Outrunning the Maui fire: "I feel blessed to be alive"
BY Joshua Partlow, John Farrell, Brady Dennis, Brianna Sacks and Joanna Slater
5th Jan 2024 Life
8 min read
Without warning, a disastrous wildfire swept across the Maui island, leaving locals to scramble for survival. These are their stories of the catastrophe
Lisa Vorpahl, a bank teller, woke to the sound of someone shuffling on her lanai, a Hawaiian-style patio. It was 3am on Tuesday, August 8, 2023.
She looked out her bedroom window along a dry, grassy slope overlooking her slice of tropical paradise in Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and realised it was just the wind.
Alexa Caskey couldn’t sleep either. On the farm where she grew taro and breadfruit for her plant-based restaurant, she listened to gusts that would soon dislodge her garage door and topple the orchid tree outside.
Photographer Rachael Zimmerman woke up before dawn in her condo on Front Street, Lahaina’s seaside boulevard of restaurants and surf shops, to the howls rattling her window screens.
If there was any warning on that fitful night that Hawaii was about to endure one of the most horrific and deadly natural disasters in the state’s history, it was only the wind.
First emergency response
Credit: Patrick T Fallon/Getty Images. Firefighters had already put out a blaze early in the day
For two days, the National Weather Service in Honolulu had been sending out ominous alerts about powerful easterly gusts, whipped up by Hurricane Dora passing 800 kilometres to the south.
The gusts hit Maui at a time when much of the tropical island had been parched by severe drought, including the drier leeward side that includes Lahaina.
The next time Vorpahl woke up, she smelled smoke. The power was out.
A fire had started in the dry grass near her home on Lahainaluna Road, on a slope just east of the highway that bypasses downtown. Power poles had fallen, and wires had snapped (several neighbours later questioned if electrical equipment had started the blaze).
"It’s Hawaii. Nobody thought anything of it"
Maui County authorities got the first reports of the fire at 6:37am, and not long afterward, police were circulating in Vorpahl’s neighbourhood, calling out on megaphones for people to evacuate. Using a nearby hydrant, firefighters doused the flames.
She didn’t feel panicked. Fires were a regular occurrence. The blaze was small and didn’t appear threatening as she and her husband, Eddy Vorpahl, heeding the directive, drove past.
“It’s Hawaii,” she said later. “Nobody thought anything of it.”
They spent a few hours at their daughter’s apartment but returned home after Maui County—at 9:55am—sent out an alert that the brush fire was “100 per cent contained.”
It looked that way to Eddy. “Nothing was happening. A couple fire engines were there, they were packing stuff up,” he said. “It looked 100 per cent fine.”
An early-morning blaze
Credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images. For those that have returned home, life is irrevocably changed after the wildfires
Lahaina, population 13,200, sits on Maui’s western flank. It’s a historic town rimmed by white-sand beaches at the foot of the Pu‘u Kukui volcano. On most days, it’s postcard-perfect tropical bliss.
But an early-morning blaze was ominous. And Mark Stefl, a tile setter, had reason to be wary.
He lived down the hill on Lahainaluna Road in a home he’d rebuilt after a wildfire burned it down five years ago. He had heard that the early-morning blaze had been extinguished. Around 2:30pm, he heard his wife, Michele Numbers-Stefl, shout, “Oh, my God!”
The blaze had kicked up again farther down the hillside. Wind dragged the flames toward downtown Lahaina.
It was a few hundred metres away, and Mark reassured Michele that firefighters would handle it. But the speed of its approach was like nothing he had seen. Within minutes, there was a wall of fire 30 metres from the house.
Overhead, dry air was jetting over and down the slopes of the volcano, sending ferocious winds into his town, spraying gravel and ripping shingles off the rooftops. It was the worst-case scenario that some emergency planners had long warned about.
"It was then that I knew: if we come back, we are coming back to nothing"
The couple scrambled to gather their dogs and cats. One rescue dog, Poppy, got left behind in the chaos. Stefl hit the gas in his truck as flames licked at the side of the house. “I was praying to God that we didn’t die,” he said.
Not far away, on Komo Mai Street, AnnaStaceya Arcangel Pang saw the distant fire marching closer. The Lahaina native lives within a few blocks of her grandmother, mother and various cousins. They all decided to leave.
Pang, 31, texted her husband, who had left early to work in another town, to see what he wanted her to pack for him. He replied eight minutes later, but by then her back yard was in flames, and she hastily fled alongside a caravan of relatives.
As she drove away with her dogs, she could hear the sound of propane tanks exploding up and down the street, one after another.
“When I looked back, all I saw was black smoke,” she said. “It was then that I knew: if we come back, we are coming back to nothing.”
Broiling smoke in Lahaina
By this time, that same black cloud was starting to smother Lahaina.
The town had been the capital of the former Hawaiian Kingdom and a trade hub for 19th-century whaling ships. Lahaina had the oldest house in Maui, the Baldwin Home Museum, and a treasured banyan tree that has grown in a courtyard by the sea for 150 years.
These days, tourists come to surf, snorkel, sunbathe and zip line.
Caresse Carson, 41, catered to those visitors at her job at Captain Jack’s Island Grill. She had spent nearly two decades in Lahaina and valued its rich history.
Mark Twain had visited the Pioneer Inn, which sits across the street from Captain Jack’s. She liked to imagine herself tracing his long-ago footsteps.
Even though the power was out, Carson had reported to work that afternoon to help keep the food from spoiling.
"It was completely black. You couldn’t see in front of you"
On the drive in, she passed the home of her boss, Sam, and watched a chunk of his roof as big as her truck get ripped off by the wind. As she and Sam hauled bags of ice, black smoke started billowing through town.
“All of a sudden, smoke was starting to barrel over the building,” Carson said. “It was completely black. You couldn’t see in front of you.”
Zimmerman, the photographer, was also downtown. She grabbed a small safe with her hard drives, her passport and some cash. Plus her computer, food for her dog, Ziya, and a few shirts.
At 3:38pm, fearing the worst, she snapped a few hasty photos of the rooms, the closets, the furniture. Those would be for the insurance claims.
She called her parents in Colorado a half-hour later, saying she and her partner, Nicole, were stuck in traffic as the fire bore down, and she didn’t know whether they would make it out. Her parents encouraged her to stick close to the ocean, and to just keep going.
No way out
Credit: Patrick T Fallon/Getty Images. Hawaiians racing to escape became trapped as people abandoned their cars
Carson was also trying to drive out of Lahaina in her Nissan pickup. Embers showered into her open window, perforating the blanket on the back seat.
There was gridlock downtown as panicked people tried to escape and others abandoned their vehicles.
Carson watched a couple running barefoot through the street pushing a stroller. She watched person after person run down the side streets until they got to the sea wall where they threw themselves into the Pacific Ocean.
"Embers showered into her open window, perforating the blanket on the back seat"
Carson recorded video on her phone as she drove, searching for a way out. Power lines and palm trees whipped around wildly. She came to a road that was blocked by a downed utility pole.
“I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” she recorded herself saying. “Look at that. That’s all burnt debris. The fire’s getting closer and closer.”
It was 4:25pm when she saw her friend Kaleo get hit in the head by a piece of debris. “Get in the car!” she screamed to him. “Get in my car!”
The air was black. Carson was disoriented. A light emerged in the sky.
“Look at the moon,” she told him.
It was 4:30pm. He told her it was the sun.
Fleeing the firestorm
Credit: Patrick T Fallon/Getty Images. Annelise Cochran was one of the many who jumped into the ocean to escape
There was no emergency siren. No organised evacuation. Few instructions about how to proceed. Just a headlong grasp toward survival.
Annelise Cochran, a 30-year-old who worked for an ocean conservation nonprofit, couldn’t get out by car, and the building next to her was on fire. So she ran to the water.
A neighbour, Etina Hingano, did the same. Together, the neighbours climbed over the rocky barrier to get away from the flames.
They spent hours in the water and on the rocks, Cochran said, trying to stay away from flying embers and choking smoke. Cars abandoned on Front Street began to explode. Waves of heat and toxic fumes washed over the sea.
At times, they began to feel dangerously cold and had to move toward the fire. Cochran watched in horror as people held onto debris and floated away from shore. “People still chose just to drift out,” she said.
"When darkness fell, the sky turned a menacing orange"
By then, Kevin Foley, 42, was stranded in a supermarket parking lot, flames encroaching on multiple sides. He had been heading to his bartending shift at Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club when the smoke forced him off the bus. He walked back to where he’d left his bike.
Worried about his roommates, Foley tried to ride home but kept getting blocked. As he moved, he recorded fires all around him.
When darkness fell, the sky turned a menacing orange. He watched flaming utility poles spraying showers of embers onto the pavement. He saw the fire consume a three-story apartment building.
Foley narrated the conflagration as he travelled. When sparks landed at the base of a palm tree and blossomed into flame, he said: “This is how it starts. One spark flies to an area, and the next thing you know, it goes up in flames, just like that.”
Waiting for dawn
Credit: Moses Slovatizki/Getty Images. Many are feel lucky to have escaped the blaze
Sometime after midnight, a man staggered out from the burning homes toward a gas station. His shorts were smouldering. Skin was peeling from his face. He collapsed on the pavement. Foley encouraged the man to stand and then led him toward the supermarket.
Foley jumped back onto his bike and rode around looking for help until he found a police officer.
Throughout the day Maui police and firefighters had been out trying to save lives and help people evacuate. But the fire was overwhelming. “The cop could only give him water,” Foley recalled.
Foley and some other people entered the Lahaina Cannery Mall, connected to the supermarket, to try to escape the encroaching smoke and wait out the night. Every so often, Foley would go outside to see whether the supermarket had started to burn.
"They shared stories about their families while also promising each other they’d make it together"
In the dark, cold water off Lahaina on Tuesday night, Cochran and Hingano clutched each other, both women shivering and struggling to breathe through the smoke and fumes. Cochran felt as if she was losing consciousness.
The women tried to stay awake. They shared stories about their families while also promising each other they’d make it together.
Sometime around midnight, firefighters rescued Cochran and several dozen other people from the water. She spent the next few nights in shelters. She was covered with bruises and lacerations; her feet and face were burned.
Still, she said, “I feel blessed to be alive.”
Banner credit: Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images
© The Washington Post (Aug. 13, 2023),
Copyright © 2023 by The Washington Post
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