‘We will survive and it will come back’: One year after Maui wildfire, survivors continue

LAHAINA, Hawaii – They have combed the ashes for souvenirs, worried about where would they sleep, they questioned their faith and tried to find a way to suffer in the midst of the great and disturbing devastation. Residents have faced a year of challenges, practical and emotional, since the deadliest wildfire in the US in a century decimated the historic town of Lahaina, Maui, on August 8, 2023.

To mark the anniversary, The Associated Press interviewed seven survivors its journalists met for the first time in the days, weeks or months after the fire, as well as a first responder who helped fight the flames. Among their difficulties, they also found hope, resilience and determination: the Vietnam veteran who has helped others deal with post-traumatic stress; the Buddhist minister with a new appreciation for Lahaina sunsets; O teenager going to college aspiring to become a Maui firefighter.

Here is a series of vignettes examining some of their experiences over the past year.

Even like him hidden behind a wall From the flames, Thomas Leonard knew the Lahaina wildfire would give him flashbacks to his service as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam 55 years ago. The explosion of cars and propane tanks sounded like mortars.

“Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom – one car after another,” he said.

The nightmares started a few months later. His Veterans Administration doctor prescribed a new sleeping medication.

“Thank God for the VA,” he said.

The 75-year-old retired mail carrier learned to identify signs of post-traumatic stress disorder at a VA clinic in 2001, helping him identify and deal with new triggers. He also helped other fire survivors.

“I learned to be a good listener about what other people are going through,” he said.

His condominium building is still a pile of ash and rubble. Leonard suspects the rebuild could take years, but he is determined to see it through to the end. He lives in hotels and a rented condominium.

“We all have to stick together here on Maui,” Leonard said. “We will survive and it will come back.”

After Elsie Rosales arrived in Maui from the Philippines in 1999, she saved up on a hotel housekeeper wage. As she saved enough to buy a five-bedroom house in Lahaina in 2014, she allowed herself some luxuries: gold bracelets, delicate hoop earrings, things she never would have gotten if she stayed in the Philippines.

Just like the house – her pride, her American dream – the jewelry was a reminder of what is possible in the U.S.

Everything was destroyed in the fire that destroyed Lahaina. When she was finally allowed back onto the property, she sifted through the rubble for anything that had survived. All she found was a broken bracelet.

She used the insurance money to pay off her home mortgage. She is now renting a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, son and son’s girlfriend in Kahului, an hour’s bus ride from Lahaina.

On these long trips, she reflects on how she accumulated her jewelry collection, only for it to disappear.

“When I’m not working, I think about everything that burned,” she said. “Especially my jewelry. Everything I worked hard for.”

Surfing at his home in Lahaina has always given Ekolu Lindsey “mana,” spiritual energy. The house has been in his family for five generations.

He is so familiar with the area that he notices when there are more crabs around or the fish are undersized. He brought school groups there teach them about choirseaweed and the ocean.

“My reset button is jumping in the water at home,” he said.

That has been impossible since the fire turned his home into rubble. Her property is now free of debris, but has no electricity or other utilities. The reconstruction is fine.

He is living at a friend’s house on Oahu, another island, a plane ride away. He couldn’t find anything in Lahaina for less than $4,000 a month.

He regularly returns to Maui to help restore native forests, a focus of the nonprofit founded by his father, Maui Cultural Lands. Sadness weighs heavily on him as he drives the winding coastal road to Lahaina.

State conservation authorities will not allow people to enter the ocean from the burn zone. He surfs on Oahu, but it’s not the same.

“You get the physical exercise,” he said, but not the “rejuvenation of that mana.”

As he died of colon cancer, Mike Vierra spent sleepless nights worrying about where his wife, Leola, and daughter would live when he was gone. The forest fire had reduced your house more than half a century to hardened pools of molten metal, burnt wood and broken glass.

When he passed away in April, the answer was still unclear.

Leola Vierra and her daughter moved several times after the fire, switching hotel rooms and vacation rentals whenever the unit’s owners returned.

“Everything was so unstable,” she said.

The Vierras, married for 57 years, were also unable to find their beloved cat, Kitty Kai. But in February, they discovered that Kitty Kai had arrived in Kahului, 30 miles from Maui’s West Mountains.

The reunion, although joyful, complicated the search for housing. Landlords are less likely to rent to families with pets.

Only last month did Vierra find some stability, securing a six-month lease while they hoped to someday rebuild their own property. Your new place has a backyard, terrace and sea views.

“I have been very depressed since my husband passed away and I can feel my mind and memory getting worse,” she said. “With this new house, I think I can accept more things now, because it feels like I’m on the right path.”

As the flames approached, Ai Hironaka and his family – wife, four children, French bulldog – crammed into your Honda Civic and left, leaving behind his home and the Japanese Buddhist temple where he was resident minister and caretaker.

Losing these buildings and being uprooted amid even greater devastation tested him as a Buddhist. How should he behave as a victim of a disaster? What is the appropriate response when someone gives him donated clothes he doesn’t want? If he feels ungrateful, he turns to the teachings of his religion.

“We all have an evil nature, self-centeredness,” he said.

After moving three times in the months following the fire, he now lives on the other side of the island, nearly an hour away, at another temple, the Kahului Hongwanji Mission, where he also serves as resident minister. He does much of the same work he did at Hongwanji Mission in Lahaina: leading ceremonies and counseling members, including fire survivors.

He occasionally returns to the Lahaina temple site to check the surviving columbarium, an area for storing burial urns. He misses the city, the beach parks, his parents at their son’s house. high school football team.

And he misses the sunsets at Lahainaluna High School, overlooking the ocean. When he comes back now, he doesn’t take that vision for granted.

“I have to capture this,” he said, “because I can’t see it tomorrow.”

Before the fire, Morgan “Bula” Montgomery was a child who loved to play soccer and rowing in the ocean. College wasn’t on his radar.

But the University of Hawaii offered full scholarships to Lahainaluna High School graduates at any school in its system after the disaster. Montgomery thought, “Why not?”

He plans to leave Maui this fall to study fire science at Hawaii Community College on the Big Island, inspired by the devastation and the firefighters who tried to save the community.

“I want to go back to Lahaina and go back to Maui and try to be a firefighter,” he said.

Montgomery’s family lost their two-bedroom apartment in the fire, but they also found opportunity. Montgomery and other Lahainaluna football captains were invited to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this year. It was one of the few times he left Maui.

After spending time in a hotel, the family got a rental house about an hour’s drive across the island. Not convenient for your canoe paddling practices in Lahaina. But it’s the biggest house they’ve ever lived in, with five bedrooms, enough for their mother and her five children.

He’s a little nervous about leaving Maui, but grateful for the scholarship.

“An opportunity for free education or tuition is something you should take advantage of,” Montgomery said.

Ikaika Blackburn, an 18-year veteran of Maui Fire DepartmentHe talks frequently with his crewmates about the fire that consumed Lahaina: at the firehouse kitchen table, sipping cups of coffee while waiting for calls, or during family gatherings on his days off.

His team of five was one of the first to arrive at the scene. There was no time to think, “no time to have these sentimental feelings,” as he fought through the night. He spent a lot of time growing up with his grandparents in Lahaina. lei lost his home.

At dawn it began: “We have lost Lahaina.”

Blackburn and his team spent days talking about it, “just getting it out there and not keeping it all in,” he said. Remembering how they ran from one part of the city to another, trying to find a way to stop it.

“For the most part, we are always capable of winning,” he said. “We are always able to get ahead.”

But this fire was different, uncontrollable. Firefighters and investigators from outside Maui helped him understand that his team did everything they could.

Blackburn followed in his father’s footsteps as a fire captain on Maui. Firefighting seems like something he was born to do.

And he kept doing it. This year’s busy wildfire season hasn’t stirred memories of last August, he said, because nothing compares to this fire.

“We respond to fires all the time,” he said. “That’s what we do.”

When the fire occurred, Jordan Ruidas couldn’t sleep. Eager to help the families in the 21 homes that caught fire, she started a Facebook fundraising campaign titled “Lahaina Strong,” which raised more than $150,000.

That was in 2018.

Five years later, Ruidas and Lahaina Strong have emerged as leaders again, pushing authorities to control tourism and try to find enough housing for local residents after the 2023 fire destroyed thousands of buildings.

Ruidas was seven months pregnant when last year’s fire destroyed Lahaina. She sometimes missed prenatal checkups. Roving nurses at community centers for fire survivors checked their blood pressure.

The fire spared the neighborhood and two months later she gave birth to her daughter, Aulia, at home.

“I don’t think I dealt with all the emotions that came with losing Lahaina and postpartum,” she said. “I feel like I can handle it by staying busy with work, with Lahaina Strong.”

Ruidas brought the baby, strapped to her chest, when she helped organize a “fishing” protest at a popular beach resort demanding that more short-term rental housing be made available to survivors.

She has not yet been able to visit the burned area.

“My children will never grow up seeing or knowing the Lahaina that I grew up seeing and knowing,” she said. “The Lahaina we lost was a very special and beautiful place.”

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AP video journalist Manuel Valdes contributed.