As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety.
And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30.
One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their four-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.
But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety.
“I could see from the bypass that people were stuck on the balconies, so I went down and checked it out,” said Kekoa Lansford, who made several trips into town to look for survivors. What he found was horrible, Lansford said, with dead bodies and flames like a hellish movie scene. “And I could see that people were on fire, that the fire was just being stoked by the wind, and being pushed toward the homes.”
The road closures — some because of the fire, some because of downed power lines — contributed to making historic Lahaina the site of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. But there were many problems that day, and in some ways the disaster began long before the fires started.
A flash drought in the region provided plenty of kindling, and Hurricane Dora brought strong winds to Maui as it passed roughly 500 miles (800 kilometers) south of the Hawaii island chain. Those winds downed at least 30 power poles in West Maui, and Hawaiian Electric had no procedure in place for turning off the grid — a common practice in other fire-prone states. Video shot by a Lahaina resident shows a downed powerline setting dry grasses alight, possibly revealing the start of the larger fire.
And later, as the fire began to swallow homes in its ravenous path, Maui County emergency officials declined to use an extensive network of emergency sirens to alert Lahaina’s residents to flee.
During a news conference Tuesday, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said police officers drove up and down streets, knocking on doors and using loudspeakers to tell people to leave, but he didn’t say exactly where and what time those efforts occurred. The Associated Press has filed public records requests for location reports and other documentation including video and internal communications to clarify the details of the police and fire response, but Maui County has not yet released that information.
A team of Associated Press journalists documented the first hours of the deadly wildfire by interviewing dozens of survivors and public officials, examining public documents and analyzing citizen videos, satellite images and publicly available data. The timeline reveals the chaos that overtook the town.
Shane Treu wakes early on Aug. 8 and is in his backyard when he hears a utility pole snap next to Lahainaluna Road. He sees the downed powerline ignite the grass and calls 911 at 6:37 a.m. to report the fire.
Small brush fires aren’t unusual for Lahaina, and the fire department declares this one 100% contained by 9:55 a.m. The assurance puts many residents at ease; the high winds have prompted the closure of some public schools for the day, and others have not yet started. That means many of Lahaina’s 3,000 public school students are home alone while their parents work.
Contained is not controlled, however, and the town is being battered by high winds. While many of Maui County’s fire crews work to extinguish the Upcountry fire on the eastern half of the island, the wind is toppling power poles and scattering embers like seeds in Lahaina.
Treu’s neighbor Robert Arconado said the fire reignites around 2 p.m. He records video of it spreading at 3:06 p.m., as large plumes of smoke rise near Lahainaluna Road and are carried downtown by the wind.
Around 3:20 p.m., Lahaina resident Kevin Eliason is watching the black smoke from a vantage point closer to downtown when passersby tell him a power pole has been knocked onto the tar roof of a gas station two blocks away, creating fireballs that are being blown in the wind, he said.
Eliason said the fire knocked the power out in the area soon after.
Ten minutes later, Hawaiian Electric sends a news release asking Maui residents to prepare for extended outages. The utility says more than 30 power poles are down in West Maui, including along the Honoapiilani Highway at the south end of Lahaina. The fire department closes the Lahaina Bypass road because of the fire.
The closures block the only route out of Lahaina to the south.
Mike Cicchino decides to flee with his wife and several dogs from their neighborhood near Lahainaluna Road.
They head toward the ocean, but when they reach the intersection with the highway, Cicchino sees a traffic jam ahead on Front Street. He sees more traffic backed up on the highway to his right, where he knows the fire is rapidly approaching.
To his left, he sees two police cars blocking the road, one across the lane of traffic and another one just starting to pull away. Cicchino ignores the roadblock, driving around the police cars to head south.
About a mile later, he runs into a line of cones blocking the highway.
“I remember thinking, shoot, maybe there is something dangerous ahead,” Cicchino says. “And then we see all the other cars driving onto Front Street, so we go that way too.”
He cuts through parking lots and side streets, and ends up on Front Street near the ocean.
“So the police were blocking roads, the exit, some of the exit roads out,” he says. “And I’m assuming it’s because there’s been some downed power lines or some downed trees.”
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier confirmed that at a news conference two weeks later.
“We did not close or forbid people from getting out of Lahaina,” Pelletier said. “If there was a downed power line that was live, we wanted to make sure that you didn’t go over a downed live power line.”
The first sign of trouble for Nate Baird and Courtney Stapleton comes at 3:40 p.m., when their 9- and 10-year-old sons say they can smell s’mores.
By the time the family piles into the car with their dog and Baird’s mother and joins a caravan of evacuating residents, parts of the subdivision are beginning to burn. A telephone pole falls behind their car, causing an accident and blocking a side street.
Meanwhile, police officers knock down a fence to help others escape, the police chief says later. Firefighters in the area nearly become trapped themselves, losing a truck to the flames, Pelletier says.
When Baird and his family turn south to drive out of town, the way is blocked by cones and a crew working on downed electric poles. The workers were motioning for everyone to turn back toward Lahaina.
Shayna Decker, a spokesperson for Hawaiian Electric in Maui, did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.
They decide they don’t care what the crew wants, swerving around the cones and heading south. They make it to a neighboring town by 4:18 p.m. and begin texting people to see who else has made it out.
“Nobody realized how little time we really had,” Baird said. “Like even us being from the heart of the fire, we did not comprehend. Like we literally had minutes and one wrong turn. We would all be dead right now.”
Jonelle Santos said her daughter, Ronelle Santos-Adrian, managed to escape her Lahaina affordable housing apartment with her 3-year-old daughter and partner by turning their four-wheel-drive vehicle away from the standstill traffic and onto a dirt road, eventually finding their way to a friend’s house in Napili. Some of the other people who lived in the apartment complex didn’t have cars, Santos said, and her daughter thinks some of them didn’t make it out.
Kim Cuevas-Reyes narrowly escapes with her 12- and 15-year-old by ignoring instructions to turn right on Front Street toward Lahaina’s Civic Center, which earlier in the day had been turned into a shelter for refugees. Instead, she takes a left, driving in the wrong lane to pass a stack of cars heading in the other direction.