Lahaina residents tell the BBC they had no official warning before 'fire hurricane' engulfed their town.
By Holly Honderich and Max MatzaWarning this story contains details that some readers may find distressing."We pick up remains and they fall apart," said Maui County police chief John Pelletier on Saturday, four days after a massive wildfire tore downhill through dry brush and grass and engulfed the island's western edge.
One thing seemed to unite their accounts: residents say they had no official warning before they fled for their lives, raising painful questions about the effectiveness of the emergency response and whether more people could have been saved.On Tuesday morning, Lahaina residents woke up to find their power was out. Phones hadn't charged, alarm clocks stayed quiet and air conditioners shut down.
Richard Tenison, a homeless Lahaina resident, woke up to the rushing winds. Standing up near the door of a pharmacy where he had set up for the night, he watched as his bedding was carried by the wind into the harbour. Suddenly, the building's smoke alarms began ringing. Residents emptied out of their apartments. Outside, embers had begun igniting the brush around them.Munn ran back inside and tried to grab his wallet, but the heat and smoke forced him to flee with nothing but the clothes on his back. Everything went black. Choking on smoke, he fled to the only thing he could see, the blue lights of a police car, and dove into its back seat.
But those early warning sirens had failed to sound, officials have confirmed, a failure now under investigation by Hawaii's attorney general. Some residents told other media outlets they received alerts to their mobile phones early on Tuesday, but the blackout across Maui's west may have limited their reach.
"It was a very fast-moving fire, it was a low to the ground fire," said Lori Moore-Merrell of the US Fire Administration on Saturday from Maui. "It outpaced anything that firefighters could have done in the early hours."
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