When Maui Burned
16 min read
To some people, the story began in a dusty field, gone wild with invasive grass. It was a story about high winds and sparks turning to flames. It was a story about harrowing escapes and people fleeing in terror, the lucky ones rushing into the ocean as the deadly wildfire devoured an entire town. Those were the stories most people heard. Those were the stories most people told. But those of us who know this place and know its history know there is so much more.
Last summer, right around this time, the wind tore through the trees for two days and nights, pushed along by Hurricane Dora as it churned south of the archipelago. The giant mango tree that hung over our new home in Haiku, on the North Shore of Maui, whipped around, hurling large branches that crashed onto the roof above us. I huddled in bed with my two young children. I had moved with my family back to Hawaii—the islands where I was born and raised, where my family has lived for generations—just 12 days before.
When the winds died down, we surveyed the damage on our property. A eucalyptus tree had crushed a fence, our mailbox had been blown out of the ground. But we were fine. Then my phone started lighting up with text messages from friends and family and breaking-news alerts. While we were sheltering in our home, winds had ripped across the island at up to 80 miles per hour, knocking over large trees and electric poles, igniting several fires that then raced through forests, cattle ranches, and old, abandoned sugar-plantation fields, now overgrown with invasive grasses and baked by years of drought. The town of Lahaina burned to the ground in a matter of hours; 102 people were killed.
The scale of this sudden disaster was shocking. For weeks afterward, the entire island was in a state of panic and chaos. In Lahaina, people had scattered suddenly in the rush to escape the fire, and cellphone and internet services were down. It would take weeks before anxious families would have answers and the missing were located, dead or alive.
Those of us who were not directly affected by the fires were wandering around trying to figure out how we could help. Facebook became the central information hub: We are in Lahaina in our home. Ran out of food … Searching for my 19 year old little sister … does anyone have a solar-powered generator? … We have one convoy going into Lahaina right now. Next convoy at 12pm. Need propane, gas in containers, walkie talkies … I’m a pilot on Oahu, trying to coordinate flights getting supplies into Kapalua Airport … Two private owned boats from [Big Island] filled with supplies coming right to Lahaina beach tomorrow. This is our islands, our families and we not waiting for official approval. It is coming ohana! Hang tight!
The U.S. military, which has a large presence on the islands, responded quickly—it was the Coast Guard that rescued many people from the water during the fire. And although it took several days for the Red Cross and FEMA to get organized on the ground, the local community had immediately sprung into action. Supplies had been sent by truck, motorboat, and jet ski to Lahaina from day one. In this moment of despair, the people of these islands pulled together like a powerful magnetic force. I had landed back home in the midst of a massive crisis, but I was glad to be here—my heart swelled with pride for these people, this place. Haoles (white people), Hawaiians, Asians, hapas (mixed-race people), old-time kama‘āina (locals), and new transplants all pushed up their sleeves and lent a hand in whatever way they could.
One of my sisters is a veterinarian on Maui, and she volunteered to care for rescued pets from Lahaina, whose paws and fur were burned during their escapes. Another of my sisters lives on Oahu, where she works as a hospital director and nurse. She came to treat the injured and displaced in the main county shelter. How could I help? There was one obvious option. I had spent more than two decades working as a reporter, editor, producer, and filmmaker. Hundreds of journalists from around the world were suddenly descending on our island—many of them with little to no understanding of this place, the political landscape, the cultural nuances. Maybe I could help.
Hawaii is a place many outsiders have visited, but few actually know. Ever since European sailors chanced upon this archipelago in the middle of the Pacific in 1778, these islands have been claimed and colonized, pillaged for natural resources, then packaged and sold to outsiders for profit. For centuries, visitors have projected their own fantasies on Hawaii, while the Native people have suffered immeasurable losses of life, land, and culture. For more than 200 years, waves of immigrant settlers have built a complex multiethnic community here with a strong sense of local identity.
Not Native, not tourist, I inhabit the in-between space of many mixed-race descendants of early immigrants here. I was born and raised on the island of Oahu, in the small beach town of Kailua. I left Hawaii at 18 to attend college in California, then stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area for my journalism career. I often missed the warmth and rich culture of the islands—I had come home for brief stints in my 20s and 30s—but it wasn’t until last summer, with my husband and two young children in tow, that I decided to move back for good.
Returning to the islands was in some ways disorienting—I had been gone for so many years. Insider, outsider, belonging, not belonging, I have known these islands from both sides. In the end I was pulled back across the Pacific to be near my family, who’ve lived here for generations. Almost 150 years ago, my ancestors arrived in Hawaii on ships from southern China, fleeing poverty and civil war, hoping to plant the seeds of a new life in Hawaii’s soil. The islands were still an independent kingdom ruled by a Hawaiian king, but the lords of foreign-owned sugar plantations reigned with ever more political and economic power.
Some of my ancestors worked the soil to support those sugar plantations; they lived through the rise and fall of the plantation era. In Honolulu, my great-grandparents witnessed the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, in 1893, when U.S. troops marched through the streets—the last Hawaiian queen was later imprisoned in a coup. My grandparents and my father were born in Hawaii when it was a U.S. territory. They crouched in fear during the bombing of Pearl Harbor and lived through Hawaii’s transformation to statehood in 1959, then the development boom and mass tourism era that followed.
Through my father’s Chinese family I have roots here, but through my haole mother I grew wings—it was her adventurous spirit that brought her to Hawaii in the late 1960s. She met and married a local boy and created a multiracial family here just two years after the Supreme Court struck down laws forbidding interracial marriage. My mixed-race family is part of Hawaii’s unique history, as well: Our island state is home to by far the largest share of multiracial people in the country, in part because people came from all over the world to work at our plantations long ago.
When you grow up in Hawaii, the tumultuous history and complex culture of this place are the threads from which your life is woven—and there are many knots and tangles. My sisters and I grew up entrenched in Hawaiian cultural practices in a traditional halau, or hula school, in our hometown, while at the same time learning the rules of engagement in American high society at Punahou, a prestigious missionary-founded private school in Honolulu. Some of my best friends from childhood are the direct descendents of those early missionaries and sugar-plantation owners. Four of my nieces and nephews are Native Hawaiian. In my youth I was a budding environmentalist protesting the construction of seawalls and golf courses; my father was a city planner approving those kinds of developments. Many tangles, indeed.
Many Native Hawaiians still view the U.S. government as an illegal invader here. Many locals, regardless of their ethnic background, feel a similar resentment for the millions of tourists who mob their neighborhood beaches, hiking paths, and roads every year. For newcomers, the misunderstandings about this place run deep. The distrust between insiders and outsiders is profound, a dynamic I saw exacerbated in the aftermath of the Lahaina fire. I took a freelance reporting and producing assignment that had me working with a reporter and a video producer who’d been sent to Hawaii from New York and Los Angeles. When they arrived, part of a media swarm descending on Maui from all over the world, I texted them my address in Haiku and they drove straight to my house.
They were both smart, sensitive, media professionals, eager to report on what was happening to Maui and its local community in this moment of crisis. Neither had been to Hawaii before, not even on vacation. I took a deep breath. We had a lot of catching up to do. In many ways I acted as a cultural ambassador: Take off your shoes when you enter someone’s home. Don’t ever honk your horn on the road, unless it’s an emergency. Strangers might hug and kiss you when you first meet. Every adult is called “uncle” and “auntie,” regardless of blood relation. These are baseline cultural behaviors in Hawaii, and if you don’t understand them, you’ll be marked as an outsider real quick.
The video producer was a “disaster” guy: He had covered the devastation in Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2017; Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria that same year; and Northern California’s Camp megafire in 2018. Though he knew little about Hawaii, it was clear why he had been sent on this assignment—he knew catastrophes.
The one main road to Lahaina had been closed for days since the fire for all but emergency responders and Lahaina residents. We went to work documenting the community relief effort that was blossoming in central and upcountry Maui and sending supplies back to Lahaina on the west side of the island, about 35 miles away. I knew of a woman who was sheltering 14 relatives who had escaped the fire but lost their home. Tiare Lawrence had grown up in Lahaina, in the same house that had just burned to the ground. She was a community activist who worked for a sustainable-farming project in central Maui and was an emerging leader for the Native Hawaiian community. I figured if anyone could show us what was really happening under the surface, it was her.
We spent several days with Tiare and her relatives at her home in Pukalani. Her garage and front yard had become a hub for donations intended for Lahaina survivors: Cases of bottled water, toilet paper, dried-soup packets, and propane tanks were stacked on her front porch and spilled out into the yard. Tiare’s cousin Dustin Kaleiopu, who had run from his burning house with his brother and his 81-year-old grandfather, sat with us and recounted their story. Several other relatives and neighbors were gathered in the driveway next door around a foldout table, organizing a cash donation system for affected families on Instagram. Every so often, a car would pull up and unload supplies, or a tray of fried rice for the crew. There were tears and long hugs. Information was shared about who was safe and who was not. Many were still in shock, eyes bloodshot with exhaustion, running on anxiety and adrenaline.
On one hand, I watched my community pull together; on the other, I worked as a reporter and producer covering the fires. In the echo chamber of the international disaster-media vortex, everyone was watching everyone else and measuring up—it was a race to reach the most viewers and attract the most clicks. The island was overrun with journalists at that point. We’d pull up to a rural beach park or a roadside pullout and there would be news van after news van, parked in a row, as if in a parade—it was a carnival of horror seekers, and I was ashamed to be part of it.
In the explosion of media stories about Lahaina, there was tremendous pressure to deliver the kinds of stories that would shock and disturb: Tourists floundering in the ocean while the town burned at their backs. Children trapped in burning homes as they tried to escape. The lucky elderly who limped away as their retirement home, and their friends, burned behind them. Many of the news teams rushing around the island were reporting back to editors sitting at desks thousands of miles away. In this bizarre game of telephone, misunderstandings were bound to happen.
Take, for example, the Lahaina banyan tree, which became a symbol in the media for Lahaina itself. So many stories were told about the loss of this gargantuan tree in the center of Lahaina’s now-devastated Front Street. From the outside, it seemed like an irresistible story. The problem was that the banyan tree was not the symbol of Lahaina’s rich cultural heritage that many imagined it to be.
Most of the journalists who parachuted in from elsewhere didn’t realize that Lahaina’s banyan tree was brought over from India and planted in 1873 by William Owen Smith, a sheriff and the son of American Protestant missionaries, to commemorate 50 years of missionary presence in Lahaina. These were the same missionaries who banned Hawaiian language, dance, religion, and other cultural practices throughout the islands and forced Native Hawaiians into stiff, hot, European-style clothing. Smith himself was one of the key actors in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 by a gang of men, most of them missionary descendents with ties to sugar plantations. This is not a history that is celebrated by many Hawaiians. But without a basic understanding of Hawaii’s history, much of the national media reporting on Maui had the story scrambled.
The history of the town of Lahaina itself invokes similarly complex feelings. During my lifetime, the Lahaina area has been a hot, dry, desert-like region covered with prickly shrubs and dry grass; the town, a low-rise tourist magnet crowded with shops selling tropical knick-knacks. It wasn’t always this way. An early name for Lahaina was Malu ‘ulu o Lele, a reference to the groves of ‘ulu (breadfruit) that shaded the village. Early written accounts by foreign visitors also tell of vast fields of kalo (taro) and a network of stream-fed irrigation channels and fishponds. When the British captain George Vancouver visited Lahaina in the 1790s, he reportedly called it the “Venice of the Pacific” because of its many waterways. The streams that ran from the mountains through the valley to the shore at Lahaina gathered in a series of fishponds—the largest, Mokuhinia, was located in what later became Lahaina’s commercial center. The pond was estimated to be at least 10 acres in size and contained a small island, Moku‘ula, that was sacred to Hawaiian royalty.
Lahaina, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was transformed dramatically by successive waves of foreigners. The whaling ships began arriving in 1819, and a Western-style town with brothels and inns sprang up around the harbor. With every wave of visitors, Hawaiians were exposed to Western diseases like smallpox, measles, and syphilis, which killed thousands of people. Next were the American Protestant missionaries, who built churches and schools and got to work changing the culture of their hosts. Then, in the 1860s, many of the sons of those first American missionaries saw wealth and opportunity in sugar. Lahaina transformed again, this time from a rowdy whaling port to a bustling plantation town. The ‘ulu groves and lowland forests were slashed and burned to make way for sugar plantations, and streams were diverted to water sugarcane fields. The town of Lahaina and the valley above it dried up and became the desert landscape I have always known it to be.
In 1901, shortly after Hawaii was annexed as a U.S. territory, a large hotel was built on the edge of Lahaina’s harbor to welcome American travelers; many more would follow. During this period, Mokuhinia was drained and paved over with a parking lot and a baseball park. The royal island of Moku‘ula now lies under three feet of compacted dirt surrounded by asphalt. Only the name of the rather shabby county park that replaced it carries a whisper of this sacred site: Malu Ulu Olele Park.
By the 1960s, tiny Lahaina, with its seemingly endless sunshine, had become one of the islands’ tourism hot spots. By the time I was growing up, many longtime kama‘āina thought Lahaina had long since become a tourist trap. It was yet another sad reminder of how Hawaii’s land and traditional culture had been paved over, packaged, and sold.
The morning of August 16, eight days after the Lahaina fire started, the main road to the area reopened to the public. My colleagues and I piled into one car; I drove so the guys could film and take notes. Many people were reentering Lahaina for the first time since the fire, and there was a brittle, anxious energy all around. There were demonstrators on the side of the highway, ominously silent, dressed in black, urging us with signs to respect the dead. We were aware that media and visitors were not wanted there by much of the local community, which put me, in particular, on edge.
Lahaina’s downtown was still a smoldering, toxic wasteland littered with the concrete shells of buildings and the twisted metal frames of vehicles that were swept up in the fire as drivers tried to escape. Front Street was completely blocked off, but as we wound through the outskirts of town, we passed through one neighborhood that stunned us all into silence. Wahikuli Terrace ran just alongside the main highway, block after block, barren and exposed, a scorched skeleton of a subdivision. The video producer had rolled down the window to film, but the smells of carnage immediately filled the car: smoke, ash, and the fumes of burned asphalt, asbestos, plastic, and tar. I grabbed a mask and motioned for him to roll up the window.
We drove through the neighborhood where the fire allegedly started, and we scanned the burned field the fire had raced through to reach the town—former sugar-plantation lands. We also drove to the base of Leiali‘i, a neighborhood created by the state government for Native Hawaiian residents. A group of men stood posted at the road entrance, arms crossed, next to a Hawaiian flag flying upside down, a symbol of the Hawaiian Kingdom in distress. A spray-painted sign hanging on a nearby fence made the message very clear: TOURIST KEEP OUT.
We stopped at a beach park to set up for an interview. Just offshore, a helicopter was scooping up seawater with a large bucket, then flying overhead to dump it up the hill from us. More than a week after August 8, the Lahaina fire was still only 85 percent contained. Past the helicopter, the green peaks of the West Maui Mountains drew up like muscular shoulders. Valley after valley, peak after peak, in both directions. That is where Lahaina’s water battles are still being fought. Those green peaks collect the rainwater that flows down into the valleys; those valleys hold the streams that used to flow to the shore but were diverted to plantations more than a century ago—and are still being diverted by real-estate developers building luxury estates. The Maui community’s response to a catastrophe, I realized, was also a story about the ongoing catastrophe that has been inflicted on Hawaii for centuries. The drama around the fire was just the latest installment.
Here I was, among other journalists, skating around on the surface of the disaster. But the real story was so much deeper and darker, full of greed and grit. We point fingers at the electric company with its rotting poles and slow response, the county’s lack of warning sirens, the police who blocked the exit roads. Yes, those things did happen and should be addressed. But viewing the Lahaina fire only through the lens of these bureaucratic failures allows us all to ignore a history of land grabs and water wars that have shaped Hawaii’s history—and are still shaping Hawaii’s present.
People might believe that if we just bury our electric lines, shut down power during windstorms, and have emergency-exit plans, everything will be fine. In the meantime, we can keep cutting down forests and diverting streams for luxury developments and planting monocrop commercial agriculture that degrades the soil until it turns to dust. We can keep overconsuming and treating the planet like it’s our personal shopping mall and garbage dump. We can keep ignoring the treehuggers and naysayers and Native people who have been warning us about these foolish and dangerous behaviors for centuries.
After the fire, there was a new energy to these decades-long battles over Maui’s land and water that was palpable. The feeling running through the community was: Maybe now they will listen. Now is the moment for change. Native Hawaiians, environmentalists, and other local residents were galvanized by the Lahaina tragedy—the stakes were suddenly higher, the consequences of apathy or inaction much clearer in the charred remains of this town. There was a rallying cry to release the West Maui streams, to reforest the old plantation lands, to replant the famous ‘ulu groves, and to restore the waterways, the fishpond of Mokuhinia, and the sacred island of Moku‘ula. The governor has voiced support for some of these ideas, but Lahaina real-estate developers and landowners have also cried foul. This part of the story has yet to be written.
The rest of the islands’ communities are watching and waiting. The same kinds of land and water conflicts happening on Maui are playing out all across the state—and around the world. Lahaina’s tragedy allowed those conflicts to be seen more clearly. But it’s not the first, and it certainly won’t be the last; there will be other tragedies in other places. With climate change, there will be more and more every year.
How many tragedies will it take before we adjust our thinking and change our ways? Here in Hawaii, the streams are still being diverted for golf courses and luxury developments, while the valleys run dry. The land is still being divided up and sold off to the highest bidder. The earliest missionaries and sugar oligarchs are still celebrated as founding fathers. And those of us who call this place home continue to wonder where our story will lead.
This article was adapted from Carrie Ching’s forthcoming book, a reported memoir about Hawaii, colonialism, and climate change.
