A barricade on the only paved road out of Lahaina blocked access to Highway 30. Road closures helped the town become the site of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century
During a news conference Tuesday, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said police officers drove up and down streets, knocking on doors and using loudspeakers to tell people to leave, but he didn’t say exactly where and what time those efforts occurred.
Around 3:20 p.m., Lahaina resident Kevin Eliason is watching the black smoke from a vantage point closer to downtown when passersby tell him a power pole has been knocked onto the tar roof of a gas station two blocks away, creating fireballs that are being blown in the wind, he said.Ten minutes later, Hawaiian Electric sends a news release asking Maui residents to prepare for extended outages.
Meanwhile, police officers knock down a fence to help others escape, the police chief says later. Firefighters in the area nearly become trapped themselves, losing a truck to the flames, Pelletier says. Jonelle Santos said her daughter, Ronelle Santos-Adrian, managed to escape her Lahaina affordable housing apartment with her 3-year-old daughter and partner by turning their four-wheel-drive vehicle away from the standstill traffic and onto a dirt road, eventually finding their way to a friend’s house in Napili. Some of the other people who lived in the apartment complex didn’t have cars, Santos said, and her daughter thinks some of them didn’t make it out.
But by then, some on Front Street have already died, according to survivor accounts. Others have jumped over the seawall and are treading water, dodging flaming debris and breathing overheated black smoke. An aerial image shows a U.S. Coast Guard vessel docking in the harbor near a destroyed building in the historic Lahaina Town in the aftermath of wildfires in western Maui in Lahaina, Hawaii, on August 10, 2023.
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