Lahaina, Hawaii, is now almost completely gone. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off,” a resident who fled through the fires said.
Lahaina was dry enough to burn, in part, because agriculture and development turned it into a tinderbox.On Tuesday morning, an herbalist named Spice Prince was at his shop in Lahaina, Hawaii, preparing for the launch of a new perfume line, when gnarly winds started to topple trees and power lines in his neighborhood. After an exhausting few hours of damage control, he fell asleep on the floor with his dog. Then the smell of smoke woke him up.
Lahaina is now almost completely gone. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off,” Michiko Smith, who grew up in Lahaina and fled through the fires, told me, on Thursday. In just a few hours, the confluence of a high-pressure system to Maui’s north, and the low pressure linked to Hurricane Dora, five hundred miles to the south, created raging, dry downslope winds that fanned flames and blasted them into town.
The island of Maui is shaped roughly like a turtle, and Lahaina, which means “cruel sun,” was once a riparian paradise on the south side of the turtle’s head. The West Maui Mountains above Lahaina contain one of the wettest places on the planet; Pu‘u Kukui, the highest peak, receives roughly three hundred and seventy-five inches of rain a year. In the late eighteenth century, a British captain called Lahaina the “Venice of the Pacific.
When the fire jumped the highway in Lahaina, Maranda Schossow, a lithe twenty-nine-year-old who likes to dance, was driving back to her Front Street apartment to get her two cats, Clio and Gianna, and whatever else she could grab. Schossow has lived in Lahaina for ten years. “I thought there was gonna be a little more time,” she told me, on Thursday evening, from the shelter of a packed house in Napili.
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