The Lahaina Burn Zone Is Coming Back To Life. How To Keep It Safe Is A Work In Progress

Sitting near the top of Lahainaluna Road on a picture-perfect Maui day last week, it’s hard to imagine the chaos, rising panic and sheer terror that Maui police Sgt. Chase Bell is describing.

One year ago, by mid-afternoon on Aug. 8, 2023, this two-lane residential road that runs up the hill from the main highway into sprawling neighborhoods was jammed with cars all trying to get down the hill. Roofs were flying off houses and into the streets. Flames were shooting up from the ravine just feet away. Houses were beginning to burn as people sat in cars that couldn’t move.

“One second you can see the car in front of you, and the next second you can’t even see the hood of your own car,” says Bell. “The smoke was so thick.”

Most people did make it off the hill that day. Police, firefighters and residents managed to clear an escape route on other side roads just in time, cutting open chained gates and using chainsaws to get fallen trees out of the way just enough to let cars through. Fire finally moved away from Lahaina Bypass allowing many to get out that way.

But dozens of people died that afternoon near Lahainaluna Road, many just blocks away on narrow Kuhua Street where an accident brought whatever traffic was moving to a standstill. About 40 bodies were recovered the first day. It didn’t take much searching to find them.

Standing at the intersection of Kuhua and Aki streets last week, Bell quietly recounts how officers came back to the scene the next day and pulled bodies out of vehicles. “Intact remains” is the phrase he uses. Some died next to their cars as they tried, too late, to run from the inferno.

Bell, a 10-year veteran of the force and now a narcotics investigator, helped put together the Maui Police Department’s 98-page after-action report. He interviewed numerous officers, watched hours of body cam footage and listened to more than 4,000 911 calls and 26 hours of MPD radio traffic, just from that one day. Despite the overwhelming post-traumatic stress that comes with being deep in the middle of an event like this, only a couple of sworn officers have left the department in the last year, he says. The department has mainly lost dispatchers since the fire, some who acknowledged the stress of the job that night was the main reason.

Bell knows well the stories of every officer who worked the fire that day and in the days after. One he mentions was just a recruit then, his own wife, toddler and infant caught in the burn zone; he didn’t know what had happened to them and wasn’t able to find them — safe — until the next day. Now he works patrol.

One lost his grandmother at Hale Mahaolu Eono, the senior housing complex just up the hill from Kuhua Street that during the height of the fire became impossible for first responders to reach.

Another officer was evacuating people a few blocks away as members of his own family died on Kuhua Street.

“He’s right there helping people,” Bell says, waving vaguely in the direction of Honoapiilani Highway and the blue roof of a still-standing coffee shop. “And he loses five family members right here.”

Once a working-class neighborhood that ran parallel to the sugar mill, Kuhua Street now looks much like other neighborhoods in the burn zone. The residential lots have been scraped clean of ash and debris by federal contractors. Gray gravel pads are everywhere, centered on hundreds of properties waiting for someone to come back and put up a new house.

Near Kuhua and Aki streets, the gray gravel is being stockpiled in an empty lot. Construction equipment is staged next to the growing gray piles. Lahainaluna Road has been repaved and a new yellow line is freshly painted down the middle.

Perhaps more surprising are the flowers that seem to be everywhere, including growing out of the middle of the gray gravel pads and whatever dirt is left between the lots. Red and pink bougainvillea have taken root all over. A purple eggplant bush is huge on the corner of Kuhua Street.

Some burned-out street signs are still up, along with a charred stop sign here and there. But some street signs look brand new, as if they were untouched by the fire. So many familiar landmarks were lost that in the days after the fire workers spray-painted street names wherever they could on the road, Bell says.

Down the hill, Honoapiilani Highway has reopened to through traffic. But Front Street is still a mess of burned-out shells of historic buildings mixed among the scraped-down lots that held waterfront homes. Black rectangles the size of a car still mark some spots where vehicles were abandoned, engulfed and melted by the fire.

From a distance, the seemingly intact Lahaina Shores Resort looms on Front Street, made larger by the fact that there is now nothing else around it. But its underground parking garage is flooded nearly to street level and a chain link fence cuts off construction work from the road.

On the day of the fire, five Maui police patrol officers were covering the whole area at the start of shift, supported by a few supervisors. By the time the afternoon fire started, there were 16 officers in Lahaina, according to the after-action report. That number grew to 49 by early the next day.

“This agency is an incredibly resilient agency. It was confronted with some of the most dynamic situations and it responded not just admirably but it really went above and beyond,” Maui Police Chief John Pelletier says.

It’s taken much of the last year for Pelletier to get his head around the magnitude of what his small police force went through on the day of the fire and in the months since. And, he says, his thinking is still evolving when it comes to what the department needs to heal and to handle Maui’s public safety issues as effectively as possible.

One thing he’s still coming to grips with is the impact that the Lahaina fire has had on his officers, their families and their lives.

“The fact that you have people that their own homes were burning,” he says. “We have people that their own families were dying and they ran toward the danger. They did the evacuations, then went to the neighborhoods. They held their positions … That takes a lot. And then the next day you had to go in and do these rescue and recoveries.”

A year later he sees a department that is continuing to rebound. He uses the word “resilience” a lot.

Not only have most officers stuck with the department, but Pelletier says he’s been able to fill two police academies in the last year. A third slated for this fall is the largest class the agency has seen in five years.

“We’re stronger after the adversity we faced,” he says. “We’re stronger as a police department but we’re stronger as a community too.”

The after-action report surfaced a number of issues for police officials to deal with in terms of policies, equipment and technology and operations. The report included 32 recommendations that Pelletier says have largely all been addressed — either completed or in progress.

Big things on the list include establishing better communications during a natural disaster where phones, computers and internet go down and even radio communication between officers and command is sketchy. One small but significant fix: earpieces that connect to the radio so officers can actually hear what is going on.

Pelletier envisions a “real-time crime center” that involves the installation of cameras at key points throughout Maui such as high-risk intersections or major visitor centers. Artificial intelligence technology can detect unusual incidents as they are happening in real time, such as smoke on a distant mountain.

First responders or emergency crews would be able to respond much sooner and not have to wait for someone to report a situation. Even 5 minutes faster for a robbery or a fire would make a big difference, he says.

Pelletier has been working with Hawaii’s congressional delegation to help get the center in place and is hopeful it will come to fruition relatively soon.

The chief also plans to buy personal protective gear — a set of no-drip, no-melt pants and shirts — for each officer to carry in a vehicle. They would have the option to put it on when responding to a fire or hazardous situation.

New tactical vehicles will roll out at the end of the year equipped with less-lethal weapons like bean-bag shotguns and breaching kits to remove debris such as downed trees as well as open blocked doors.

The police vehicles also will carry “mass casualty critical incident bags” that include bandages and other medical supplies, extra respirators or masks, among other things.

All of this will be backed up with training, Pelletier says, so officers will know how to use the new equipment.

Pelletier made headlines earlier this year when he pitched a police helicopter to the Maui County Council. That was ultimately approved and his plan is to find a company that will allow the department to lease an aircraft and pilot for police use. He hopes to have that in place within a year.

Pelletier used the task of finding and identifying victims of the Lahaina fire to stand up a cold case detail, which he says he’d wanted to do since he took over as chief nearly three years ago. The unit now has two full-time officers and is still working on trying to find two people still considered missing from the fires. Its caseload includes three unsolved homicides and seven missing persons cases, dating back to 1986.

Beyond the recommendations in the after-action report, Pelletier says the mental health and well-being of his employees has been a major focus over the past year. Besides providing funding for programs and counseling, the department is offering new training opportunities through a national company to help officers learn new policing skills and practices.

Wellness “is not just a word we say,” Pelletier says, “but we want it to be a culturally accepted action item.”

“Our people are still hurting,” he says, “I mean you can sit here a year later and that doesn’t mean the wound’s not gone. A scar fades, but a scar can be an open wound very quickly. We have people who are still suffering.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.