Rebecca Johnson and her roommates were sleeping when the wildfires erupted in Maui. What she awoke to early in the morning on Tues. Aug. 8 was the stuff of nightmares.
The power had gone out the night prior due to severe winds from Hurricane Dora, and electrical lines were already downed in her neighborhood in Lahaina in west Maui. One of her roommates was awake and spotted smoke rising across town. Soon after, a neighborhood gas station exploded. A police officer was going through the neighborhood telling residents to evacuate, but many couldn't hear the advisory over the 70-mile-per-hour winds, Johnson said. She and her roommates split up, and she and one of them left on foot with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their dog.
The island's alert system — in which 80 green towers sound off an alarm in the case of a natural disaster — was never activated.
"People stood there dumbfounded," Johnson told Salon in a phone interview. "If the sirens would have gone off, we would have all left our homes [earlier], but we didn't know what to do."
Johnson circled the area trying to find a safe place that wasn't in flames. But most of the highways were not traversable due to fallen debris, and the other roads were jammed with people trying to leave in a panic. Even the ocean, which some jumped into to try to evade the flames, was ablaze in some areas from oil spilled by boats, she said. Without electricity, they had no way to charge their cell phones and check for news of what was going on.
"No one had any idea where to go," she said.
Johnson and her roommate headed to a friend's house and they lent them an extra truck to evacuate. One of the vehicle's windows had shattered, leaving them with no protection against inhaling the thick smoke. Driving south along the coast, they made their way to the east side of the island, watching as flames leapt across the landscape in what looked like a "fire tornado," she said.
"I kept looking at the stars, praying I could still see them," Johnson said. "If the wind changed, we wouldn't be able to see any more to drive."
They finally made it to safety in Maalaea, but as is true in many surrounding communities dealing with an influx of evacuees, supplies were running low. Survivors began to share stories as it became clear that the Lahaina they knew was no more.
As of Monday, 99 people had been reported dead from the wildfires in Maui, but Gov. Josh Green said that may rise by 10 to 20 victims per day as personnel search the destruction for bodies. As of Aug. 11, 2,207 buildings in Lahaina alone had been damaged or destroyed, with 86% of those structures residential. It is already the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. since 1918.
In addition to the flames in Lahaina, other wildfires also ignited across the east side of Maui in the Kula region. It's unclear what ignited the fires, but drier conditions linked to climate change and the invasion of nonnative plants across the island are thought to have exacerbated them.
"We never anticipated in this state that a hurricane, which did not make an impact on our islands, would cause this type of wildfire," said Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who served as acting governor while Green was away.
A similar yet less severe situation occurred in Maui in August 2018 when strong winds from Hurricane Lane spread wildfires on the west side of the island that burned through 2,000 acres. A 2019 report from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency stated that the disaster was a "real world wake-up call."
Bob Graybosch, a retired resident that used to work in property management who moved to Maui in 2007, said the sirens did go off in 2018, but their home was not damaged.
This time around they wouldn't be so lucky. The day the fires erupted, Graybosch watched the smoke trickle toward his and his wife's home in Lahaina early in the morning. By the afternoon, they evacuated to a shopping center nearby, where they could see the fires spreading clearly down Puʻu Kukui, the mountain east of Lahaina. They could also see that the highway had been cut off and there was no clear way to evacuate. A nearby Safeway was using propane tanks to power a generator, and soon, they too exploded, Graybosch told Salon in a phone interview.
"I thought at that point, 'Oh no, the last place we could go was gone,'" Graybosch said. "It's going to burn."
That night, a firetruck arrived to evacuate people sheltering in the shopping mall, and Graybosch, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, two dogs, and two cats huddled in the car to follow the firetruck to a nearby shelter.
"It looked like Armageddon," Graybosch said. "It looked like a nuclear bomb had come through and vaporized both sides of the road in the area. It was just surreal."
Graybosch's family spent the night in a makeshift shelter at the Maui Prep School in Napili, but it was too remote to receive supplies, so they once again had to move. After finally getting cell service, they heard from a friend in Kihei, on the other side of the island, that said they could stay with them. On the way there, the Graybosch family passed their old house.
"It was completely disintegrated," Graybosch said. "The biggest need now is finding housing for people that are going to stay in the Lahaina area because there's nowhere to put them right now."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates rebuilding the area affected by wildfires will cost $5.52 billion. Graybosch fears this will take years. And Johnson, who managed to find a flight out of Hawaii, said many locals who stayed fear they'll be left out of rebuilding efforts.
"People think their land is about to be taken over by a bunch of millionaires and they'll never get to rebuild," Johnson said. "They can't just worry about survival, they also worry about [having] no chance of going home."
In a press conference Monday, Green said emergency relief efforts were offering 36 weeks of housing to residents for free across 2,000 units, with housing renewed on a month-by-month basis.
"We don't want people to think they're going to be housed but suddenly asked to leave," Green said.
Residents have already banded together to start rebuilding themselves. Hundreds of fundraising efforts have been created on crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and individual families are sharing their stories on social media to get help and bring supplies to the island.
"Hawaii is coming together so strong," Johnson said. "They're helping each other. … They're getting supplies there by literally swimming them to shore. I saw a glimpse of hope when I saw that."
