When Lahaina Resident Needed to Escape Fire, She Plunged Into Sea

Lahaina resident Jo Ann Hayashi couldn’t bring herself to leave her four cats that had gone into hiding Tuesday afternoon. So while most of her neighbors had urged her to flee her home near the harbor hours earlier when they were told to evacuate, Hayashi stalled. She doused the outside of her apartment with a garden hose, hoping for the best.

At that time, Hayashi, a 57-year-old harbor employee, hadn’t smelled any smoke or seen any flames. 

“I thought it was safe,” Hayashi said. “And there was just nowhere to go.”

Just a few minutes later, she realized how much danger she was in when sparks sailed through her air-conditioning vent. She looked outside to find her neighbor’s house on fire.

Within seconds, her front room was engulfed in flames, and thick, black smoke began filling her home. 

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God. Is this how I’m going to die?’” Hayashi said.

She fled through a backdoor and into the yard. She hoisted herself over a fence and made her way to Front Street, the town’s main commercial boulevard, where she encountered her friend Phil Bailey. 

Embers rained down all around them against a pitch-black sky. Bailey kept patting her arms and shoulders, trying to keep the embers from igniting her clothes. “It looked like a bunch of meteors flying by, like billions of them, spinning,” she recalled. 

The safest place for them to go, Bailey said, was right in front of them: the Pacific Ocean.

They entered the water fully clothed, and the pair stuck together and stayed close to shore. There they waited, being battered by the waves and high tide, rocks pummeling their feet, for what she guessed was six or seven hours. For much of the time, they had to dodge burning palm fronds and tree branches falling into the water. 

Hayashi said the water around them grew slick with ashy muck and diesel fuel from downed boats. Occasionally, she and Bailey would stand up to warm their bodies in the hot, blowing air of the fires. They would then duck back in the water to reduce the risk of being burned. At one point, Hayashi swatted away a piece of smoldering debris as big as a softball.

For the duration, Hayashi squinted and stared at the inferno. “I’d see swaying palm trees, and it gets brighter, brighter, brighter red,” she recalled. “I can’t stop seeing it right now, I looked at it for so long.”

The town burned all night.

Before daybreak, exhausted and afraid of drowning, Hayashi dragged herself onto the rocky shore. She guided Bailey, who was having trouble seeing. When the sun rose, she realized the extent of his burns.

“His skin was all gone, from his shoulder to his hand,” she said. 

She started looking for help, walking shoeless through what looked to her like a war zone. Little remained but rubble and ash. Her street was unrecognizable. 

A couple of hours later, she finally flagged down a group of firefighters, who got them an ambulance to take them to the hospital. She got bandages and oxygen and took a shower. She had been covered in soot, and the nurses said they were surprised to see her auburn-red hair once she washed off.

“I was stupid to stay that long,” said Hayashi, who was still wondering if her cats made it out. “I can’t believe I’m alive.”

Bailey couldn’t be reached for comment.

One of Hayashi’s neighbors, Kevin Campbell, said his community is used to violent storms. When winds kicked up Tuesday afternoon, a dozen or so neighbors and friends gathered at his home. The wildfire smoke still seemed far away, so he started up a generator, made some burgers and put on the movie “Shrek.” 

“I was thinking we’re going to stick it out together like we have in the past,” said Campbell, 37, who worked for a local boat-tour business. “Normally there’d be like a hurricane siren or something. None of that stuff went off.”

Around 5:30 p.m., he rode his scooter up to the highway to get a better look, knowing the winds tend to change around sunset. His stomach turned when he saw how quickly the blaze was moving. 

“The wind was just so powerful and so fast that the buildings and the trees were just like match heads next to each other,” he said. “There was no outrunning it.”

He rushed back to his fiancée, Tasha Anderson, eight months pregnant with their first child. Friends argued that it was pointless for them to leave, since the only road out of town was jammed with cars. Not long before, county officials had issued an advisory, saying those on the west side of the island should shelter in place unless ordered to evacuate.

Panicked, Campbell grabbed his wallet, his passport and a few other possessions along with his cat and dog. He threw the couple’s newly installed child car seat aside to make room for a friend, and the three of them drove out through an emergency gate in their neighborhood and onto a back road, making their way to the highway. Dark smoke chased them out.

The next day, Campbell found satellite images online that showed his entire neighborhood had been leveled, including the house he and Tasha rented. They had recently painted and organized a nursery for the baby, complete with murals of a swinging monkey and neat rows of diapers, burp cloths and pacifiers.

He wasn’t sure whether his landlords would be able to rebuild, and if they did, how he would make a living to support his family. Both vessels he had used for work were destroyed. 

The couple have been hopping from one property to another, crashing at places owned by friends of friends or acquaintances. They don’t know where they would be bringing their baby boy, whom they plan to name Kade, but they do know they want to raise him in Lahaina.

“We just get waves of sadness, thinking about what we thought was going to be our life,” Campbell said.

At around 10 p.m. Tuesday, Travis Miller, a photographer who lived on the north side of town, decided his only way out was by going through the smoke. He had grabbed a few possessions, his dog, Brutus, and a couple of friends on his way out of town. But his Prius’s gas tank was empty, and no service stations were open.

He started to drive, and the car was puttering along—more stop than go in the midst of the gridlock. He worried they would run out of gas before they could get to safer ground. In the distance, they could see little else but headlights of other fleeing vehicles and the orange glow of flames against the night sky.

Stalled for what felt like an eternity, Miller struck up a conversation with another motorist, who told him about a canister of gas he kept on his back porch. The man gave him his address and said if he was willing to risk it, the fuel was his.

Miller exited the car, put on a headlamp and ran.

When Miller arrived at the home, he tried to keep steady as he poured a few gallons of the stash into a more portable container. He could see the backlit palm trees swaying against a glowing sky. Explosions were loud and close, he said, maybe one or two blocks away. The wind-swept flames roared and hissed around him.

“Stealing gasoline from a fire,” he muttered to himself while he recorded his exit. “Genius.”

By the time he made it back to his car and his friends, traffic had lightened. They drove north, arriving at a friend’s house at around 10:30 p.m.

The next day, Miller’s landlord sent him a photo of their home, now merely a stone wall surrounded by ashes. Singed palms and bare tree trunks punctuated the landscape like giant, morbid candles.

Write to Christine Mai-Duc at [email protected]