Lisa Francis was trying to drive home from her job at a bank in Lahaina, Hawaii, when the firestorm caught up to her.
It was 5pm on Tuesday (Wednesday afternoon NZT), and she was trapped in traffic near the ocean. Whipped by bruising winds, the firestorm was raging its way west toward her and others in similar straits. She looked at the long column of abandoned cars ahead of her on Front Street and knew there was only one place to go — toward the water.
A stranger, a young man in his 20s, Francis said, rallied her and a small group of similarly stranded women, exhorting them to climb over the knee-high sea wall and take refuge on the strip of rocks along the water below.
They clambered onto the slippery rocks, Francis said. The fire roared through the cars and buildings along the street above, unleashing a choking wall of thick smoke. The oven-like heat pushed them farther down to the water’s edge, she said.
Facing the ocean, she clung tightly to a large boulder, afraid of being swept away by the crashing waves that were protecting her from an unrelenting shower of burning embers.
“A big wave would come and relieve us,” Francis, 54, a Hawaii native who has lived in Lahaina for 31 years, said during a phone interview on Friday. “So the waves really — the ocean — really took care of us.”
Still, the embers left her sleeveless arms with mosquito bite-size burns. Her eyes were seared by smoke and stung by salt water.
Hours passed, and the inferno continued to consume the town above.
Eventually, the fire dissipated. Francis and the others climbed back up the rocks and sat against the sea wall. A faint moon hovered over a dark sea. Lahaina’s burning harbour jutted into view.
It would be 1am before help arrived. Wedged into a truck barreling up Route 30 with other evacuees, Francis looked out on a charred landscape.
“Everything — scorched,” she said. “I felt like I was in a place I had never been before.”
Her neighbourhood, just off the highway, had been levelled by the fire.
From a shelter at Maui Preparatory Academy, about 20 minutes north of Lahaina, she caught a ride to a friend’s house, where her family had gone to escape the fire. Her husband, John Francis, 66, was sleeping inside a car.
“I went by the car window and said, ‘John, I’m here,’” Francis said. “He just broke down crying.”
‘We need some help here’
Days after the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century ignited in West Maui, killing dozens and levelling more than 2200 buildings, increasingly frustrated residents said they were receiving far more help from an ad-hoc network of volunteers than they were from the government.
After the fire destroyed Lahaina, hundreds of local residents — a group that includes evacuees along with nearby residents who found themselves cut off from power and internet service — remained affected in West Maui, miles beyond the highway checkpoints. Some evacuees slept in parks; others stayed in their own homes that survived the disaster or with friends in the wider community of that part of the island.
They have been searching desperately for gasoline, phone reception and hot food, especially after power outages rendered refrigerators and microwaves useless. In many cases, they have leaned on church groups, community organisations and volunteers to track down missing relatives, get rides to shelters or access supplies brought in on private boats and airplanes.
“Where are the county officials? Nobody has internet — I just found out you can’t drink the water,” said Josh Masslon, who was sitting on a hill by the remote Kapalua Airport on Friday night trying to get cellphone service.
The death toll from the fire continued to rise — to at least 93 on Sunday — with more expected. While life in most other parts of Maui seems to have continued with little interruption, West Maui has felt like an island unto itself.
“We need some help here,” Rolando Advincula said as he loaded nappies for his nephews into the back of his car.
State, local and federal officials have had a presence in West Maui since the fires erupted on Tuesday. County firefighters confronted the inferno, Coast Guard sailors rescued people from the water and state officials have distributed supplies and organised temporary housing. Many West Maui residents relocated to government-run shelters in other parts of the island days ago.
On Saturday, Governor Josh Green and Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were among the officials from all levels of government who surveyed the destruction and pledged to help rebuild.
Maui’s remoteness and the scale of the destruction have made the response more challenging, officials said on Saturday. They promised that more help was on the way.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Orlando Mayorquin, Kellen Browning and Mitch Smith
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