Updated: 12:30pm
Lahaina, Hawaii, US
Reuters
Maui’s emergency management chief on Wednesday defended his agency’s decision against sounding sirens during last week’s deadly wildfire amid questions about whether doing so might have saved lives.
Herman Andaya, administrator of the Maui County Emergency Management Agency, said sirens in Hawaii are used to alert people to tsunamis. Using it during the fire might have led people to evacuate toward the danger, he told reporters.
Vehicles are seen in traffic on Honoapiilani Highway after officials allowed residents and tourists back into West Maui after a wildfire destroyed the historic town of Lahaina, in Maui, Hawaii, US, on 11th August, 2023. PICTURE: Reuters/Marco Garcia/File photo
Yadira Ulloa, 55, sits outside her daughter’s home in Lahaina after her home was destroyed during the Lahaina fire on the island of Maui in Hawaii, US, on 15th August, 2023. PICTURE: Reuters/Mike Blake/File photo
PRAYERS, TERROR AND A RACE TO ESCAPE AS WILDFIRE BORE DOWN ON HAWAIIAN TOWN
Yadira Ulloa was pumping gas near the apartment building where she lived on the western side of Maui when the winds kicked up, blowing shingles off the roof and propelling the wildfire that would soon incinerate her town of Lahaina.
The winds from a distant hurricane were so fierce they shook her car, and as the fire approached, Ulloa began to pray. Her teen daughter, she realized, was alone in their apartment.
“God guided me,” she said as she recalled the day last Tuesday when a wildfire ripped apart her community. “I went straight to my apartment and there was my daughter.”
“Let’s go!” Ulloa told her. “We ran away.”
Racing down the stairs, seeing the blaze come closer, Ulloa began to cry. “The fire didn’t stop,” she said. “It came running.”
They climbed into Ulloa’s blue truck and fled. The gas station, she later learned, exploded when the wildfire reached it, and the apartment building burned to the ground.
The inferno killed at least 101 people after racing from grasslands outside town into Lahaina.
The magnitude of the fire, which charred a 13-square-kilometre area of town in hours, combined with the logistical challenges of recovery have taken a toll on many of Lahaina’s 13,000 year-round residents, who are also facing the prospect of precious tourist dollars evaporating.
Ulloa, who works as a housekeeper, and her daughter found refuge with an older daughter in the village of Olowalu. But the 55-year-old has been barely able to eat or sleep in the days since. Like many here, she wishes there had been an emergency alert warning to spur people into leaving sooner.
Taxi driver Kiet Ma, 56, was at home as the fire bore down, just 15 metres away from his house. His wife Daisy Luu, 56 and also a taxi driver, was out on the road somewhere in the swirling black smoke. He couldn’t reach her because phone and electrical services were down.
Finally, at around 4:30pm, he said, “I decided it’s time to run.” He followed a neighbour out as the fire bore down. Emergency sirens came on, he said, but their announcements blared evacuations for a different part of town. For two nights, he slept in his car outside the fire zone before joining his wife at her sister’s home in Olowalu – the same home where Ulloa’s daughter rented a room.
On Thursday, Ma and Luu went back to check on their home – it was gone. Twenty years of work, driving private taxis on the island, putting everything into their house, and there was nothing left. Luu showed a visitor before-and-after photos – a peaceful looking ranch-style suburban home, bounded by a fence on a property dotted with palm trees. And then rubble.
“All my life put in, and it’s gone in a minute,” she said.
– JORGE GARCIA and SANDRA STOJANOVIC, Olowalu, Hawaii, US/Reuters
The grassland fire on 8th August raced down the base of a volcano sloping into the tourist resort town of Lahaina, killing at least 110 people and destroying or damaging some 2,200 buildings.
“The public is trained to seek higher ground in the event that the siren is sounded,” Andaya said during a press conference, which grew tense at times as reporters questioned the government response during the fire.
“Had we sounded the siren that night, we’re afraid that people would have gone mauka [to the mountainside] and if that was the case then they would have gone into the fire,” Andaya said.
Maui instead relied on two different alert systems, one that sent text messages to phones and another that broadcast emergency messages on television and radio, Andaya said.
Because the sirens are primarily located on the waterfront, they would have been useless to people on higher ground, he said.
Hawaii Governor Josh Green also defended the decision not to sound sirens. Green has ordered the State Attorney General to conduct a comprehensive review of the emergency response that would bring in outside investigators and experts, clarifying on Wednesday that the review is “not a criminal investigation in any way.”
“The most important thing we can do at this point is to learn how to keep ourselves safer going forward,” Green said.
In other developments:
• US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Hawaii on Monday to survey the devastation and meet with first responders, survivors and federal, state and local officials, the White House said in a statement.
• Officials on Wednesday reopened a main road through town for the first time in days, responding to frustration from residents. The highway, which bypasses the charred waterfront and town centre, was previously closed to all but residents of the surrounding area, first responders and people who work in local businesses.
• Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for. Twenty cadaver dogs have led teams on a block-by-block search that have covered 38 per cent of the disaster area as of Wednesday. The number of dogs would soon double to 40, Green said at Wednesday’s press conference, where he also announced the death toll had risen to 110.
• Identification of the remains has been slow, in part because of the intensity of the fire. Maui County released the first two names on Tuesday: Robert Dyckman, 74, and Buddy Jantoc, 79, both of Lahaina. Three other individuals have been identified but their names have been withheld pending family notification. The other remains await identification, Maui County said.
• As officials work to identify the deceased, stories about those injured or killed in the flames have emerged from loved ones. Laurie Allen was burned over 70 per cent of her body when the car she was escaping in was blocked by a downed tree, forcing her to flee across a burning field, according to a GoFundMe post by her family. She is burned to the bone in some places, but doctors hope she will regain partial use of her arms, the post said. “The Burn Team has expressed more than once that she shouldn’t be alive!” a relative wrote on the page. Allen is now at a burn centre in Oahu, according to the fundraiser post.
• The incongruous sight of tourists enjoying Maui’s tropical beaches while search-and-rescue teams trawl building ruins and waters for victims of the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century has outraged some residents.
– With reporting by JORGE GARCIA and SANDRA STOJANOVIC in Hawaii; additional reporting by BRENDAN O’BRIEN in Chicago
