Hours before the wildfire became an inferno that wiped out the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, officials at the West Maui Land Company reached out to the state with an urgent request. The company, a real estate developer that supplies water to areas southeast of Lahaina, took note of the dangerous combination of high winds…
Before fire tore through the Hale Mahaolu Eono senior-living complex, trapping a man in his wheelchair and forcing a 95-year-old grandmother to flee through a blizzard of embers, before it killed two close friends and left neighbors missing, people felt lucky to live there. The independent-living complex in Lahaina was one of the few housing…
The pastor Arza Brown had long told the congregants of Grace Baptist Church that if they left the sanctuary and gathered beneath Lahaina’s mango trees, that then their church would be under the mangoes, too. “When we talk about the church,” Mr. Brown said on Sunday, “the building is not the church. The building is…
The death toll from the fires that overtook Maui was already growing significantly on Thursday as questions mounted over whether officials had acted with enough urgency to evacuate the tourist haven of Lahaina, where many people described harrowing escapes. When the brush fire was first spotted early on Tuesday, Maui County officials ordered evacuations in…