At 4 P.M. on August 8th, Shaun Saribay’s family begged him to get in their car and leave the town of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The wind was howling, and large clouds of smoke were approaching from the dry hills above the neighborhood. But Saribay—a tattooist, a contractor, and a landlord, who goes by the nickname Buge—told his family that he was staying to guard their house, which had been in the family for generations. “This thing just gonna pass that way, downwind,” Saribay said. At 4:05 P.M., one of his daughters texted from the car, “Daddy please be safe.”
Within ten minutes, it became clear that the fire had not passed downwind. Instead, towering flames were galloping toward Saribay’s house. He got in his truck and drove to Front Street—Lahaina’s historic waterfront drag—and found gridlock traffic. Saribay, a stocky forty-two-year-old man with a tattoo covering the left side of his face, texted his daughters. “Don’t worry. Dad’s coming,” he wrote. Then he lost cell service. At 4:41 P.M., he pulled into the one large open space he could find, a parking lot behind the Lahaina United Methodist Church, which had just started to burn.
Saribay had recently built a closet at the church, so he knew where all the water spigots were. He filled buckets and water bottles and scrambled to find neighbors’ garden hoses. With the help of three other men who had retreated to the lot, he soaked the church, again and again, fighting a three-story ball of fire with the equivalent of a water gun. At times, the men were stomping, even peeing, on sparking debris. Saribay recorded a video for his kids: “It’s bad. All around—crazy,” he said, panning the hellscape behind him. “Remember what Dad said, eh? I’ll come back.” Almost as if to reassure himself, he added, softly, “I know you guys safe.”
Shaun (Buge) Saribay, a tattooist and landlord, lost three houses, his tattoo parlor, and his boat in the fire. He has become a hero in the community, after he helped keep the neighborhood of Leiali‘i from burning down.
Saribay recorded videos throughout the night as he fought the fire. Despite his efforts, flames consumed the church. Well after midnight, the men tried to save a neighboring preschool, but that caught fire, too. When the sun rose and the wind began to ebb, Saribay got on an old bike and rode around town looking for other survivors. “I’m seeing fucking bodies every fucking way,” he recalled. “I’m pedalling through charcoal bodies and bodies that didn’t have one speck of burn—they just died from inhalation of black smoke. I felt like I was the only fucking human on earth.”
The wildfire in Lahaina was the deadliest in the United States in more than a century. Ninety-nine people have been confirmed deceased, although for weeks the death toll was thought to be even higher, with police reporting that more than a hundred bodies had been recovered. In a town of nearly thirteen thousand people, at least seventy-two hundred were displaced. Twenty-two hundred structures were damaged or destroyed, and the estimated cost to rebuild is five and a half billion dollars. “I have been to most major disasters in the United States in the past decade. This is unprecedented,” Brad Kieserman, a senior official with the American Red Cross, said. “The speed of the fire, the level of fatality and physical destruction, the level of trauma to those who survived—it’s unspeakable.”
The destruction may have been unprecedented, but the fire itself was not. Public-safety officials, scientists, and activists had warned for years of the wildfire risks in Maui, owing to the growing population and the dryness of the island. “It was a ticking time bomb,” Willy Carter, a conservationist who studies native Hawaiian ecosystems, said. “The bomb went off.” Weeks before the disaster, conditions in parts of the state had been categorized as “severe drought,” and on August 4th the National Weather Service warned of hazardous fire conditions in the coming days. With a high-pressure system north of Hawaii and Hurricane Dora spinning hundreds of miles to the south, forecasters predicted that strong winds would be blowing, allowing flames to spread fast.
At 12:22 A.M. on August 8th, a brush fire ignited in Olinda, in the mountains of Central Maui, prompting evacuations. At 6:37 A.M., thirty-six miles away, another brush fire ignited, in a bone-dry field bordering Lahaina Intermediate School. Hard winds had toppled utility poles, and flying sparks from downed power lines likely started the blaze. (The official cause is still under investigation, according to the Maui Fire Department.) Nearby residents were ordered to evacuate within three minutes. By 10 A.M., the county announced, via Facebook, that the Lahaina fire was “100% contained,” but that a main road was closed.
Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
Around 3 P.M., people noticed smoke clouding the sky near the school. With the wind gusting more than seventy miles per hour, the fire had flared up again in the same area. During the next hour, the fire hit “crossover”—a term used to describe a moment when the relative humidity drops below the temperature in Celsius. This allowed the blaze to tumble freely and grow exponentially faster, exceeding firefighters’ capabilities. All they could do was try to save lives.
It would be difficult to overstate the horror of these hours, the disorientation of the hazy twilight caused by toxic smoke, the searing wind and glowing ash, the stark terror of being surrounded by tall flames, the suffocation. At various times, Maui police, in coördination with the power company, closed most of the roads out of town, because of tangles of downed lines and branches, but also because of a fear that some of those roads would direct people into the fire. Evacuees were herded onto Front Street, where traffic was at a standstill. Some people abandoned their vehicles and hurled themselves into the ocean. The water’s surface itself seemed to be smoking, making it hard to breathe. One group held on to wreckage that had fallen in the water; others waded for hours, trying to dodge or douse the embers falling on their heads.
By 7 P.M., the docks and boats in the harbor were lit up as if in a coal-fired oven, the roar of the flames broken by a staccato of exploding propane tanks. In the ocean, the current was pulling weaker swimmers out to sea. Coast Guard boats were crisscrossing the water, barely able to see through the smoke. They ultimately rescued seventeen people from the water and forty from the shore, and recovered one body the next day.
During the fire, the county’s command-and-communication system fell apart. The county sent one emergency cell-phone evacuation alert at 4:16 P.M., after the fire was already moving through town, but the order was just for a single neighborhood. At 6:03 P.M., while the fire was incinerating Front Street, and while people were struggling in the sea, Maui County’s mayor, Richard Bissen, appeared on a local news broadcast, calmly sitting in his office on the other side of the island. “I’m happy to report that the road is open to and from Lahaina,” he said, seemingly unaware of the inferno under way. The county did not issue online evacuation orders for other parts of town until 9:45 P.M. The winds finally subsided at dawn.
Maui was formed by two shield volcanoes about two million years ago, becoming the second-largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, the most remote chain of inhabited islands on earth. Lahaina, which means “cruel sun,” sits on the leeward side of Maui, below the western mountains, Mauna Kahālāwai, which roughly translates to “house of water.” The highest peak is one of the wettest places in the world, historically receiving about three hundred and sixty-six inches of rain per year.
Hawaiians built their communities around the watershed. Their word for water, wai, has many meanings: blood, passion, life. Lahaina—even though it was relatively hot and dry—became, because of its water supply, a cornucopia, replete with irrigated breadfruit, banana, and sugarcane crops, terraced taro patches, and fishponds. In the early nineteenth century, Lahaina was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The king lived in a coral-block palace on an island in the middle of a pond. Residents could paddle around town.