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Lahaina, on the west coast of Maui, three years after a fire destroyed the town.Credit...Brendan George Ko for The New York Times
Jaime Lowe
Jaime Lowe reported from Lahaina and spent two months speaking with seven families and a dozen experts.
Early in the morning on Aug. 8, 2023, the Dadez family could see smoke about two and a half miles up the hill from their house in Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The combination of extreme winds, severe drought and the nearby dried-out fields of a former sugar cane plantation had created the perfect conditions for a fire. Still, the fire seemed far away. The family didn’t think there was any way it would travel across town and downhill, all the way to their home by the ocean.
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Then, around 9 that night, Marilou Dadez heard their neighbors running outside their house. Her husband, Randy, was about 10 miles away in Kapalua, where he worked as a shuttle bus driver at a resort, but she and their four children were at home. “The sky was orange,” says Rhaliyah, their 22-year-old daughter. “It was red. It was so scary.” The five of them piled into their 2001 Honda with as many belongings as they could cram into a single suitcase.
The Dadezes’ older daughter, Rianna, 24, who was just learning to drive, had to navigate the darkened roads as embers streaked past the windshield. The flames and the smoke were accompanied by what sounded like a war outside: gas tanks exploding, windows breaking, wind ripping roofs off homes, entire homes collapsing.
They were fleeing what would end up as the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century. The Lahaina fire burned 2,170 acres, destroyed more than 2,700 structures and killed at least 102 people. Some 12,000 people lost their homes overnight.
Less than a year later, 11,637 Hawaii residents were homeless, an 87 percent increase from before the fire, and the number of residents living in emergency shelters or in transitional places — ranging from FEMA-funded housing to friends’ garages — had tripled.
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