LAHAINA, Hawaii — They have the ash combed for souvenirs, concerned about where they would sleepquestioned their faith and tried to find a way to grieve amid the vast, unsettling devastation. Residents have endured a year of challenges, practical and emotional, since the deadliest wildfire in the US in a century, the historic town of Lahaina on Maui was devastated on August 8, 2023.
To mark the anniversary, The Associated Press interviewed seven survivors their reporters first encountered in the days, weeks or months after the fire, as well as a first responder who helped battle the flames. Despite their challenges, they have also found hope, resilience and determination: the vietnam veteran who has helped others with post-traumatic stress; the buddhist minister with a new appreciation for Lahaina sunsets; the teenager going to college He wanted to become a firefighter on Maui himself.
Below you will find a series of short stories discussing some of their experiences over the past year.
Even while he hidden behind a sea 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 exploding 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 new sleep medications.
“Thank God for the VA,” he said.
The 75-year-old retired mail carrier learned to recognize signs of post-traumatic stress disorder at a VA clinic in 2001, helping him recognize and deal with new triggers. He has also helped other fire survivors.
“I’ve learned to listen very carefully to what other people are going through,” he said.
His apartment building is still a pile of ash and rubble. Leonard suspects it could take years to rebuild, but he is determined to see it through. He has lived in hotels and a rented apartment.
“We’ve all got to stick together here on Maui,” Leonard said. “We’re going to survive and it’s going to come back.”
After arriving on Maui from the Philippines in 1999, Elsie Rosales had to cut back on a hotel housekeeper salary. While she saved enough to buy a five-bedroom house in Lahaina in 2014, she did treat herself to a few luxuries: gold bracelets, delicate hoop earrings, things she never could have afforded if she had stayed in the Philippines.
Like the house – her pride, her American dream – the jewelry was a reminder of what is possible in the US.
It was all wiped out in the wildfire that devastated Lahaina. When she was finally allowed back on the property, she dug through the rubble for anything that survived. All she found was a broken bracelet.
She used insurance money to pay off the mortgage on the house. She now rents a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, their son and their son’s girlfriend in Kahului, an hour’s bus ride from Lahaina.
During her long rides she thinks about how she collected her jewelry collection, only to have it disappear.
“When I’m not working, I think about everything that’s burned,” she said. “Especially my jewelry. Everything I worked hard for.”
Surfing from his home in Lahaina always gave Ekolu Lindsey “mana,” spiritual energy. The home had been in his family for five generations.
He is so familiar with the area that he can tell when there are more crabs or fish are too small. He has taken school groups there to teach them about the coralseaweed and the ocean.
“My reset button is to jump in the water at home,” he said.
That has been impossible since the wildfire reduced his home to rubble. His property is now clear of debris but has no electricity or other utilities. Reconstruction is well underway.
He lives with a friend on Oahu, another island a plane ride away. He couldn’t find anything in Lahaina for less than $4,000 a month.
He returns to Maui regularly to help restore native forests, a focus of the nonprofit his father founded, Maui Cultural Lands. Grief weighs on him as he drives the winding coastal road to Lahaina.
State conservation officials won’t allow people to enter the ocean from the fire 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 lay dying of colon cancer, Mike Vierra spent sleepless nights wondering where his wife, Leola, and their daughter would live when he was gone. The wildfire had their house reduced for more than half a century into hardened pools of molten metal, burnt wood and broken glass.
When he died in April, the answer was still unclear.
Leola Vierra and her daughter moved several times after the fire, changing hotel rooms and vacation homes when the owners returned.
“Everything was so turbulent,” she said.
The Vierras, married for 57 years, also couldn’t find their beloved cat, Kitty Kai. But in February, they learned that Kitty Kai had found her way to Kahului, 30 miles (48 kilometers) across the West Maui Mountains.
The reunion, while joyful, complicated their search for a home. Landlords are less likely to rent to families with pets.
It wasn’t until last month that Vierra found some stability, securing a six-month lease while they wait to eventually rebuild their own compound. Their new place has a garden, sun deck and ocean views.
“I’ve been so depressed since my husband passed away, and I feel my mind and my memory going down,” she said. “With this new house, I think I can accept things more because it feels like I’m on the right track.”
As the flames approached, Ai Hironaka and his family – wife, four children, French bulldog – crammed into his Honda Civic and drove away, leaving behind his home and the Japanese Buddhist temple where he worked as a preacher and administrator.
Losing those buildings and being uprooted amid the larger devastation has tested him as a Buddhist. How should he behave as a victim of disaster? What is the right response when someone gives him donated clothing he doesn’t want? When he feels ungrateful, he turns to the teachings of his religion.
“We all have a bad nature, a self-centeredness,” he said.
After moving three times in the months following the fire, he now lives on the other side of the island, almost an hour away, at another temple, Kahului Hongwanji Mission, where he also serves as resident minister. He does much of the same work as he did at Hongwanji Mission in Lahaina, leading ceremonies and counseling members, including survivors of the fire.
He returns to the Lahaina Temple site occasionally to check on the columbarium, a space for storing urns that has survived. He misses the city, the beach parks, the parents on the high school soccer team.
And he misses the sunsets from Lahainaluna High School, overlooking the ocean. Now when he goes back, he doesn’t take that view for granted.
“I have to record that,” he said, “because I can’t see it tomorrow.”
Before the fire, Morgan “Bula” Montgomery was a child who loved to play football and paddling 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. He is inspired by the devastation and the firefighters who tried to save the community.
“I want to go back to Lahaina and back to Maui and try to become a firefighter,” he said.
Montgomery’s family lost their two-bedroom apartment in the fire, but they also found opportunity. Montgomery and his fellow Lahainaluna football captains were invited to Las Vegas for this year’s Super Bowl. It was one of the few times he left Maui.
After staying in a hotel for a while, the family secured a rental house about an hour’s drive across the island. It’s not convenient for his canoe-paddling practice in Lahaina. But it’s the largest house they’ve lived in, with five bedrooms, enough for his mother and her five children.
He’s a little nervous about leaving Maui, but he’s grateful for the scholarship.
“The opportunity to go to school or get free tuition is something you should take advantage of,” Montgomery said.
Ikaika Blackburn, an 18-year veteran of the Maui Fire Departmenttalks to his crewmates often about the fire that devastated Lahaina: at the kitchen table in the firehouse, over a cup of coffee while waiting for a phone call, or during family gatherings on days off.
His crew of five was among the first on 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. His wife is from the city. His mother-in-law lost her home.
As dawn broke it dawned on us: “We’ve lost Lahaina.”
Blackburn and his crew talked about it for days, “just letting it go and not holding it all in,” he said, recalling how they ran from one part of the city to another, looking for a way to stop it.
“Generally speaking, we can always win,” he said. “We can always be ahead.”
But this fire was different, out of control. Firefighters and investigators from outside Maui helped him understand that his crew was doing everything they could.
Blackburn followed in his father’s footsteps as a Maui fire captain. Firefighters feel like something he was born to do.
And he’s kept at it. This year’s busy fire season hasn’t brought back memories of last August, he said, because nothing compares to that fire.
“We respond to fires all the time,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
When the wildfire hit, Jordan Ruidas couldn’t sleep. Eager to help families in the 21 homes that burned down, she started a Facebook fundraiser called “Lahaina Strong,” which raised more than $150,000.
That was in 2018.
Five years later, Ruidas and Lahaina Strong emerged as leaders again, pushing authorities to control tourism and try to find adequate housing for locals after the 2023 fire destroyed thousands of buildings.
Ruidas was seven months pregnant when last year’s fire devastated Lahaina. She sometimes missed prenatal checkups. Traveling nurses at community centers for fire survivors checked her blood pressure.
The fire spared her neighborhood and two months later she gave birth to a daughter, Aulia, at home.
“I don’t think I’ve processed all the emotions that came with losing Lahaina and being postpartum,” she said. “I feel like I’m dealing with it by staying busy with work, with Lahaina Strong.”
Ruidas took the baby with her, strapped to her chest, as she helped organize a “fish-in” protest at a popular beach resort, where they demanded that more temporary rental housing be made available for survivors.
She still hasn’t been able to bring herself to visit the fire area.
“My children will never grow up seeing or knowing the Lahaina that I saw and knew growing up,” she said. “The Lahaina that we lost was a very special and beautiful place.”
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AP video journalist Manuel Valdes contributed.
