Four days after the wildfire that ripped through Lāhainā, damaging or destroying more than 2,200 mostly residential structures and taking at least 99 lives, the town remains a dangerous place. Live power lines are strewn everywhere, and even if residents have an intact home, they don’t have safe, running water. In addition to the loss of so many residential structures, churches and schools, much of Lāhainā’s commercial property, including its entire historic district, is gone.
The death toll is expected to rise in the coming days and weeks. “They will find 10 to 20 people per day probably until they finish and it’s probably going to take 10 days,” Governor Josh Green told CBS News Monday. “It’s impossible to guess really.”
Military forces are taking part in the search and recovery mission, according to Hawaii National Guard Brigadier General Stephen Logan. Forty-seven service members are currently engaged in this “hard, emotional type work,” Logan said Monday. The FBI is assisting in the search effort by using cell phone records to locate missing people.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation. Rebuilding the town could cost more than $5 billion, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Pacific Disaster Center announced Friday.
Greg Bolin knows all of this very well. As the mayor of Paradise, California, he was there in November 2018 when a wildfire overwhelmed the town, killing 85 residents and destroying about 12,000 homes. He said he and other Paradise residents have been watching news reports on the Lāhainā fire with great concern—and familiarity.
On August 12, Lāhainā closed off from the rest of the island while police and fire personnel collect the dead. As of yesterday, 99 people have been confirmed killed—more than the number in Paradise—Governor Josh Green said Saturday. Accounting for the dead is a process Bolin remembers vividly. “It took us two months before we had a final count,” said Bolin. “We had to go through each house.”
Nearly five years later, the town is still rebuilding and is nowhere near what it once was. It probably never will be.
Once housing about 26,000 residents, today the population of Paradise is just a little over 9,000, according to Bolin. Many people, too exhausted, saddened and scared to go through the hardship of trying to stay and rebuild, simply left.
“I lost a ton of friends,” Bolin said of people who decided to leave Paradise after the fire. Though he never considered leaving the town he’d lived in since he was 9 years old, Bolin did wonder at times how it would be possible to save the town. “I did not want to give in and move,” he said. “It wasn’t a question of bringing Paradise back, but were we capable of pulling this off?”
To help convince people to stay, Bolin said the town council agreed to 41 goals demanded by residents. Those included installing warning sirens — which is expected to be complete next month — and getting rid of dead-end roads, which had trapped many of the people who died while trying to escape.
But rebuilding has been slow. In Paradise, the fires melted water pipes, releasing the carcinogen benzene. Maui County officials announced Friday night that neither Lāhainā nor Upper Kula residents should drink or use tap water because of potential contamination.
Today, tap water in Paradise is drinkable, but it took about a year to get there. “Even after it came back, many people didn’t trust it,” Bolin said. “But that was a monumental thing to get the town running again.”
So far, Paradise has rebuilt just over 2,000 homes, but it wasn’t until last year that the town began rebuilding its roads. “They take a beating with cars melting on them,” he said of the damage. According to Bolin, these new roadways are expected to be complete around 2026, nearly 8 years after the fire.
Another key factor to bringing life back to Paradise was rebuilding churches and schools. “FEMA told us to get schools and churches back,” Bolin said. “If you can’t do that, they said, forget it.”
Bolin recalled that the town’s schools reopened very soon after the fire, operating out of warehouses in nearby Chico. He also said the town, what was left of it, rallied around the high school football team. “They missed their playoff game that year because of the fire,” he said. “But the next year, they came back. One kid, his parents moved to San Diego but he stayed in Chico with his aunt because he wanted to play football in Paradise. That brought the town together.”
As for churches, Bolin said one of the largest in town was saved from burning in the fire by an alert maintenance guy who managed to cut down enough trees around the building to keep it intact. Big enough to hold 2,000 people, it was where the town council met after the fire. Other churches in town weren’t so fortunate, and are only now getting rebuilt.
As for the town’s hospital, Bolin said that hospital officials announced last week that it wouldn’t come back. Now, the closest hospital to Paradise residents is 30 minutes away.
What happened in Paradise won’t necessarily translate directly to Lāhainā, but there’s no question that starting to rebuild won’t happen anytime soon. In the meantime, Bolin said the most important thing for residents is to rest. “You have to find a way to rest,” he said. “It’s difficult, but you have to.”
He said community groups were key to Paradise’s recovery. Soon after the fire, they organized free dinners for residents to meet and talk. “We did that for two, three years,” Bolin said. “People need to get together and talk. And they should cry when they need to cry.”
Bolin said it was months before he and others in town really laughed again. A big help came at one of those community dinners, when residents went around the table telling everyone the things they hurriedly grabbed when they evacuated their homes after the fire broke out. “It was some of the funniest things you heard,” Bolin said. “One woman said she grabbed a plate of deviled eggs. We busted up. People need to laugh.”
Like Lāhainā, Paradise lost its museums and historical sites, while residents lost family heirlooms and treasures.
“You can’t bring that back,” Bolin said. “It hurts. People say it’s just stuff, and you almost want to slap them. But you can reach out and ask people who might have pictures of what was lost. You’ll be amazed at how many people have pictures.”
This reporting is from Maui Times, the island’s independent, locally-owned publication. A GoFundMe appeal has been started at wklys.co/mt to support independent local journalism on Maui, which is needed more than ever to ensure a reliable flow of information and accountability as Lāhainā rebuilds.
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