As people flooded a main road out of West Maui, the inferno caught up. A resident who managed to escape with his family says he will never forget what he saw.
After an exhausting day battling to protect his family’s home in Lahaina against hurricane-like wind — it felled trees, tore apart roofs and knocked down power lines — Bryce Baraoidan figured things couldn’t get much worse.Like so many others in Lahaina, who had lost electricity and internet service hours before the flames arrived Tuesday, Baraoidan and his family were completely cut off from 21st century information sources.
in their cars. There are stories of a couple found in each other’s arms. The bones of one man were found in the back seat on top of the bones of his beloved golden retriever. His own trip out began in haste. He and his father were originally determined to stay and fight, go down “like captains on a sinking ship,” he said, until they heard a nearby gas station explode.
In his light brown Toyota Tacoma, with his usually fearless dog turned backward in the passenger’s seat — ears down, tail between his legs and face buried in the upholstery – Baraoidan tried to steer them both to safety.For a moment, they cruised in silence and Baraoidan felt confident they were going to be OK. “Me and my dog were just chilling,” he said. “I wasn’t too panicked, I wasn’t really shook.
“I feel like it was just so chaotic,” he said. If he had caused an accident, making things worse for his neighbors, “I could never forgive myself.” Roadblocks set up by the police are still keeping thousands of residents away from their destroyed town, but Baraoidan managed to get back in. He’ll never forget what he saw, many of those things too gruesome to describe in print.
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