The Invisible Fire on Maui

When fire began to incinerate the historic town of Lahaina, on the west side of Maui, Anna Lieding got a call from her boss: people were fleeing into the ocean, and the Coast Guard needed boats to help rescue them. Lieding, who was born on Maui and grew up in Nahiku, a spot of jungle on the island’s east side, is a boat captain. She frantically packed a bag, got in her truck, and raced from Haiku, where she now lives, to Maalaea Harbor. There she met up with three other boat captains, including her boss. Before heading out, Lieding asked the least experienced captain among them if she’d ever had a death, or a dead body, on her boat—she wanted to be sure the younger woman was prepared for what was coming. Lieding had had a body aboard her boat once before, about twelve years ago. “I can still picture it exactly,” she told me. “I lost, like, ten, fifteen pounds afterward.”

The captains shoved off around 10:30 P.M. on a thirty-six-foot fishing boat, the Marjorie Ann. “Rough as fuck,” Lieding texted a friend. “Only quarter mile offshore and we got solid rollers.” As they rounded Maui’s southwestern edge, she encountered a water spout, then saw what looked like a tornado of fire on the horizon: the erstwhile capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the historic whaling town, immolating. She wetted a neck gaiter and pulled it over her mouth, preparing for the smoke. Visibility dropped to thirty feet. “The lighting came off the fire on the water,” she told me. Her eyes burned and her breathing grew labored. Ash coated the boat and crew. Even a thousand yards offshore she could feel the heat. The crew sat on the front of the boat, searching with dive lights. They navigated through a grove of moored vessels, getting as close as they could to the shore. “We watched things that we grew up with burn away on the shoreline, like the Jodo Mission,” Lieding said, referring to a historic Buddhist temple. “I will remember what that looks like forever, burning.”

Over the radio, the Coast Guard called out for a rescue: five people in the water. They motored past a platform of Jet Skis but found no one. Then the Coast Guard called again: fifty, maybe a hundred people were in the ocean along downtown Front Street. “But, because it’s shallow, none of our boats could get into shore to get fifty people or a hundred that have been in the water for five hours, possibly injured, burnt,” Lieding said. “And so we’re sitting there on our boat being, like, Well, should we go back to the Jet Ski platform and commandeer these Jet Skis?”

A Coast Guard boat sent out a small volunteer skiff, accompanied by a firefighter and another rescue worker on soft-top surfboards. Motoring against the smoke and wind, the skiff got as close to shore as it could and deposited the two on boards, who paddled into the shallows, grabbed two children no older than six, put them on the boards, and brought them back to the larger boat. The kids were ferried between boats as the rescuers figured out where to take them. “I wanted to be, like, ‘Please bring them here,’ ” Lieding said. “ ‘I would like to hold these children.’ ”

The kids were finally taken ashore in a small boat a short distance north. It was past one in the morning, and it was hard to know how many more people were in the water. On the Coast Guard’s orders, Lieding’s boat began patrolling up and down the coastline, looking for survivors and, “you know—unspoken but implied—bodies,” she said. They didn’t find any. Around four o’clock, Lieding’s crew was released, and they drove back south. She tied up by the glow of her headlamp, but, by the time she started cleaning ash off the boat, the first rays of sun were coming up over Maui.

A day later, the streets of Lahaina were lined with the burnt husks of cars, the glass melted and metal trickling out of them. With all but concrete foundations razed, the view of destruction ran clear to the ocean. The ruins held vestiges of the lives overturned: toy trucks, a Peloton bike, a stinking cooler of meat. Blackened papayas, coconuts, and oranges clung on and littered the ground. Tall, wrinkled cactuses drooped like deflated balloons. It was quiet besides the sirens and the wind. At one lot, a man in his sixties shovelled through the rubble of his house, still hot and smoking, looking for his passport. He wore flip-flops, and his feet were covered in toxic dust, because all his shoes had burned.

The death toll from the fire had climbed to a hundred and fourteen as of Saturday. Nearly nine hundred people remain unaccounted for, according to a community-sourced spreadsheet, and the number may be higher. Thousands of residents have had to relocate elsewhere on Maui; some are leaving altogether. The fire alone took out some ten thousand jobs, and its effects are creeping across the island. Unemployment claims went up by more than seven hundred, to almost eighteen hundred, in the week that ended August 12th, the Department of Labor reported. The state’s economic agency estimates that, each day, Hawaii is seeing thirty-six hundred fewer tourists—worth more than a million dollars—than would normally be expected.

Three days after the fire, a charter boat was caught on camera letting tourists snorkel miles from Lahaina, and a public shaming followed. The company apologized and suspended its operations. The message “Maui is closed” spread rapidly, boosted, in part, by big names, such as the actor Jason Momoa, who was born in Honolulu. (He also posted a link where people could donate money to help.) The state government acknowledged the sentiment but stressed that the island still needed tourism, which accounts for about eighty per cent of the local economy. Workers immediately felt the squeeze—fewer bookings, less tip money—and pushed back with a more specific slogan: “Lahaina is closed.” (Momoa has since adopted this message.)

“Maui tourism was built around Lahaina,” Denver Coon, who has operated in the same waters as Lieding for decades, told me. His father, uncle, and grandfather founded a boat company there, Trilogy Excursions, in 1973. Coon grew up between his father’s boats in Lahaina and the family home in Kula, thirty-five miles away—where fires continue to burn. Growing up, Coon would visit his grandmother in Lahaina, who lived in a housing development there, now in ashes. When the harbor caught fire, Coon’s brother-in-law Gabe saved one of their boats, and Coon came by with the company’s heaviest, a sixty-five-foot catamaran, to pick up rescues. One of his captains paddled in on a surfboard and picked up a four-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy.

Coon initially feared that Trilogy, which has a hundred and sixty-five employees, would have to lay off more than sixty per cent of its staff—deckhands, third mates, second mates. Coon is trying to pay their salaries with insurance money, but downsizing seems inevitable. Some employees left the island or are making plans to do so. “It’s almost like an invisible fire. It’s going to keep burning, and it’s going to destroy a lot more lives than it already has,” Coon said. Many on his team are hanging on, still shuttling supplies into Lahaina by boat to help out. “For many of our employees, the company was their social circle, their identity,” he said. “It’s hard for a boat captain on Maui to switch to another job. You’re a boat captain.” But Coon has to balance the effort to save those jobs with the need to observe a period of grief and recovery. “How long do you have to take before it’s O.K. to work?” he said. “It’s very hard, the idea of sharing joy and happiness when you feel like there’s very little joy and happiness to give.” Ten days after the fire, the company restarted their tours out of Maalaea Harbor. “The only way we survive is if we operate,” Coon said.

Anna Lieding spent the day after the rescue mission, exhausted and in shock, with friends who had lost their homes and come to stay at her four-hundred-square-foot cottage. Her phone rang again and again, with calls from journalists looking for a ride in, tourists wanting to retrieve abandoned luggage, and would-be visitors cancelling their plans.

That Friday, she rode in a four-car convoy loaded with ice, water, propane, and watermelon, to Lahaina. An ad-hoc supply hub was forming at the post office. They dropped more fuel at a family compound in the Olowalu area for neighbors to pick up. “Driving in and out, we saw the devastation from afar,” Lieding said. “They weren’t letting anybody in, and I didn’t want to go in to see anything closer.” Still, she drove past a house she had lived in more than a dozen years ago. “It was just a burnt skeleton,” she said. “I sent the video to my roommates who are all still mostly on-island, and I was, like, ‘This is where we used to live together.’ ” The reality of what had happened began to sink in, and she finally broke down.

The next day, she applied for unemployment relief. The company she was working for, Maui Custom Charters, which is run by two brothers born and raised in Hawaii, will survive, she said: “They’ve always grown slowly and lived well below their means.” But all eleven captain and crew members were out of work for now. Her next charter is booked for mid-September. She recently got one more for mid-October. In the meantime, her bosses have permitted her team to take families affected by the fire out on the boat, as a therapy of sorts. On Saturday, she joined her friend Ryan, a captain who had been on the rescue boat with her, in his boat. They were taking out a friend of Ryan’s whose fishing boat had burned in the fire, taking his job with it. The friend’s wife caught her first marlin, and both of the kids caught mahi-mahi. They’d be cutting up and donating the marlin for the west side, she told me. “There’s just something really great about being on the water,” she said. ♦