How the Maui wildfires devastated Lahaina, hour by hour

It is already the deadliest conflagration in modern U.S. history, but there is still so much unknown about the Maui wildfires that destroyed much of Lahaina last week. How many people died? What caused the blazes? To what degree did climate change contribute?

What is known is that thousands of people on Maui experienced horrors on Aug. 8 that they had never imagined, and that unfolded hour after hour.

Morning: Howling winds, then a brush fire

Lisa Vorpahl, a bank teller, woke to the sound of someone shuffling on her lanai. It was 3 a.m. on Tuesday when she looked out her bedroom window - along a dry, grassy slope overlooking her slice of tropical paradise - and realized it was just the wind.

Alexa Caskey couldn’t sleep, either. On the farm where she grew taro and breadfruit for her plant-based restaurant, she listened to gusts that would dislodge her garage door and topple the Hong Kong orchid tree outside.

Photographer Rachael Zimmerman woke up before dawn in her condo on Front Street, Lahaina’s seaside boulevard of restaurants and surf shops, to the howls rattling her window screens.

If there was any warning that fitful night that Hawaii was about to endure one of the most horrific and deadly natural disasters in the state’s history, it was only the wind.

For two days, National Weather Service employees in Honolulu had been sending out ominous alerts about powerful easterly gusts, whipped up by Hurricane Dora passing 500 miles to the south. They hit Maui at a time when much of the tropical island had been parched by severe drought, including the drier leeward side that includes Lahaina.

The next time Vorpahl woke up, she smelled smoke. The power was out.

A fire had started in the dry grass near her home on Lahainaluna Road, on a slope just east of the highway that bypasses downtown. Power poles fell in the neighborhood, and wires had snapped - leading several neighbors to later question whether electrical equipment had started the blaze.

Maui County authorities got the first reports of the fire by 6:37 a.m., and not long afterward, police were circulating in her neighborhood, calling out on megaphones for people to evacuate. Using a nearby hydrant, firefighters doused the flames.

She didn’t feel panicked. Fires were a regular occurrence. The blaze was small and didn’t appear threatening as she and her husband, Eddy, drove past.

“It’s Hawaii,” she said. “Nobody thought anything of it.”

They spent a few hours at their daughter’s apartment but returned home after Maui County - at 9:55 a.m. - sent out an alert that the brush fire was “100% contained.”

It looked that way to Eddy.

“Nothing was happening. A couple fire engines were there. They were all packing stuff up,” he said. “It looked 100 percent fine.

Afternoon: Rapid flames, then ‘broiling smoke’

Lahaina sits on Maui’s western flank, a historic town rimmed by white-sand beaches at the foot of the ancient Pu’u Kukui volcano. On most days, it’s a postcard-perfect symbol of tropical bliss. But an early-morning blaze was ominous. And Mark Stefl, a tile setter, had reason to be wary.

He lived down the hill on Lahainaluna Road in a home he rebuilt after another wildfire burned it down five years ago. He had heard that the early-morning blaze had been extinguished. Around 2:30 p.m., he heard his wife, Michele, shout: “Oh, my God.”

The blaze had kicked up again farther down the hillside. Wind dragged the flames toward Lahaina.

It was still a few hundred yards away. Mark tried to reassure Michele that firefighters would handle it. But the speed of its approach was like nothing he had seen.

“Within minutes, there was a wall of fire 30 yards from the house,” he said.

Overhead, dry air - the result of a high-pressure system - was jetting over and down the slopes of the volcano, sending ferocious winds into his town, spraying gravel and ripping shingles off the rooftops. It was a worst-case scenario that some emergency planners had long warned about.

The couple scrambled to gather their dogs and cats. One rescue dog, Poppy, got left behind in the chaos. Stefl hit the gas in his truck as flames licked at the side of the house.

“I was praying to God that we didn’t die,” he said.

Not far away, on Komo Mai Street, AnnaStaceya Arcangel Pang saw the distant fire marching closer. The Lahaina native and family members - her grandmother, her mother, various cousins - live within blocks of one another, and all had decided to leave.

Pang, 31, texted her husband, who had left early that day to work in another town, to see what he wanted her to pack for him. He replied eight minutes later, but by then, her backyard was in flames, and she hastily fled alongside a caravan of relatives.

As she drove away with her dogs and a few clothes she had grabbed she could hear the sound of propane tanks exploding up and down the street, one after another.

“When I looked back, all I saw was black smoke,” she said. “It was then that I knew: If we come back, we are coming back to nothing.”

By this time, that same black cloud was starting to smother Lahaina.

The town of 12,000 had been the capital of the former Hawaiian Kingdom and a trade hub for 19th-century whaling ships. Lahaina had the oldest house in Maui, the Baldwin Home Museum, and a treasured banyan tree that has grown in a courtyard by the sea for 150 years. These days, tourists come to surf or snorkel, sunbathe and zip-line.

Caresse Carson, 41, catered to those visitors at her job at Captain Jack’s Island Grill. She had spent nearly two decades in Lahaina and valued its rich history. Mark Twain had visited the Pioneer Inn - across the street from Captain Jack’s. She liked to imagine herself tracing his long-ago footsteps.

Even though the power was out, Carson had reported to work that afternoon to help keep food from spoiling. On the drive in, she passed the home of her boss, Sam, and watched a chunk of his roof as big as her truck get ripped off by the wind. As she and Sam hauled bags of ice, black smoke started billowing through town.

It came on in an instant.

“All of a sudden, it was starting to barrel over the building,” Carson said. “It was completely black. You couldn’t see an inch in front of you. This was broiling smoke.”

Zimmerman, the photographer, was also downtown. She grabbed a small safe with her hard drives, passport and some cash. Plus her computer, some food for her dog, Zya, and a handful of shirts.

At 3:38 p.m., already fearing the worst, she snapped a few hasty photos of their rooms, their closets, their furniture - thinking she might need the pictures for insurance claims.

She called her parents in Colorado a half-hour later, saying she and her partner, Nicole, were stuck in traffic as the fire bore down, and she didn’t know whether they would make it out. They encouraged her to stick close to the ocean, and to just keep going.

Carson was also trying to drive out of Lahaina in her Nissan pickup. Glowing embers showered into her open window, perforating the blanket in the back seat.

There was gridlock downtown as panicked people tried to escape and others abandoned their vehicles. Carson watched a couple running barefoot through the street pushing a stroller. She watched person after person run down the side streets until they got to the sea wall and then threw themselves into the Pacific Ocean.

Carson recorded video on her phone as she drove, searching for a way out. Power lines and palm trees whipped around wildly. She came to a road that was blocked by a downed utility pole.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” she recorded herself saying. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Look at that. That’s all burnt debris. The fire’s getting closer and closer.”

It was 4:25 p.m. when she saw her friend, Kaleo, get hit in the head by a piece of debris.

“Get in the car,” she screamed to him. “Get in my car.”

He was panting.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

The air was black. Carson was disoriented. A light emerged in the sky.

“Look at the moon,” she told him. “Look at the f---ing moon, dude.”

It was 4:30 p.m. He told her it was the sun.

Evening: Fleeing the firestorm

There was no emergency siren. No organized evacuation. Few instructions about how to proceed. Just a headlong grasp toward survival.

Annelise Cochran, a 30-year-old who worked for an ocean conservation nonprofit, couldn’t get out by car, and the building next to her was on fire. So she ran to the water. She saw her neighbor, Freeman, 86struggling to walk. Another neighbor, Edna, was with him. Together, the three climbed over the rocky barrier to get away from the flames.

They spent hours in the water and on the rocks, Cochran said, trying to stay away from flying embers and choking smoke. Cars abandoned on Front Street began to explode. Waves of heat and toxic fumes washed over the sea.

At times, they had to move toward the fire when they began to feel dangerously cold. Cochran watched in horror as people held onto debris and floated away from shore.

“People still chose just to drift out,” she said.

By that time, Kevin Foley, 42, was stranded in a Safeway parking lot, flames encroaching on multiple sides. He had been heading to his bartending shift at Longhi’s Kaanapali, an Italian restaurant in Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club, when the smoke forced him off the bus. He walked back to where he had left his bike.

Worried about his roommates, Foley tried to ride home but kept getting blocked. As he moved, he recorded fires all around him. When darkness fell, the sky turned a menacing orange. He watched flaming utility poles spraying showers of embers onto the pavement. He saw the fire consume a three-story apartment building on Keawe Street.

He narrated the conflagration as he traveled. When sparks landed at the base of a palm tree and blossomed into flame, he said: “This is how it starts. One little spark flies to an area, and the next thing you know, it goes up, just like that.”

Sometime after midnight, a man staggered out from the burning homes, toward a Shell gas station. His shorts were smoldering. Skin was peeling from his face. He collapsed on the pavement. Foley encouraged the man to stand and led him toward Safeway. Foley rode around looking for help until he found a police officer.

Maui police and firefighters had been out throughout the day trying to save lives and help people evacuate. But the fire was overwhelming.

“The cop couldn’t do anything for him,” Foley recalled. “He just gave him water.”

Foley and some other people entered the Lahaina Cannery Mall - connected to the supermarket - to try to escape the smoke and wait out the night.

Every so often, he would go outside to see whether the Safeway had started to burn.

In the dark, cold water off Lahaina on Tuesday night, Cochran and her neighbor Edna clutched each other, both women shivering and struggling to breathe through the smoke and fumes. Cochran felt like she was losing consciousness.

The women tried to stay awake. They talked about their families and promised each other they’d make it.

At one point, Cochran called out to Freeman, her elderly neighbor, who was a little farther down the rocky beach, and asked how he was.

He smiled and made a shaka gesture with his hand - hang loose - to indicate he was all right. Later, she saw him slumped against the wall, unmoving. She believes he might have died from the smoke.

Sometime around midnight, firefighters rescued Cochran and several dozen other people from the water. She has spent the past few nights at shelters. Her body is covered with bruises and lacerations; her feet and face are burned.

“I feel blessed to be alive,” she said.

Partlow and Sacks reported from Lahaina. Farrell and Slater reported from Washington. Dennis reported from Rhode Island. The Washington Post’s Reis Thebault in Lahaina and John Muyskens in Washington contributed to this report.