Leola Vierra and her daughter moved multiple times after the fire, switching hotel rooms and vacation rentals whenever the unit’s owners would return.
“Everything was so unsettled,” she said.
The Vierras, married 57 years, also couldn’t find their beloved cat, Kitty Kai. But in February, they learned Kitty Kai had found her way to Kahului, 30 miles (48 kilometers) across the West Maui Mountains.
The reunion, while joyful, complicated their housing search. Landlords are less likely to rent to families with pets.
Not until last month did Vierra find some stability, securing a six-month lease while they wait to someday rebuild on their own property. Their new place has a yard, a sundeck and an ocean view.
“I have been so depressed ever since my husband passed, and I can feel my mind and my memory all going downhill,” she said. “With this new home, I think I will be able to accept more things now, because it seems like I’m on the right track.”
Cherishing sunsets
As the flames approached, Ai Hironaka and his family — wife, four children, French bulldog — crammed into his Honda Civic and drove off, leaving behind their home and the Japanese Buddhist temple where he was resident minister and caretaker.
Losing those buildings and being uprooted amid the greater devastation has tested him as a Buddhist. How should he behave as a disaster victim? What is the appropriate response when someone gives him donated clothing he doesn’t want? If he feels ungrateful, he turns to the teachings of his religion.
“We all have an evil nature, self-centeredness,” he said.
After moving three times in the months after the fire, he now lives across the island, nearly an hour away, at another temple, Kahului Hongwanji Mission, where he also serves as resident minister. He performs much of the same work he did at the Hongwanji Mission in Lahaina: leading ceremonies and counseling members, including fire survivors.
He returns to the site of the Lahaina temple occasionally to check the columbarium, an area for storing funeral urns, which survived. He misses the town, the beach parks, the parents on his son’s high school football team.
And he misses the sunsets from Lahainaluna High School, overlooking the ocean. When he goes back now, he does not take that view for granted.
“I have to capture that,” he said, “because I cannot see this tomorrow.”
From football to firefighting
Before the fire, Morgan “Bula” Montgomery was a kid who loved playing football and paddling in the ocean. College wasn’t on his radar.
But the University of Hawaii offered full-ride scholarships for Lahainaluna High School graduates at any school in its system following 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, inspired by the devastation and the firefighters who tried to save the community.
“I want to come back to Lahaina and come back to Maui and try to be a firefighter,” he said.
Montgomery’s family lost their two-bedroom apartment to the fire, but also found opportunity. Montgomery and fellow Lahainaluna football captains were invited to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this year. It was one of just a handful of times he has left Maui.
After spending time in a hotel, the family secured a rental house about an hour drive across the island. It’s not convenient for his canoe paddling practices in Lahaina. But it’s the biggest house they’ve lived in, with five bedrooms, enough for his mom and her five children.
He’s a little nervous about leaving Maui but grateful for the scholarship.
“An opportunity for school or free tuition is something you’ve got to take advantage of,” Montgomery said.
“That’s what we do”
Ikaika Blackburn, an 18-year veteran of the Maui Fire Department, talks often with his crewmates about the blaze that consumed Lahaina: at the fire house kitchen table, over cups of coffee while waiting for calls or during family gatherings on days off.
His five-person crew was one of 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 town. His mother-in-law lost her home.
At daybreak, it set in: “We lost Lahaina.”
Blackburn and his crew spent days talking about it, “just releasing it and not holding it all in,” he said. Recalling how they rushed from one part of town to the next, trying to find a way to stop it.
“For the most part, we’re able to always win,” he said. “We’re always able to get ahead of it.”
But this fire was different, uncontrollable. Firefighters and investigators from outside Maui helped him understand that his crew did all they could.
Blackburn followed his father’s footsteps as a Maui fire captain. Firefighting feels like something he was born to do.
And he has kept doing it. This year’s busy brushfire season hasn’t triggered 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.”
Lahaina Strong
When wildfire struck, Jordan Ruidas couldn’t sleep. Eager to help families in the 21 homes that burned, she started a Facebook fundraiser titled, “Lahaina Strong,” which raised more than $150,000.
That was in 2018.
Five years later, Ruidas and Lahaina Strong again emerged as leaders, pushing officials to control tourism and try to find enough housing for local residents after the 2023 fire destroyed thousands of buildings.
Ruidas was seven months pregnant when last year’s fire destroyed Lahaina. She sometimes missed prenatal checkups. Traveling nurses at community hubs for fire survivors would check her blood pressure.
The fire spared her neighborhood and two months later she gave birth at home to a daughter, Aulia.
“I don’t think I’ve dealt with all the emotions that came with losing Lahaina and being postpartum,” she said. “I feel like I cope by staying busy with work, with Lahaina Strong.”
Ruidas brought the baby along, strapped to her chest, when she helped organize a “fish-in” protest at a popular beach resort demanding more short-term rental housing be made available for survivors.
She still hasn’t been able to bring herself to visit the burn zone.
“My kids will never grow up seeing or knowing the Lahaina that I grew up seeing and knowing,” she said. “The Lahaina that we lost was a very special and beautiful place.”