The devastating fires that roared through Maui this week, killing dozens and ravaging the historic town of Lahaina, scorched a beloved tree that has been described as the largest banyan in the US.
For generations, the majestic tree along Lahaina Town’s historic Front Street served as a gathering place with leafy branches that unfurled to give shade from the Hawaiian sun. By most accounts, the sprawling tree was the heart of the oceanside community – towering more than 60ft (18 meters) and anchored by multiple trunks that span nearly an acre. This year the town celebrated the banyan’s 150th birthday with cake.
Today, the tree is still standing but the fire that burned through the area left it charred.
“It certainly doesn’t look like that tree is going to recover,” James B Friday, an extension forester with the University of Hawaii, told the New York Times after reviewing photos and videos of the damage. The tree’s thin bark would not have provided adequate protection from the flames, he said.
The colossal tree has shaded community events, including art fairs, for 150 years.
“It’s kind of the center of town,” Amy Fuqua, a Maui resident, told the Associated Press in a 2016 interview when she was the manager of the Lahaina visitors’ center. “Everyone knows where it’s at. It has an important significance to the town and it feels good under there.”
At the time it was planted in 1873, a gift shipped from India to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Protestant mission in Lahaina, the tree was only an 8ft (2-meter) sapling. It was planted a quarter century before the Hawaiian Islands became a US territory and seven decades after King Kamehameha declared Lahaina the capital of his kingdom.
The tree’s enormity – and its many trunks – is due to how it grows. Aerial roots dangle from its boughs and eventually latch on to the soil. Branches splay out widely and become roosting places for choirs of myna birds.
It has been described as the the “heartbeat of Lahaina Town”.
“There’s just so much meaning attached to it and there’s so many experiences that everyone has. It’s in the heart of a historic town,” said John Sandbach, who has lived on Maui for nearly two decades.
“There is nothing that has made me cry more today than the thought of the Banyan Tree in my hometown of Lahaina,” one Twitter user wrote.
Authorities are still assessing the scale of the damage to Lahaina from the fire, which raced through dry vegetation in the hills and into the town of 13,000 people on Tuesday evening. The ferocious blaze quickly incinerated historic wooden buildings and forced thousands of people to flee.
“I can say everything in Lahaina is gone,” Maui resident Dustin Kaleiopu told CNN. “Everyone that I know and love, everyone that I’m related to, that I communicate with, my colleagues, friends, family – we’re all homeless.”
The governor said Thursday that the town, “with a few rare exceptions, has been burned down”.
Lahaina could have survived the loss of the banyan tree, Sandbach said, “but nothing can survive with the whole town burning down”.
