodo Mission hosted nighttime dances with chow fun booths. The outdoor kitchen at Jodo Mission overlooked the ‘Au‘au Channel and the steam from the boiling noodles wafted out to sea along with lanterns to remember the dead.

Lahaina old-timers will remember the little mango stand across from 505 Front Street. For years a local woman sold pickled mango there in little plastic sacks. Kids biked over after baseball games for bags of mango and sodas. In the summer, Lahaina’s mango trees were laden with the orbs of fruit. And before there were mangos, there were ‘ulu, or breadfruit, groves. Lahaina’s ancient name, Malu ‘Ulu O Lele, refers to the ‘ulu trees that once grew so thick you could walk for miles beneath their shade. Perhaps those trees will grow again.

As enormous as this disaster was, the community’s response was even greater. The day after the fire, Maui’s chefs sprang into action. The team of the grassroots project Chef Hui mobilized at the UHMC Culinary Arts campus to do what they do best: feed and nourish their community. In the first six days, they served over 50,000 hot meals to survivors of the fire. Despite losing her Maui restaurant, Wong has been at the campus every day plating up bentos, along with Isaac Bancaco, who lost both his home and his workplace at Pacific’o. Jojo Vasquez lost his home, too, and was forced to temporarily close Fond , his restaurant in Nāpili. That didn’t stop him from messaging his Chef Hui colleagues: “Tag me in coach, I stay ready.” Joey Macadangdang turned his restaurant, Joey’s Kitchen in Nāpili, into an emergency shelter the night of the fire and has been cooking for his displaced neighbors every day since.

Hawai‘i’s restaurant owners and workers are a tight-knit crew, battle-tested and resilient. Long before this fire stretched them thin, Maui’s restaurateurs, chefs, and servers were always at the island’s innumerable charity events with knives and generators ready. I had often wondered how they kept their doors open while donating food and staff to all these causes. Now is our chance to repay them for their decades of nourishment and for helping to knit together Lahaina’s fabric — layers of history laid down by Native Hawaiians, whalers, missionaries, plantation laborers, locals, transplants, and tourists to create the Lahaina in which we lived, loved, and dined.

Shannon Wianecki is a Hawai‘i-based writer and editor who specializes in natural history, culture, and travel.

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See the historic sites of Lahaina before and after the Maui wildfires

The landmarks of lahaina have been badly damaged and restored before. preservationists hope to rebuild.

Plantation-era wooden buildings turned to ashes. Landmarks made from coral, lava rock and concrete hollowed out by flames. A once-quaint historic street blackened and wrecked.

The wildfire that ravaged Maui this week , killing at least 80, decimated homes and incinerated cultural sites in the historic town of Lahaina . As rescue crews continue working and more than 14,000 people face displacement, the focus there is on helping those who lost their homes, treating the injured and locating the hundreds still missing.

Hawaii utility under scrutiny for not cutting power to reduce fire risks

Adding to the devastation is the loss of some of Lahaina’s culturally rich places, spots that visitors to Maui remember and locals had painstakingly preserved. Over the last 200 years, most of them have been damaged or destroyed – by the strong Kauaula wind, by accidental fires, by time – and rebuilt.

That could happen again, meaning the precious sites may not be lost forever.

“I know we’re going to rebuild, and I know the entire town is going to come together,” said Kimberly Flook, deputy executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation.

“The physical manifestation of the many stories of Lahiana have been lost, but the stories themselves are not,” she said. “The stories have not gone anywhere. The culture lives in the community.”

What we know about the cause of the Maui wildfires

The town is rich in royal Hawaiian history and home to remnants of the missionary era — a place sometimes called Maui’s crown jewel or the colonial Williamsburg of the Pacific. Taking stock of the wreckage there was only just beginning. Flook’s organization was making assumptions about buildings’ fates based on videos and photos, satellite images and the path of the fire.

Maui wildfire updates

Ticking through a list of the town’s historic sites meant ticking through a list of places that were likely mostly destroyed, from a Chinese hall that once served as a social center for immigrants to an erstwhile jail that rounded up rowdy sailors for infractions like drunkenness and adultery.

“It was basically a matchbox waiting to go up,” Lee Anne Wong, executive chef at Papa’aina at the now-decimated Pioneer Inn, said of Lahaina’s historic district. “It was all old wood buildings that had been dried out in the sun.”

Maui fires not just due to climate change but a ‘compound disaster’

Wooden structures – the Wo Hing Museum and Cookhouse, the cell blocks and gatehouse at the Old Lahaina Prison – are presumed to be gone. The Waiola Church, which recently celebrated its 200th anniversary, was engulfed in flames. The Lahaina Harbor was charred and blackened, wreckage floating in the water.

Lahaina historic districts map

Historic district 1

Historic district 2

Historic site

Papalaua St.

Lahainaluna Rd.

Catholic Church

Bolles’

Stone house

Holy Innocents

1. Wo Hing Museum

2. Masters Reading Room

3. Baldwin Home

4. Old Courthouse

5. Holy Innocents Church

6. Waiola Church

Sources: Maui County, Planet Labs PBC

Photos: Eric Broder Van Dyke/Getty Images,

B. David Cathell/Alamy Stock Photo, Atomazul/Shutterstock,

YinYang/Getty Images, Crbellette/Shutterstock,

Courtesy of Lahaina News

SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST

Luakini St.

Richard’s

Ship Market

Stone House

Fanny Young’s

Malu-ulu-o-lele Park

Waiola Church

Photos: Eric Broder Van Dyke/Getty Images, B. David Cathell/Alamy Stock Photo, Atomazul/Shutterstock,

YinYang/Getty Images, Crbellette/Shutterstock, Courtesy of Lahaina News

Stone and concrete buildings – the Baldwin Home, the oldest house on Maui; the Old Lahaina Courthouse, which housed a heritage museum; the Masters Reading Room, an 1800s club for ship captains – may have their walls left. Made of coral, lava rock and concrete, such historical buildings often had wooden floors, roofs and other parts, Flook said. She saw a video of Baldwin Home on fire and satellite images showed the courthouse’s coral block walls left standing.

After five hours in ocean, Maui fire survivor is ‘blessed to be alive’

The restaurant Fleetwood’s – which stood on the merchant site that served as the town’s “center of life” in the Plantation Era, Flook said – was reduced to charred walls and rubble.

The destruction is “pretty devastating,” said Nicholas Rajkovich, a University of Buffalo architecture professor who briefly lived on Maui in the mid-2000s.

Powered by hurricane-force winds, the wildfires on Maui nearly impossible to prepare for or combat. In Hawaii, hurricanes and floods pose more common threats.

“We certainly knew that if a fire started, we were ripe for an issue, but natural fires weren’t a major concern,” Flook said. “In terms of climate change, we were way more focused on sea rise and king tides and tsunamis.”

In photos: The scene as deadly wildfires devastate parts of Hawaii

Sometimes, buildings can be moved or raised in efforts to guard against extreme weather. But that often doesn’t work for buildings of cultural significance, which are tied to a specific location and derive their meaning from their context, Rajkovich said.

And on the whole, little can be done to protect buildings caught in the path of such a catastrophic blaze, especially wooden ones, experts said.

“Based on the images I’ve seen, it seems pretty hard to imagine what could possibly protect a building in this context,” said Daniel Barber, head of the University of Technology Sydney’s architecture department.

The cultural loss is steep. Lahaina holds architectural and historic significance, and its buildings speak to the town’s Hawaiian origins, said Bill Chapman, head of the graduate program in historic preservation at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

He is working with colleagues on a book about architectural conservation that was supposed to dive into Lahaina’s history. Now, it will require a caveat.

“We’re going to have to have a dark box in there,” he said, “to explain that Lahaina isn’t what it was.”

Most of the town’s landmarks had been painstakingly restored at least once over the decades. The Waiola Church, which had celebrated its 200th anniversary in May, had been destroyed by weather or accidental fires and rebuilt four times before: in 1858, 1894, 1947 and 1951.

And in 1919, a fire broke out that destroyed part of Lahaina. What was built in its place, Flook said, became “part of the flavor of the town,” an area people loved.

“We’ve rebuilt fallen structures from the ground up before, so it’s not impossible to redo it,” said Flook.

When they can return to town, the Lahaina Restoration Foundation staff will begin surveying the damage, starting on insurance claims and FEMA paperwork. Buildings with some stable bones left could possibly be restored; the wooden ones would have to be fully recreated, Flook said.

Eventually, preservationists will likely solicit donations and start making plans to rebuild.

For now, the focus remains on humanitarian aid.

Wong, the chef who worked at the nearly 120-year-old Pioneer Inn, described community efforts to help displaced people and coordinate donations of supplies. She was working with a group to make lunches for 2,000 people and dinners for another 2,000.

“The priority is life, is our neighbors and our friends and our family. … I can always build another restaurant,” Wong said. “We need to find safety and shelter and food and water. That is all anybody is thinking about.”

Natalie B. Compton contributed to this report.

Wildfires in Hawaii

What’s happening: After the deadly wildfire in Maui devastated the town of Lahaina, people search for their loved ones as they face the devastation of losing homes , schools and businesses .

How did the fires start? Officials have not announced a cause, though video and data shows it was probably power lines . The spread of nonnative grasses and hurricane-stoked winds could have been factors, along with the indirect influence of climate change .

What areas have been impacted? Fires burned across multiple Hawaiian islands — these maps show where . The town of Lahaina on the island of Maui suffered widespread damage, and historical landmarks across the island were damaged . These photos show the extent of the blaze .

Can I help? Many organizations are accepting donations to assist those affected by the wildfires. Visitors returning to West Maui are encouraged to practice regenerative tourism .

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Cargo ship pilots involved in Baltimore bridge collapse to be interviewed

Lahaina victims mourned as search continues 'until all are found'.

Sep. 10—Families and friends remember David Nuesca Jr., 59, and John "Thumper " McCarthy, 74, who died in the Lahaina inferno.

WAILUKU—No new names since Tuesday have been added to list of those known to have died in the Aug. 8 Lahaina wildfire, but the slow, methodical process of identifying the 115 individuals recovered so far continues.

The Maui Police Department has released the names of 55 of the fatalities, with six others identified but whose relatives have yet to be notified.

On Aug. 29, Maui County reported that 100 % of the 5-square-mile burn zone had been surveyed by specialized search and recovery teams. Officials said that all the recognizable human remains to be found had been recovered, leaving in doubt whether the true number of people killed in the inferno that destroyed over 2, 200 structures, most of them residences, will ever be known.

Officials added that efforts to recover and identify bone fragments and other partial remains will be ongoing as the ruins of Lahaina are cleared.

Since Thursday, the county's daily fire update has reported that 99 % of the disaster area had been searched. When asked about the discrepancy, a county Joint Information Center spokesperson said, "We backed it up to 99 % because the government (Federal Emergency Management Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Maui County ...) will always be looking. There are still those that are unaccounted for. It will remain at 99 % until all are found. The search for those unaccounted for will continue."

The FBI and MPD on Friday released still unaccounted-for in the wake of the deadly fire and are seeking information on scores of others who were included on a much longer list released the previous week.

MPD has yet to officially acknowledge the death of Kirk Carter, 44, of Lahaina, who died Aug. 15 at Straub Medical Center's Burn Unit in Honolulu. The department did not respond to Honolulu Star-Advertiser requests last week asking why Carter's name has not been added to, even though the Honolulu Medical Examiner confirmed his identity and notified his family almost a month ago. MPD also did not respond to a request to clarify whether Carter is included in its wildfire death toll of 115.

MEANWHILE, the families and friends of those who died in the Lahaina fire are struggling to deal with that knowledge, along with their own losses.

Davilynn Severson recalls saying goodbye to her uncle, David Nuesca Jr., 59, on Aug. 8 as she departed from their longtime family home on Malolo Place. Both her husband and 4-year-old daughter suffer from bad asthma, she said, and they wanted to leave before the smoke from the wildfire worsened.

Four generations of their extended family lived in two homes on a property that was built by her grandparents.

"Everything happened so fast, as everyone knows in Lahaina. That fire was definitely devastating, " said Severson, 32. "But that was our third fire that we fought in Lahaina. Including myself, we didn't think this fire was going to turn out to be that way.

"The last conversation that I had with my uncle was, 'I 'll see you later.'"

Before they left, Nuesca tried to reassure his niece that everything would be OK.

"My uncle said, 'Nah, no worries ; not going come down here.'

"I'm not sure what my uncle's last words would have been, but what I believe, when I talk about my uncle, is definitely he would've just stayed with the house."

Nuesca's name was released Aug. 27 by MPD as one of the 115 Lahaina wildfire fatalities.

The happy-go-lucky Nuesca was raised in Kahana and Lahaina, Severson said. In his younger years he paddled for Kahana Canoe Club in a dominating crew known as the "egg-­beaters, " because "they were untouchable, " according to his niece.

"As a brother, an uncle, and grand-uncle, he was always willing to give anything he had, especially to the kids, and lived the simple life of enjoying each day and each other's company."

Eleven other family members escaped Lahaina safely and for now are living in different locations, adding to their sadness and grief. Severson and her husband and daughter received a voucher to stay in a Kihei Airbnb unit but will have to move Sept. 27, she said.

"It just sucks and it's sad that we're all kind of scattered, because there's not really a place that can hold all of us at once, and we do have a couple dogs, " she said. "So it's frustrating and hard to find help and hope."

Anyone wishing to assist the family may donate directly to them through her mother's @cganer Venmo account.

RETIRED FISHING charter captain John "Thumper " McCarthy, 74, was a fixture at the Lahaina Yacht Club on Front Street.

"He greeted everyone with a personal greeting, loved to see people, loved to be around everybody, " said Dave Schubert, yacht club commodore. "To be fair, Front Street has probably been his life longer than the eight years I've known him, whether he was at the yacht club or whether he used to go Pi Artisan (Pizzeria ), or on days we weren't open even the Lahaina Fish Co. He had a little scooter for the last couple of years and would go up and down the street. He knew everybody."

To celebrate his 70th birthday, Schubert said an impromptu parade was held with McCarthy sitting in the back of a convertible cruising up and down Front Street accompanied by honking horns.

Friends previously had rallied around McCarthy last summer with a GoFundMe fundraiser to help with his recovery after a fall that affected his mobility.

Originally from Newport Beach, Calif., his remains were found at his home off Front Street. MPD released McCarthy's name Sept. 3.

"The outpouring over the weeks of uncertainly when we didn't know, we were getting phone calls, messages and emails from the mainland asking, 'How's Thumper ?' We was extremely well-known and extremely missed, " Schubert said. "We're missing a huge part of our yacht club."

The venerable Lahaina Yacht Club also lost its 58-year-old clubhouse in the fire. The club has 800 members, including 400 on Maui, and hosts the biennial Vic-Maui Yacht Race, first contested in 1965, from Victoria, British Columbia, to Lahaina.

Losses included boats used in the club's popular summer sailing classes for youngsters, according to Schubert, who lost his home in the fire, escaping the flames with his girlfriend with only 20 minutes to spare.

The yacht club's auxiliary group has been making checks of members and staff, and so far McCarthy is the only one known to have died in the fire. A relief fund has been set up to assist employees, about a dozen of whom lost their homes, at.

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Hawaii says 30 Lahaina fire survivors are moving into housing daily but 3,000 are still in hotels

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says some 3,000 people displaced by Lahaina’s wildfires are still living in hotels more than seven months after the August blaze

HONOLULU -- Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Wednesday some 3,000 people displaced by Lahaina's wildfires are still living in hotels more than seven months after the August blaze but that up to 30 people are moving to longer-term housing each day.

Green told a news conference the state and federal government have lined up sufficient long-term rental units to shelter everyone who is currently in one of 11 hotels still housing survivors. The state and federal governments are also building some modular transitional housing units for displaced residents. Green said he expects all displaced residents will leave the hotels by July 1.

Nearly 8,000 Lahaina residents were living in 40 hotels in the days immediately after the fire.

Maui has a severe housing shortage. In West Maui, much of the housing that does exist has been used as vacation rentals for tourists. In December, Green threatened to use the “hammer” of emergency orders to impose a moratorium on Maui short-term rentals if enough property owners didn't make their units available to Lahaina residents.

But Green said Wednesday such a moratorium won't be necessary. He said the state has contracts for 1,300 units and that the number of households in hotels has dropped to under 1,300.

One issue now, Green said, is that many available rentals are not in West Maui, and some Lahaina residents have refused them because they want to stay near their jobs and their children's schools.

“A lot of people have been offered an apartment, housing, and have rejected it because it’s too far away from West Maui, or it didn’t suit their family circumstance,” Green said.

Green said people are being given four opportunities to accept housing that is offered and two chances to appeal an option provided. He said some people have rejected housing four, five and even six times. Green said authorities are trying to be understanding because they don't want to disrupt people's lives even further but that people will need to leave the hotels eventually.

“Once that transitional housing comes online, honestly, people will have to go move into those if they haven’t left the hotels yet because it’s only fair,” Green said. “We need the resources so that we can build the next school, so that we can rebuild clinics that were lost during the fire.”

Jordan Ruidas, a founder and organizer of the Lahaina Strong community group, expressed disappointment that Green didn't impose a moratorium.

"Today Governor Green chose the comfort of short-term vacation rental owners over the needs of thousands of fire survivors," Ruidas said in a text message. She said Green was “turning away” from his responsibility and authority to use his executive powers to prohibit vacation rentals in West Maui.

Green said in his news conference that he has asked his attorney general to “get serious” about enforcing laws against illegally operated short-term rentals. Ruidas said she looked forward to hearing how the attorney general will do that.

Using the Hawaiian word for land, Ruidas said Lahaina Strong hopes the planned crackdown occurs “before more families leave the aina and communities many have called home for generations.”

The fire destroyed 3,971 properties and caused $4 billion to $6 billion in property damage.

Of these properties, 561 were occupied by homeowners. One-quarter of these lots have already been cleared of debris, Green said.

“That means they’re going to get permits sometime later this year to begin to rebuild back in Lahaina,” Green said, while acknowledging water, sewer and electricity service will need to be restored to these lots.

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Controversy erupts in West Maui as timeshare owners arrive despite tourism delay

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - As state and county officials prepare for a phased reopening of tourism to West Maui on October 8th, some say visitors are already in Ka’anapali.

Displaced Lahaina residents staying at the Hyatt Regency did not want to go on camera for fear of retaliation. Still, they told HNN the sight of new arrivals at the Hyatt Vacation Club next door hit a nerve.

A spokesperson for Hyatt said the people seen by Lahaina residents are timeshare owners with pre-existing reservations.

In a statement saying quote:

We very much respect the Hawaii Governor’s proclamation that strongly discourages nonessential travel to West Maui until October 8. All revenue-generating reservations at Hyatt Vacation Club at Kā'anapali Beach have been canceled into October. Hyatt Vacation Club Owners who have a deeded real estate ownership interest (for which they pay property taxes) and pre-existing reservations are permitted to be on property at this time.

“Yes, they own property. They pay property taxes,” said Syed Sarmad with Advantage Vacations, who has more than 45 years in the Maui timeshare business. He estimates more than half of the lodging in Ka’anapali are timeshares, with most of the owners from the continental U.S.

“They don’t own enough here to stay here for a long time. They are vacationers.”

HNN reached out to the governor‘s office for comment and received this statement from DBEDT Director James Kunane Tokioka.

Since the Governor issued the seventh proclamation relating to the wildfires, this is the first that we’ve heard of visitors staying in West Maui. The hotel partners that I have been in contact with on a regular basis have not taken in guests other than shelter survivors and government employees. We would like to thank all of the partners that have been respectful to the survivors and adhering to the Governor’s strong discouragement of nonessential travel to West Maui until October 8.

According to a Hyatt spokesperson, the staff have been highly responsive to concerns raised by Lahaina fire survivors and have made modifications, including restricting pool access and suspending food and beverage service on the property at this time out of sensitivity from displaced residents staying nearby. It also says that only a small fraction of their timeshare villas are occupied, with owners being reminded to be respectful.

This comes as tensions continue to rise as the October 8th opening date gets closer, with more than 7,000 people signing a petition  online  calling for it to be delayed.

On Tuesday, the governor stood by his plan.

“This begins the process of recovery for Lahaina and its people. It’s a very difficult decision. We expect a small fraction of the normal travelers to come at that time. It’s just the beginning. We will not displace any survivors and their families for tourists. We will make every effort, no matter what, to take care of our people,” said Green.

It comes as thousands in Maui County continue to apply for unemployment every week, two months after the fire.

Whether some like it or not, come next month, it will be more than just timeshare owners staying at Ka’anapali Beach.

The full statement from Hyatt Vacation Club reads as follows:

Hyatt Vacation Club consists of several points-based and weeks-based Ownership programs. In a normal operating environment, non-owners also have the opportunity to experience our resort offerings through rentals. However, all revenue-generating reservations at Hyatt Vacation Club at Kā'anapali Beach have been canceled into October. Currently on property at Hyatt Vacation Club at Kā'anapali Beach are timeshare owner reservations.

We very much respect the Hawaii Governor’s proclamation that strongly discourages nonessential travel to West Maui until October 8. All revenue-generating reservations at Hyatt Vacation Club at Kā'anapali Beach have been canceled into October.

Hyatt Vacation Club Owners, who have a deeded real estate ownership interest (for which they pay property taxes) and pre-existing reservations, are permitted to be on property at this time.

We have communicated the Governor’s proclamation to Hyatt Vacation Club Owners and information regarding the limited level of service and amenities that are available both on and off property during their stay and provided opportunities and options for canceling or rebooking. We have an extremely limited number of Owners on the property – only 10 of our 131 villas are occupied at this time – and have encouraged any Owner who is returning to their residential unit do so respectfully. We are being highly responsive to the concerns raised by those who have been affected and have made modifications, including restricting all pool access and food and beverage amenities on the property at this time.

We understand that the community has incurred significant loss, and it is a very emotionally challenging time for the people of West Maui. We are sensitive to the needs of our associates who have been deeply impacted and are working to extend care to the community while also caring for owners on property. Hyatt Vacation Club at Kā'anapali Beach is not owned or operated by Hyatt.

Copyright 2023 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.

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After ‘unexpected’ delays, AG’s office to release initial timeline of Lahaina fire in April

L AHAINA (KHON) — Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said the state will release its initial timeline of the Lahaina fire on April 17.

The Fire Safety Research Institute was hired by the AG’s office to investigate the timeline of events on Aug. 8, 2023, or Phase 1 of the report.

AG Lopez said FSRI ran into delays.

In an email to NewsNation affiliate KHON, the AG’s team said FSRI was seeking documents and data, including photos, video, and audio recordings; along with interviews with key Maui County personnel who worked during those first three days.

“Initial requests for information were made directly by FSRI investigators. The initial responses from the county were often slow and yielded less information than expected. To confirm that all responsive documents were being provided in response to these requests, the issuance of the initial three subpoenas by the Department of the Attorney General was deemed necessary. Afterward, the County of Maui stated that it would require subpoenas for subsequent document productions and interviews with any County of Maui personnel,” the email stated.

Attorney General Lopez said on Monday that FSRI has all the information needed to develop a timeline and conduct an analysis of what happened. The AG’s office said:

The purpose of this investigation is to make sure that this tragedy never happens again, period .

Former Attorney General Doug Chin said the public must remember that the state and four counties are all different entities.

“One reason why the county might be saying we want subpoenas for everything could be because the state and county aren’t getting along, that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that when you have a subpoena you’re introducing a formal process that ultimately, if there’s a disagreement or a problem, a judge will be able to look at this and decide whether the production of documents is satisfactory or if there needs to be more or whether the county doesn’t have to produce so much, is all under the supervision of a judge,” Chin explained.

The AG’s office said it issued 64 subpoenas to Maui County since November, including 11 subpoenas for documents from Maui Police, Maui Fire and Public Safety, Maui Emergency Management Agency, Maui Public Works, Maui Water Supply, and the Finance Department.

The AG also issued 53 subpoenas to interview Maui Police officers, Maui dispatchers, and MEMA workers.

“They want to know as much as possible about the events of that day, where were people, where were the different Maui county employees,” explained Chin.

“Whether it was law enforcement or the emergency management officials or other players involved in Aug. 8, 2023 those are going to be the people they want to interview and the documents they wrote up that day is what the state is going to want to look at because those are present in time contemporaneous recollections of what was going on that day.”

Chin said they can subpoena texts, social media posts, and other types of communication from that day.

“Anytime you have a subpoena process what that does is create a formality in the investigation that I think in this case the state and county probably want,” Chin explained.

“That way if there is any pushback on ‘why are you subpoenaing so many people’ or ‘why are you asking for so many documents’ or ‘we’re going to produce these documents and not these documents to you because they’re privileged,’ all of those can be resolved by a judge if the two parties, the state and the county, can’t agree with each other.”

He said the downside of the formal subpoena process is that it takes time.

The Camp Fire which destroyed the town of Paradise, California claimed 85 lives.

KHON reached out to the Butte County District Attorney who said they had to issue hundreds of subpoenas to PG&E employees and the whole process took about one year.

The list of subpoenas for the AG’s Phase 1 investigation, did not include Hawaiian Electric, which has touted transparency.

“We have fully cooperated with the attorney general’s investigation and have not received any subpoenas,” HECO said in a statement.

Maui County said in an email on Monday afternoon that it shares the AG’s goal of comprehensively analyzing the timeline of the August 2023 utility-caused fires, a task that is simultaneously being completed by the County of Maui Fire Department, by the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and by dozens of independent experts in the ongoing lawsuits related to the fires.

The county pointed out that MPD had completed its After Action Report in which a timeline was given.

Maui County said it’s delivered over thirty different productions of documents (containing nearly 20,000 distinct files, including almost 8,000 video and audio files, 48,000 pages, and over 118 gigabytes of data) and has made its workers, directors, deputies, and employees available for over 150 technical interviews and numerous site visits into and around the affected areas.

“The County has shown and continues to show great respect for the Department’s investigative authority in this matter,” the email stated.

Maui officials added, “Of course, the County also appreciates the Department’s [Attorney General] mutual respect for the realities faced by a significant number of County personnel, who must continue maintaining the operations of County infrastructure and systems while they also grieve, re-orient their lives, and recover physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually from the fires. To this end, subpoenas were requested for personnel testimony following multiple instances of FSRI arriving to interview County personnel, including first responders, without notice, coordination, or legal representation. In fact, there were several occasions where such interviews occurred during work hours and were interrupted by emergencies requiring the attention of County personnel, only to have FSRI waiting for them upon their return.”

Maui County said document subpoenas were requested to organize and track FSRI’s “dozens of requests, many of which FSRI communicated directly to County personnel despite the County’s repeated requests to go through Corporation Counsel.”

The e-mail added that the document subpoenas have “greatly assisted in managing FSRI’s more than 150 informal and unorganized document requests and has allowed County personnel to better track the progress of production for each. It has also helped the County identify multiple instances of repeated requests or requests for information that had already been provided.”

“Finally, the County has provided to FSRI all documents that have been produced by the County in response to dozens of UIPA requests from the public.

The County pursuant to the ongoing litigation is in the process of disclosing both the UIPA production and the FSRI production to all parties in the ongoing litigation—including hundreds of claimants and their attorneys and experts. The County is in the process of complying with its discovery obligations with respect to that order.”

The FSRI told KHON it conducts advanced fire science research to advance fire safety knowledge and address the world’s unresolved risks and emerging dangers and works in collaboration with its international network of partners.

FSRI said the Phase One report will analyze how the fire incident unfolded, based on science, during the first 24 to 72 hours of the fire and its aftermath, and includes a comprehensive timeline of events. The analysis will be included in Phase Two. 

“Since the investigation is ongoing, FSRI cannot provide additional details before the Phase One report is released on April 17,” the e-mail stated.

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Lahaina Harbor cleanup estimated to finish around early December

Testing of lahaina waters pending results, funding.

Tiare Lawrence addresses state Department of Land and Natural Resources officials during an informational meeting Wednesday in the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s McCoy Studio Theater. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photos

KAHULUI — The U.S. Coast Guard has removed 79 vessels inside and outside of Lahaina Harbor and is looking to have its cleanup of fire damage and debris done around early December, although it could take longer, an official said Wednesday.

“We are anticipating to conclude our operations by Dec. 5, but it could be slightly delayed based on the rest of the work that we are anticipating completing,” said Cmdr. Melanie Burnham, incident commander for the Emergency Support Function No. 10, which is assessing the pollution and discharges as well as handling sunken vessels and debris left by the August fire.

So far seven vessels have left under their own power and have been returned to their owners, she said. Owners of 51 vessels removed from the harbor were given the option to come see their vessels to take notes and photos if they wanted.

She said there are still 10 vessels that are either cleared to leave the harbor as they are still floating, or are still being assessed by their owners, operators and insurance.

There are four vessels left that they know of that are sunken or whose final status is still being determined, Burnham said.

State Senate Majority Whip Lorraine Inouye, who chairs the Senate’s Committee on Water and Land, asks a question during Wednesday’s state Department of Land and Natural Resources meeting in the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s McCoy Studio Theater.

“We are also really then focused on the final debris removal from all of the structures such as the piers and so on and so forth, so we are going through and removing that,” Burnham said.

Burnham was one of several speakers Wednesday morning at the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ informational meeting at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center. The meeting was to provide an update on recovery and operations of Lahaina Harbor, which remains closed, and Mala Wharf, which reopened last month.

Russell Sparks, aquatic biologist with the DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources on Maui, cautioned those wanting to get into the waters off Lahaina.

“The water may look clear, it may look perfectly fine, but we really do not know, and from this perspective knowing what is in the ash and the toxic components of that, we just strongly recommended people minimize or avoid entering the water off of Lahaina town,” Sparks said, noting they are awaiting test results. “If you must go in, limit your exposure as much as possible.”

Sparks said there are no results yet from the state Department of Health’s testing of ash in Lahaina, but it is expected to be similar to what was found in the Kula ash, with some high concentrations of toxins.

Maui DOCARE Branch Chief Howard Rodrigues (from left), DAR aquatic biologist Russell Sparks, DLNR Chairperson Dawn Chang, DOBOR Assistant Administrator Meghan Statts and staff planner Finn McCall listen to testimony Wednesday.

He said that even without a budget, DAR partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey to collect samples of offshore waters from Puamana to Mala and also the Lahaina Small Boat Harbor to check for toxins. But, they do not know any results, as they are still seeking funding.

“I know it’s not satisfying to hear me say that we’ve collected samples but we don’t know what’s in them. Believe me, we feel that frustration equally,” Sparks said.

The estimated cost for the 12 samples to be analyzed is around $200,000 to $300,000, with each sample costing $5,000 to $7,000 to analyze. The state is seeking to cover costs through “emergency service funding,” Sparks said.

“Hopefully within a month or so we’ll have some kind of preliminary results,” Sparks said, adding he expects more formal results in a few months.

Commercial shoreline activities from Mala are prohibited until water sampling results are available, said Meghan Statts, assistant administrator for DLNR’s Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation.

During Wednesday’s meeting at the MACC, a member of the audience holds up a sign protesting commercial use at Mala Wharf, a longtime issue for the area.

Statts said they have put in a request for Federal Emergency Management Agency help to get dredging done at the harbor and surrounding submerged areas to remove hazardous materials as well. She said when work is done to remove the debris and vessels, they hope to start work on the inner marginal wharf.

Finn McCall of the DOBOR Engineering Branch said work had already been scheduled on the inner marginal wharf at Lahaina Small Boat Harbor in September but that did not occur due to the fires.

DLNR also is waiting for the release of $4 million for work on the front row piers at Lahaina Harbor, McCall said.

There are no funds yet set aside for work on the outer marginal wharf but they do intend to rebuild that and are hoping to get funding for that in the next budget session, McCall said.

He said there have been discussions of how Lahaina Harbor will be rebuilt, and he wants to have more discussions with harbor users. However, he said space is limited in the area.

“Some of the things that you may want to do may not be feasible because of the space,” he said. “But at a minimum we are planing to build back the harbor the way it was.”

As for Mala Wharf, Statts said there are 16 companies with commercial permits. Four are currently able to do business but none have started working.

Statts said the new 56-foot office trailer should be on-site at Mala by Nov. 15, and Lahaina employees should be staffing it regularly.

The state Legislature also appropriated DLNR $3.2 million for Mala Ramp for design and construction, with work including comfort station improvements along with on-site upgrades such repaving and restriping. Release of funds from the state is still pending, she said.

More than 100 people attended Wednesday’s meeting that filled the McCoy Studio, and dozens spoke before DLNR Chairwoman Dawn Chang and other DLNR representatives. Testifiers were only supposed to ask questions but spoke about better management of the harbors and facilities, setting up an advisory group to give input to DLNR, assisting boaters whose vessels were lost and addressing the long-standing issue of managing commercial and recreational uses.

Some said a way to alleviate overcrowding is to expand Lahaina Harbor, seeing an opportunity now that the harbor is being rebuilt.

“I think the real solution is to increase capacity of the harbor,” said recreational sailor Tom Bolz, who added that this is the time to envision how the harbor will be in 10 years. He said this could help solve the struggle between recreational and commercial use.

Bolz added that there needs to be a place boats can go in bad weather to prevent them from running aground. Earlier this year multiple boats broke loose from their moorings, including a yacht in Honolua Bay that took nearly two weeks to remove.

“Right now the only real option that we have in West Maui is mooring,” Bolz said.

State Sen. Lorraine Inouye of Hawaii island, who heads the Senate Committee on Water and Land, attended the meeting and agreed with expanding capacity, saying it was something that officials could look into.

“I’m curious, I’d like to see an increase in Lahaina Harbor. The reason why I ask this is because no different than what was mentioned, it is an opportunity for us to do that because you are rebuilding,” Inouye said, who received applause after her testimony.

She said she would be happy to ask Hawaii’s federal congressional delegation to make an appropriation for the expansion.

But some testifiers, including Native Hawaiian organizer Tiare Lawrence, whose family is from Lahaina, did not want more commercial entities at the West Maui boating and recreation areas.

“Increased capacity at Lahaina and Mala is not an option,” she said to applause. “It will be met with the utmost resistance, and I can promise you that. As a surfer, as a kanaka oiwi, as a waterwoman that surfs in these areas, destroying these historical surf breaks would be devastating and met with a lot of resistance from around the world.”

Lawrence also wants to put a stop to cruise ships who dock off Lahaina town but have their tenders bring passengers to the harbor.

“The working class families and the surfing community are adamantly against cruise ships returning to Lahaina town,” she said.

Chang told the audience that DLNR has been working to address public concerns since an October meeting on the harbors, noting that Mala Wharf has reopened and commercial activity is limited to weekdays while recreational use is available 24/7.

“We are listening to you,” Chang said. “We hear your concerns and we are trying to address them.”

Chang said DLNR has also revisited the status of Lahaina Harbor and Mala Wharf use permits, placing those who lost their vessels in the fire on a “holdover status” and not on a permit waitlist, as was indicated at the October meeting.

Chang added that DLNR has been in discussions with the state Department of Education over public requests to expand the Lahaina Harbor area to allow for trailer parking to accommodate Mala commercial users. The DOE’s King Kamehameha III Elementary is located next to the harbor and was damaged beyond repair in the Aug. 8 fire. But, Chang said, “we don’t have firm commitments” from the DOE and no decision has been made about using the school’s space.

“I’m really trying very hard to balance recreation, commercial use permits,” Chang said, adding that she is doing so with DLNR’s “primary mission” in mind, which is to protect cultural and natural resources.

* Staff Writer Melissa Tanji can be reached at [email protected].

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Hawaii Says 30 Lahaina Fire Survivors Are Moving Into Housing Daily but 3,000 Are Still in Hotels

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says some 3,000 people displaced by Lahaina’s wildfires are still living in hotels more than seven months after the August blaze

Audrey McAvoy

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green addresses a news conference in Honolulu on Wednesday, March 27, 2024. Green said some 3,000 people displaced by Lahaina's wildfires are still living in hotels more than seven months after the Aug. 8 blaze but that up to 30 people are moving to longer-term housing each day. (AP Photo/Audrey McAvoy)

HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Wednesday some 3,000 people displaced by Lahaina's wildfires are still living in hotels more than seven months after the August blaze but that up to 30 people are moving to longer-term housing each day.

Green told a news conference the state and federal government have lined up sufficient long-term rental units to shelter everyone who is currently in one of 11 hotels still housing survivors. The state and federal governments are also building some modular transitional housing units for displaced residents. Green said he expects all displaced residents will leave the hotels by July 1.

Nearly 8,000 Lahaina residents were living in 40 hotels in the days immediately after the fire.

Maui has a severe housing shortage. In West Maui, much of the housing that does exist has been used as vacation rentals for tourists. In December, Green threatened to use the “hammer” of emergency orders to impose a moratorium on Maui short-term rentals if enough property owners didn't make their units available to Lahaina residents.

But Green said Wednesday such a moratorium won't be necessary. He said the state has contracts for 1,300 units and that the number of households in hotels has dropped to under 1,300.

One issue now, Green said, is that many available rentals are not in West Maui, and some Lahaina residents have refused them because they want to stay near their jobs and their children's schools.

Photos You Should See

“A lot of people have been offered an apartment, housing, and have rejected it because it’s too far away from West Maui, or it didn’t suit their family circumstance,” Green said.

Green said people are being given four opportunities to accept housing that is offered and two chances to appeal an option provided. He said some people have rejected housing four, five and even six times. Green said authorities are trying to be understanding because they don't want to disrupt people's lives even further but that people will need to leave the hotels eventually.

“Once that transitional housing comes online, honestly, people will have to go move into those if they haven’t left the hotels yet because it’s only fair,” Green said. “We need the resources so that we can build the next school, so that we can rebuild clinics that were lost during the fire.”

Jordan Ruidas, a founder and organizer of the Lahaina Strong community group, expressed disappointment that Green didn't impose a moratorium.

"Today Governor Green chose the comfort of short-term vacation rental owners over the needs of thousands of fire survivors," Ruidas said in a text message. She said Green was “turning away” from his responsibility and authority to use his executive powers to prohibit vacation rentals in West Maui.

Green said in his news conference that he has asked his attorney general to “get serious” about enforcing laws against illegally operated short-term rentals. Ruidas said she looked forward to hearing how the attorney general will do that.

Using the Hawaiian word for land, Ruidas said Lahaina Strong hopes the planned crackdown occurs “before more families leave the aina and communities many have called home for generations.”

The fire destroyed 3,971 properties and caused $4 billion to $6 billion in property damage.

Of these properties, 561 were occupied by homeowners. One-quarter of these lots have already been cleared of debris, Green said.

“That means they’re going to get permits sometime later this year to begin to rebuild back in Lahaina,” Green said, while acknowledging water, sewer and electricity service will need to be restored to these lots.

Copyright 2024 The  Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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After the fire: St. Andrews Bay Yacht Club focused on revitalizing this coming summer

PANAMA CITY — In November, the St. Andrews Bay Yacht Club building on Bunkers Cove Road was destroyed in a fire. Ever since then, questions have circulated around the community: How did the fire start? Would the Yacht Club rebuild?

The Yacht Club was up and operational for business within weeks of the fire. The Yacht Club is still taking in new members, as well. Members have joined the club even after the fire.

”The Yacht Club is in better shape than people would have imagined,” said Michael Wynn, 2024 commodore. “The staff members that we have are family to us. We believe and give to them and they give back to us.”

Wynn explained that one club member had this to say after the fire: “The clubhouse was just a building; the Yacht Club is about the people.”

The Yacht Club has discussed expanding its sailing center to provide greater resources for the community. The club expects the plans and renderings for the new club facility will be unveiled this summer.

Some of the staff members have left the club since the incident and others have stayed.

“Our staff is smaller now since the fire,” said Wynn. “We have less services being offered at the moment, but many staffers who left the club for other jobs have offered to come back once the club becomes (fully) operational again.”

The cause of the fire is still unknown. There have been different ideas and theories on how the fire started, but there has not been a definitive answer. But there was no foul play, Wynn emphasized.

”Right now, we don’t have a final number on what it’s going to cost to rebuild,” said Wynn. “We have architects and plans on rebuilding. We have members of the community who are donating services to help cut the cost (of our rebuild).”

More information about the club will be released closer to the clubhouse reopening. Wynn said the rebuild will both honor the club's history and heritage and also add modern touches.

Previous coverage: More details released as Panama City monitors St. Andrews Bay Yacht Club fire site

Wynn said the club's experience dealing with insurance after the fire has been good and the matter soon will be resolved. The experience was much better than the ones many people had after Hurricane Michael, he noted.

Wynn also is humbled and gratified by the outpouring of support and dedication from his fellow club leaders and all club members. He knew his one-year term as commodore, which began in January, would be full of challenges. But the club has rallied because the tradition and legacy mean so much.

"People care so deeply," he said.

News Herald Editor Jim Ross contributed to this report

[email protected]

Published on August 10th, 2023 | by Assoc Editor

Maui wildfires continue to decimate

Published on August 10th, 2023 by Assoc Editor -->

(August 10, 2023) – The rescue efforts are continuing after the death toll from the fast-moving wildfires wreaking havoc through Hawaii increased to 53, Maui County officials said. Blazes have been raging across Maui and have also been reported on the island of Hawaii, trapping locals and visitors as strong winds linked to Hurricane Dora continue to hamper efforts by authorities to contain the flames.

The fires tore through the historic, popular vacation town of Lahaina, in Maui County, which Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke said was decimated and forever changed. On it’s Instagram page , Lahaina Yacht Club posted the message, “Thank you to everyone who has reached out with thoughts and prayers. The LYC clubhouse may be gone, but it is the community that matters.”

Tourists have been warned to avoid traveling to the hard-hit island. More than 271 structures in Lahaina have been damaged so far, according to Maui officials. U.S. Civil Air Patrol and the Maui Fire Department conducted flyovers of the area, revealing widespread destruction to the West Maui town, the harbor and surrounding areas.

As of this morning, the Lahaina fire was 80 percent contained, county officials said. President Biden declared a major disaster in Hawaii and ordered federal aid to areas affected by wildfires, according to the White House. A second fire on Maui was 70 percent contained, officials added, and a third fire is pending further assessment.

The gusty winds that have been fueling fires on Maui and the Big Island are gradually relaxing. In its morning forecast discussion today, the National Weather Service office in Honolulu, which serves all of Hawaii, wrote that this morning’s winds were moderate to locally breezy, but noticeably much weaker than the last two days and the down trend in wind speeds should continue.

Editor’s note : This video from yesterday says so much: https://twitter.com/WxNB_/status/1689384898958917633

Source: Washington Post

Tags: Lahaina fire , Lahaina Yacht Club , tragedy

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Hawaii fire survivors moving into housing but 3,000 still in hotels

Governor Josh Green expects all displaced residents to leave the hotels by July 1.

Hawaii Governor Josh Green said 3,000 people displaced by wildfires in Lahaina are still living in hotels more than seven months after the blaze, but up to 30 people are moving to longer-term housing each day.

Mr Green told a news conference the state and federal government have lined up sufficient long-term rental units to shelter everyone currently in one of 11 hotels still housing survivors.

State and federal governments are also building modular transitional housing units for displaced residents and Mr Green everyone to leave the hotels by July 1.

Nearly 8,000 Lahaina residents were living in 40 hotels in the days immediately after the fire.

Maui has a severe housing shortage. In West Maui, much of the existing housing has been used as vacation rentals for tourists.

In December, Mr Green threatened to use the “hammer” of emergency orders to impose a moratorium on Maui short-term rentals if enough property owners didn’t make their units available to Lahaina residents.

But on Wednesday he said such a moratorium won’t be necessary.

He said the state has contracts for 1,300 units and that the number of households in hotels has dropped to under 1,300.

One issue now, Mr Green said, is that many available rentals are not in West Maui, and some Lahaina residents have refused them because they want to stay near their jobs and their children’s schools.

“A lot of people have been offered an apartment, housing, and have rejected it because it’s too far away from West Maui, or it didn’t suit their family circumstance,” Mr Green said.

Mr Green said people are being given four opportunities to accept housing that is offered and two chances to appeal an option provided.

He said some people have rejected housing up to six times.

“Once that transitional housing comes online, honestly, people will have to go move into those if they haven’t left the hotels yet because it’s only fair,” Mr Green said.

“We need the resources so that we can build the next school so that we can rebuild clinics that were lost during the fire.”

The fire destroyed 3,971 properties and caused between four and six billion dollars (£3.2-4.8 million) in property damage.

Of these properties, 561 were occupied by homeowners. Mr Green said one-quarter of these lots have already been cleared of debris.

“That means they’re going to get permits sometime later this year to begin to rebuild back in Lahaina,” Mr Green said, acknowledging that water, sewer, and electricity services must be restored to these lots.

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