Maui Town Is Devastated by Deadliest Wildfire to Strike Hawaii (2023)

Follow live updates on the deadly wildfires in Maui, Hawaii.

From the air, the town of Lahaina looks incinerated. Charred palm trees are reduced to slender matchsticks protruding into the smoky sky. Homes are ash. Streets are deserted.

“Oh, my Gosh! Unbelievable,” said Richard Olsten as he piloted a helicopter along the Maui coast on Wednesday. “This looks like Baghdad or something.”

The firestorm that tore through the western shores of Hawaii’s Maui island on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday has killed at least 36 people and forced the evacuation of more than 2,000, the authorities said. It was the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history, according to Clay Trauernicht, a tropical fire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

It was a scene familiar to residents of California and other states in the American West that have suffered a spate of hot-burning and fast-moving wildfires. This week they were ravaging a part of the United States that many consider paradise.

“This is not a safe place to be,” Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke said at a news conference Wednesday. The state government was trying to stop tourists from arriving on the island, but as late as Wednesday morning, flights filled with tourists were still landing in Maui, she said. “We have shelters that are being overrun. We have resources that are being taxed.”

Ed Sniffen, director of the Hawaii state Department of Transportation, said some 2,000 travelers spent Tuesday night at the airport and another 4,000 people had been stranded by road closures. The situation was “absolutely horrific,” he said.

At least three fires on the island were propelled by strong winds as a hurricane moved across the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles to the south. The inferno came so quickly that some residents ran into the ocean to escape the smoke and flames. They were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard, Maui County officials said. Others escaped by car, driving past flames in the shadow of the West Maui Mountains.

President Biden ordered all federal assets in Hawaii to assist with the fire response, the White House said. The Coast Guard, the Navy and the Marines were supporting firefighting and rescue efforts, and the Department of Transportation was working with commercial airlines to evacuate tourists from the island.

The most concentrated damage appeared to be in Lahaina, once the royal capital of Hawaii and now a major tourist hub.

The first signs of disaster for Rachel Zimmerman were the gusts of wind that tore through her condominium, ripping the screens from her windows. Then, around 4:45 a.m. Tuesday, she saw flames in the distance and called the fire department, but it said there was no need to worry, she said. So Ms. Zimmerman went back to sleep.

By the time she awoke, the power was out, and Ms. Zimmerman could smell smoke, so she and her partner decided it was time to go. In the 10 minutes it took to grab their clothes, a bicycle and their dog, the air had become so thick with smoke that they did not know which way to drive in order to get away from the approaching wildfire.

“It was black,” Ms. Zimmerman said. “It happened so fast.”

On Wednesday, she and her partner, both 34, were sheltering at a friend’s home about 20 miles away in the town of Waikapu.

Mr. Olsten, the director of operations at Air Maui Helicopter Tours, flew back and forth across the devastation on Wednesday, even as smoke was still wafting over the azure waters of the Pacific. Entire neighborhoods appeared flattened by fire, with only charred remnants remaining of homes. Some larger structures appeared intact. And some neighborhoods were spared the flames, their lawns still green.

He filmed the scene and posted it to Facebook. In one frame, he captured a single house that remained standing while dozens around it had been rendered into a sickly white ash.

The death toll and wrecked landscape of the town reinforced the grim reality that even corners of the globe generally blessed with plentiful rainfall — and until recently unaccustomed to powerful wildfires — are now, partly because of climate change, much more vulnerable.

In August 2018, a series of fires on Maui destroyed dozens of homes and forced the evacuation of hundreds of residents and tourists. Lionel Montalvo, an official with the Maui County Fire Department, was quoted at the time saying the fire was “unprecedented in our department’s history.”

Three years later, wildfires in Maui and the Big Island tore through more than 40,000 acres of ranchland and brush.

Wildfires in Hawaii are now burning through more than four times the number of acres than in previous decades, according to Professor Trauernicht, at the University of Hawaii.

Experts attribute the surge in wildfires to the prevalence of nonnative grasses, which are especially common on Maui, and are more flammable than indigenous plants. This is coupled with extreme weather patterns connected to climate change: unusually hot and dry summers and shifts in rainfall patterns.

“The grasslands make us incredibly vulnerable,” Professor Trauernicht said.

“We have known there was the potential for this,” he said, referring to incinerated homes in Lahaina, “but I still don’t think any of us could have imagined how destructive and devastating this fire became.”

The island of Maui is the state’s driest at the moment, with much of West Maui facing moderate drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Temperatures in Hawaii have risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950 and are expected to rise by as much as 5 degrees more by 2085, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Officials said that they did not know what had caused this week’s wildfires, which spread over at least 1,800 acres on Maui and the Big Island.

Friends and family members of residents and vacationers posted frantically on Facebook in hopes of reaching loved ones. They asked about their parents, who may have been stuck in traffic, or their siblings who work at resorts, whom they hadn’t heard from since the previous night. Some posted about evacuation centers and donation drop-offs.

Roads into West Maui were closed to everyone except emergency workers on Wednesday morning, officials said, effectively cutting off access from outside to some of Hawaii’s best-known resorts. In Lahaina, a town of about 12,000 people, all roads were closed, officials said.

Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm, remained around 700 miles south of Honolulu on Wednesday and did not make landfall in Hawaii. Although the hurricane was not directly responsible for the conditions in the state, it has helped strengthen the winds, according to Robert Bohlin, a meteorologist in the Weather Service’s Honolulu office.

A firefighter on Maui was hospitalized with smoke inhalation but was in stable condition.