Maui resident’s family home of 40 years is destroyed by wildfires
A resident from Lahaina has said her home and family business are “all gone” after the resort town on the Hawaiian island of Maui was ravaged by wildfires.
Ashley Probst, 28 and who works as an editor for Maui Times, told i she had seen satellite images showing the home where her father had lived for 46 years and where she grew up had been destroyed by the wildfires, which have been ripping through Maui since Tuesday.
Ms Probst, 28, who was safe on the other side of the island when the fires erupted, said she could not get through to her parents “all day”.
A neighbour managed to let her know that they were “waiting it out”, she said, before she started hearing about people being evacuated from the area because it was “really bad”.
She said: “I was getting snippets of ‘this building is gone, the gas station blew up, people are saying this is gone’… I wasn’t able to confirm anything for a long time and I really didn’t want to believe that the things I was hearing were true.”
The death toll from the wildfires in Maui has hit 55, a figure which is expected to rise.
The governor, Josh Green, said the inferno that reduced much of Lahaina to smoldering ruins was the worst natural disaster in the state’s history, making thousands of people homeless and levelling as many as 1,000 buildings.
Ms Probst, whose parents are now with her after being able to evacuate and get in touch, said she feared for her relatives and others in the north of Maui who were told to stay put because they “were not in the immediate line of the fire”.
She said she saw worrying social media posts of people “now isolated” with only outward traffic reportedly being allowed. While some had managed to get into the area to deliver aid, and residents “should be physically safe”, Ms Probst said “they are running out of supplies, they need food and water and gas and medication”.
She said: “There were people who have been out of power, elderly people who live alone, people who may have medication that needs to be refrigerated that they can’t take but they need.”
“I also know there were people who were trying to evacuate but they couldn’t because they didn’t have gas,” she added.
The fire in Lahaina was one of three major wildfires on Maui, all of them still burning, that were fuelled by dry conditions, a buildup of fuel and 60 mph (100 kph) gusts of wind.
Mr Green warned that the death toll was likely to rise as search and rescue operations continued. Cadaver-sniffing dogs were brought in on Friday to assist the search for the remains of people killed by the inferno, said Maui County mayor, Richard Bissen Jr.
Speaking of how satellite images showed her family home had “gone”, Ms Probst said: “It’s devastating, my dad lived in that house for 46 years, his family built it from the ground up and we are just hoping we’ll be able to rebuild on that same plot of land.”
Ms Probst, who also runs a Tarot card reading business, said that while she was grateful to have been far from the fire, a part of her wished she could have gone back into her childhood room to take everything of value.
“I’ve lost all of my sentimental items, my childhood stuffed animals, letters that my dad wrote to me from before I was born, all of my important documents are also presumably gone.
“I am really hopeful that when we go through the rubble something will have survived although that is probably very unlikely.”
Additional reporting by agencies
