Chance dictated survival or death in Lahina
LAHAINA, Hawaii — The black smoke from the fire billowed over the ocean as Luz Vargas and her husband, Andres Garcia, left the seaside condo they were cleaning and drove back to Lahaina to find Keyiro.
School had been canceled at Lahainaluna High School due to bad weather, and the 14-year-old boy they considered a son was resting at home, his sophomore year starting the next day. High winds had knocked out the power early that morning, and the modest yellow house on Kaakepa Street was stifling in the late summer heat. Keyiro Fuentes was alone with his terrier, Dexter.
His parents and 20-year-old brother were at work. An older relative who shared the hillside home with its view of palm trees and the ocean below had stepped out that afternoon, unaware anything would go terribly wrong.
At around 4 p.m., as the couple tried to make their way home, traffic snarled in long lines as many in the remote town of 13,000 people fled. Garcia jumped out of their van and grabbed a bicycle to make his way through streets he had known for two decades since moving from Mexico City. Luz simply ran.
It would be two full days until the Garcias could make it home. There, they said, they found Keyiro’s burned body in what remained of his bedroom, his arm around Dexter.
Keyiro is one of at least 111 people who died in the fire that swept through the historic West Maui town of Lahaina, beginning the afternoon of Aug. 8. Officials and residents expect the toll to grow significantly. No American wildfire has claimed more lives in the past century.
The flames were pushed by hurricane-force winds, the escape complicated by Lahaina’s one-road-in-and-out design. The government’s warning system, tested monthly to alert residents of tsunamis, never sounded, and even if it had many here say they would have little idea how to get out of a town nearly surrounded
by flames. They had never been told how.
There was no pattern to the deaths, and there was no single path toward safety.
Some found refuge in the ocean; others died in it, suffocating in the heavy smoke or swept to sea along shores already posted with “strong current” warnings.
Some escaped by car, and others were killed in miles-long traffic jams, enveloped by flames at peak heat due to the old wooden construction in the oldest parts of town, including along coastal Front Street where a large portion of the victims are believed to have died.
Some were old, frail and caught at home with no help; others young, like Keyiro, home from school on a bad-weather day. Many children were left with grandparents and great aunts and uncles while parents like the Garcias worked, making escape even more challenging. In many cases, residents say, the very young and the very old died together.
Hi’ialo Palakiko, an elementary school teacher in Lahaina, said a 7-year-old boy whom she saw regularly died with his family. The boy’s uncle passed on the
news to her, adding that his nephew had been “so excited for the school year” ahead.
The remains of the dead are scant, making identification nearly impossible in some cases. Of the scores of body bags containing remains, only about 10 victims have been identified by name. It may take months to know the totality of who died and how, although word has spread among surviving residents about many of the names and circumstances.
In the absence of official notice, citizens have taken identification of the dead and missing into their own hands.
“My name is Anthony D. Smith and I live in Thailand,” begins one post on the page of a Facebook group helping to locate the missing. “My father is James P. Smith and is a resident of Lahaina.”
“My step-sister-in-law was rescued and taken to Maui Memorial Hospital. Unfortunately my father was not,” the post continues. “He was last seen unresponsive close to the sea wall. He’s an elderly Afro-American man, tall and slender build.”
One of the few dead officially identified was Buddy Jantoc, a 79-year-old musician who lived
at the Hale Mahaolu Eonu complex, a series of single-story apartments for seniors in central Lahaina. The neighborhood was overwhelmed early as the fire raced down the steep hill behind the city toward the sea.
Very little of the central neighborhoods have been searched so far by recovery crews, who have yet to survey even half the damaged areas, according to estimates by emergency officials. Most police and National Guard posts are designed to keep people out of neighborhoods while search and rescue crews slowly work through them.
A van sits abandoned in the street near where Jantoc lived, its rims melted into puddles of metal pooled on the asphalt. Foundations, all that is left of so many homes, are covered with the charred detritus of lives recently lived - burned-out washing machines, weightlifting sets, televisions.
The dead, though, have proved to be most elusive in a recovery effort that has left many here angry, their numbers already clear evidence of the wind’s ferocity that day and the sheer heat of the fire in an old town by the sea.
“In natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes, the bodies are intact once you reach and recover them,” said George Martin, a Maui physician who has been to Lahaina twice since the fire helping with recovery efforts. “Here the fire was so hot it liquefied steel. So what you are really dealing with is teeth, bone and ash when you reach a body. That’s really what’s left of many of the people of Lahaina.”
In cars, on foot, in the sea
The Pacific off Lahaina sparkles blue during the day and, when the winds kick up, cottony white caps stretch to the horizon. Large pods of spinner dolphin pass the town regularly and, from a pathway along the shoreline, people can watch sea turtles ride currents among the mossy rocks just feet from the coast.
But the ocean is dangerous, as those who live here know. Still, the night of the fire, as the flames rushed toward them, many in the city’s center took to the ocean for refuge anyway, witnesses said.
Coast Guard vessels soon arrived, but their effort to save scores of people stranded in the ocean was hampered by fire in the harbor and the reef in front of town.
Debris was blowing into the sea. Boats in the harbor began exploding, their fuel tanks ignited by windblown embers. All of it blocked the way for those seeking to rescue those near shore.
Kanamu Balinbin, a youth football coach who earlier this week was distributing food and relief supplies in the neighborhood of Kahana, said he was told by a close friend who spent several hours in the water that the Coast Guard had to send dinghies and other small boats to navigate the reef and shallow water, retrieving survivors in small groups.
“They had to row boats in and do it one by one,” he said. “That’s all they had. Dinghies or whatever they had,” he said, recounting what he was told. “It’s the middle of the night. Chaos. Fire going on. Bodies all around.”