LAHAINA, Maui — As a whirlwind of flames nearly encircled the Lahaina Gateway shopping center on Aug. 8, 2023, Edralina Diezon hid in a storage room, surrounded by mops, buckets and brooms. Terrified, Diezon, who worked 80 hours a week as a janitor, did not leave for two days and two nights. When she finally emerged, starving and disoriented, the neighborhood where she lived was gone.
Diezon, 69, wandered the charred streets for a few hours before encountering a police officer who took her to a hotel that had been turned into a shelter. Eventually, she would move into the beachfront Royal Lahaina Resort and Bungalows, along with more than 1,000 of Maui’s 8,000 displaced survivors.
One year ago, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century turned Lahaina, on Maui, into a town of ash and ghosts. Buses still did not run in September. Streetlights did not shine. Stores left standing were shuttered. Employees and customers did not populate the Lahaina Gateway. But Diezon still showed up to her janitorial job every day, unsure of where she would eventually live.
Each year, millions of people in the United States are displaced from their homes because of fires, hurricanes and other weather-related disasters — and then find themselves struggling to rebuild their lives, as Diezon did.
Nearly half of Maui’s wildfire survivors lost their jobs, according to the preliminary results from 679 people in a University of Hawaii study, which aims to track more than 1,000 people over the next decade. Thirteen percent of survivors in the study still do not have health insurance, and 40% of households are experiencing low food security.
For Diezon, managing her livelihood became an arduous daily undertaking that involved navigating a confusing and often uncoordinated network of organizations that provided aid, housing and other support. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United Way had begun to provide services, and celebrities pledged funds for fire victims. Locals also set up Venmo donation funds for families, but Diezon did not have an account.
She survived the fires that killed at least 102 others. But what does it mean to survive when society’s most vulnerable remain unprotected after a crisis? For Diezon, the road to rebuilding her life would turn perilous.
A longer, darker commute
Diezon’s husband, who had long been the family breadwinner, died of colon cancer in 2014. A year later, she received her green card and moved from Manila, Philippines, to Maui to join her brother, who drove a taxi and owned a now-destroyed seven-bedroom house where he rented rooms to tenants, including her.
Diezon was employed by a cleaning service and recycled aluminum cans on the side. She earned $15 an hour while juggling two or three jobs and saved enough to send $500 to $1,000 every two weeks to her four children and six grandchildren in the Philippines.
Diezon’s paychecks helped pay for upgrades to her family home in the Philippines and her grandchildren’s schooling. She also collected goods, sending a care package every three months filled with clothes, cologne, handbags and food.
Before the wildfires, Diezon walked less than a mile to get home from work, an easy distance to her neighborhood of multigenerational houses behind the Lahaina Gateway. After the fires, one of Diezon’s daily dilemmas involved figuring out how she would commute. The Royal Lahaina hotel was 4 miles north of the shopping center, along the fast-moving and dangerous Honoapiilani Highway.
One dark evening in September, Portia Marcelo, 43, encountered Diezon waiting alone at an unlit gas station adjacent to the Lahaina Gateway. (Disclosure: Marcelo, a photographer, is a friend of this reporter.) Diezon was trying to go back to the Royal Lahaina and had resorted to hitchhiking. She climbed into the back seat and Marcelo, who is also Filipina, asked Diezon if she was OK.
“I’m sad,” Diezon replied. She explained how difficult it had been to get rides back from work. “Auntie, I know in our culture it is hard to ask for help,” Marcelo said to her. “But always ask for help.”
A maze of services
Courtney Lazo, 34, who is Filipina and Native Hawaiian, said non-English-speaking communities often slipped through the cracks. Filipinos make up 40% of Lahaina residents, and Lazo, a fire survivor, had seen frustrated Filipino families walk away from Red Cross sites without aid because they could not navigate services. So, on Labor Day, she helped coordinate a Filipino outreach event at the Royal Lahaina.
The event had translators who spoke Tagalog and Ilocano. When volunteers arrived in red-and-yellow “Lahaina Strong” T-shirts, Diezon dashed to the front of the “needs assessment” line.
“We’re getting everybody’s name, what you’re needing,” a volunteer said. That information would be submitted to the larger community organizations, which were coordinating relief efforts, funds and support. Diezon sat at a table opposite a volunteer.
“Do you need insurance claims?”
“I don’t have insurance,” Diezon replied.
“Employment?”
“I have work for now.”
“OK, transportation?”
“I need, yeah, I need.”
The volunteer asked more questions about rebuilding, housing and her mental health, then told her to move to the next station. “That’s where they’re doing the Oprah,” she said. “They’re going to help you sign up for that one, OK?”
Oprah Winfrey and actor Dwayne Johnson originally committed $10 million to the People’s Fund of Maui to provide direct monthly cash payments to families whose homes had been destroyed. They teamed up with the Entertainment Industry Foundation and ultimately raised nearly $60 million. For recipients, it worked out to temporary payments of around $1,200 a month. Diezon took a photo and handed over her ID and bank routing number.
Next, Diezon went to another hotel to inquire about disaster relief funding from Maui United Way, which was distributing direct cash payments of $1,000 to nearly 8,000 individuals affected by the fires. But when she arrived, she was directed to another location that she couldn’t go to because she had to leave for work.
Diezon’s journey is emblematic of the toll taken on many survivors trying to navigate services after a climate disaster. Government organizations like FEMA and the Small Business Administration can provide financial assistance, but some survivors discover that they aren’t always eligible because of various bureaucratic reasons and instead have to rely on nonprofits like church organizations and friends or families for aid.
A final shift and a return home
In the days and weeks that followed, Diezon, heeding Marcelo’s advice, asked for help. At first, she asked Marcelo, who spent a few days shuttling her to appointments to have her glasses replaced, to the motor vehicle division to get an official state identification card and to a supermarket to wire money to her family. She complained that her foot hurt and another survivor, Myla Lazarte, 42, told her she should try to get new shoes.
By winter, most of the Gateway’s shops had reopened and buses had started running again. Diezon’s shift usually ended around 8 p.m. — the same time the last bus back toward her hotel stopped running. Missing it meant that Diezon would be scrambling, yet again, to find a ride in the dark.
By spring, Diezon began to appear despondent.
She had told her daughter Eden Diezon Balobo that she lived “like a princess” at the Royal Lahaina, with her own room, bed and balcony view. But most fire evacuees had been notified that they would be moved out of the hotels by the summer, and waves of survivors had been told to check out. Lahaina had a severe housing shortage, and some survivors relocated to far-off neighborhoods.
For Diezon, moving away from Lahaina would have most likely meant finding a new job after she had spent the last seven months doing everything to keep the one she had.
On April 1, Balobo, who lives in Manila, received a $300 wire transfer from her mother. Two days later, Charlie Solis, 65, Diezon’s longtime co-worker who considered her an “older sister,” called her before she finished her shift.
“Don’t forget to clean the manager’s office,” he said. Diezon assured him that she would make it tidy.
It was dark when Diezon left work. She was not wearing the white flower-printed Hawaiian shirt uniform that the other cleaners wore. On this evening, Diezon wore black.
To catch the bus, she had to cross the Honoapiilani Highway and cut across the parking lot of the Lahaina Cannery Mall, where the driver picked up passengers. There was a crosswalk at Keawe Street, but that meant overshooting the bus stop. Diezon might have spotted the bus coming down the highway. Maybe she tried to move fast. Maybe she moved too slow.
A 2017 Nissan Rogue driven south on the highway by a 17-year-old girl struck Diezon around 8:15 p.m., about 400 feet north of Keawe Street. The Maui Police Department said it did not appear that Diezon had used the crosswalk.
Balobo received a video call from Diezon’s brother. He was in a hospital room, next to his sister. Diezon had died, three days before her 70th birthday. Diezon’s friends and loved ones could not fathom how she had survived the devastating wildfires, working to reconstruct her livelihood, only to die senselessly.
Diezon’s brother started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to send her body back to the Philippines to hold a proper funeral. Her children did not want her returned to them in ashes.
The family set a fundraising goal of $30,000 to pay for the transportation of Diezon’s body, along with funeral expenses. It raised only $475. The family did not know how it would ever afford to bring her home and considered burying her on Maui.
In May, Diezon’s brother called Balobo. He had learned about his sister’s savings account. It contained all the money she had saved over her lifetime: $19,000. It was enough to ship her to Manila and pay for her funeral.
On June 11, Diezon’s body arrived in a coffin wrapped in brown paper. Six men carried her remains into a truck. For Diezon’s funeral on June 17, her open coffin was shrouded in white daisies. A framed photo of Diezon sat alongside her body and a statue of Jesus.
Upon learning of her death, Marcelo wondered if she could have done more to help Diezon. “She is a victim of that fire,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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