Here’s what to know about the Maui wildfires. (2024)

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Here’s what to know about the Maui wildfires.

More than 2,100 people were in evacuation shelters, Richard T. Bissen, Jr., the mayor of Maui County, said at a news conference on Wednesday morning.

On the western side of Maui, some residents fled by swimming into the ocean, where they were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard, Maui County officials said. Others escaped by car, driving past flames in the shadow of the West Maui Mountains.

Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Lahaina, a West Maui coastal town of 12,000 that was once the royal capital of Hawaii and home to a famed banyan tree, is “almost totally burnt to the ground.”

Roads into West Maui were closed to everyone except emergency workers on Wednesday morning, officials said, effectively cutting off access from outside to some of Hawaii’s best-known resorts.

Here’s what else to know:

• Hawaii is better known for its tropical conditions and bouts of intense rain, but the islands have become increasingly prone to wildfire damage because of climate change. Rainfall has been dropping in the state for decades, drying out the lush landscape.

• Dangerous wildfire weather conditions, with low humidity and strong winds, are expected to continue through the afternoon hours in Hawaii. But as Hurricane Dora moves farther away, the winds should steadily ease and return to a typical moderate to breezy weather pattern Thursday into early next week, the Weather Service said.

• The Weather Service said that a red flag warning — indicating that critical fire conditions were occurring or would be shortly — was in effect for some areas of the Hawaiian islands.

• Several parts of Maui were under evacuation orders. Two evacuation shelters closed because of the encroaching fire, and people inside were sent to new locations, Maui County officials said. The 911 emergency call service in West Maui was down early on Wednesday, and people were told to call the local police department directly instead, Maui County officials said.

• The fires in Hawaii and Maui Counties had already burned hundreds of acres by Tuesday, Sylvia Luke, Hawaii’s acting governor, said in an emergency proclamation that activated the National Guard.

• In Maui County, there were more 12,600 electricity customers without power on Wednesday, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.

The devastated town of Lahaina is a trove of history.

On Wednesday, that legacy and more appeared to be in ashes, consumed by the hurricane-driven wildfires that have devastated the island of Maui, razing much of the historic district of Lahaina, once Hawaii’s royal capital, in a matter of hours.

“We had no preparation, no warning, nothing,” said Theo Morrison, the executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, which manages more than a dozen historic sites in the town. Ms. Morrison, a longtime resident and the mother of a firefighter who has kept her apprised of the damage, spoke from an East Coast airport on Wednesday. She left Maui a day before the fires had broken out on Tuesday night, bound for Europe on family business, she said.

“I never would have left if I’d known what was coming,” she said. Whipped by wind, the fires blew through nearby grasslands and roared through the historic tourist town.

The Baldwin Home, which houses the foundation’s main office, appears from news photos to have burned to the ground after its roof caught fire, she said.

The home contained the wooden rocking chairs that the family of the Rev. Dwight Baldwin had shipped all the way from their East Coast home in the 1830s, their son’s antique shell collection and the medical instruments that Dr. Baldwin, a missionary and physician, had used to vaccinate much of Maui against smallpox.

“The Old Lahaina Courthouse roof is entirely gone,” Ms. Morrison said. “And so is the beautiful heritage museum we had there. The top floor had ancient Hawaiian things, things from the monarchy and plantation and whaling periods, objects from all of Lahaina’s eras.”

Most of the museum’s important documents have been preserved online, she said, and she is hoping that the island will restore at least some of the buildings when the fire abates.

But she is preparing herself for some major losses. “This is the worst destructive thing that has happened in this town’s entire history,” she said.

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While their return flight to California had been booked for Sunday, the Brien family decided to cut their trip short and head home on Wednesday. They can still see smoke from the airport windows. Flights from Maui have been delayed all day: their 3 p.m. flight was now scheduled for 9:30 p.m. “We feel very lucky to be able to leave, but also it’s our obligation to, so we’re not consuming resources for the people living there who need it.”

At least 10 buses will take visitors in West Maui from the Sheraton Maui Resort in Kaʻanapali straight to Kahului Airport, according to the Maui County district office.

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The fire had burned over 600 acres when the request was made Tuesday. The declaration enables the state to be reimbursed by the federal government for up to 75% of firefighting cost, Hawaii’s emergency management agency said.

“Some people have just lost everything,” he said. “One client just closed on July 31 — she never even got to move in before it burned down.”

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She escaped the fire, but worries about the dead.

By the time she woke up around 8 a.m., the power was out; by the afternoon, Ms. Zimmerman could smell smoke. That’s when she and her partner decided it was time to go.

It took 10 minutes for them to grab their clothes, a bicycle and their dog. In that time, the air had become so thick with smoke that they didn’t know which way to drive to get away from the approaching wildfire.

“It was black,” Ms. Zimmerman, a photographer, said. “It happened so fast.”

On Wednesday, she and her partner, both 34, were sheltering at a friend’s home in Waikapu, about 20 miles east of Lahaina. They wandered in a daze through Costco, seeking toilet paper, water and other essentials. Aerial footage of their neighborhood suggested that their home was very likely gone.

“It just, it flattened it — it flattened us,” Ms. Zimmerman said. “We just don’t know how many people are dead.”

The Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort said on its Instagram account that it remained “committed to caring for our guests, colleagues and our Maui community during this difficult time,” adding that government officials were strongly discouraging non-essential travel to Maui.

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Here’s why Hawaii, too, is battling wildfires.

While the fires showcase several challenges that Hawaii shares with states in the West, including the spread of highly flammable invasive grasses, the authorities in Hawaii also cite other factors that make Hawaii unique. Those include big shifts in rainfall patterns over the archipelago and tourism’s eclipse of large-scale farming in Hawaii’s economy, allowing nonnative plants to overtake idled sugar cane and pineapple plantations.

Firefighters also have to operate across exceptionally diverse climate zones, extinguishing blazes everywhere from thick tropical forests to semiarid scrublands to chilly elevations where frost can be seen on trees along the slopes of the Mauna Kea volcano.

The area burned annually in Hawaii by wildfires has been climbing fourfold from previous decades, according to Clay Trauernicht, a tropical fire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Mr. Trauernicht, who analyzed more than a century’s worth of wildfire records, also found that the area burned each year in Hawaii from 2005 to 2011 was about 0.48 percent of the state’s total land area, roughly the same as in fire-prone western states on the mainland during the same period.

Greater rainfall during the state’s winter, or wet season, may be just as responsible for Hawaii’s growing wildfires. A lot of rain helps grass species such as guinea and kikuyu thrive. Both were introduced to the state decades ago, as both forage for livestock and to curb erosion. Some grow up to six inches in a day and provide fuel for fires to quickly leap out of control.

“The biomass out there is off the charts,” Mr. Trauernicht said. “When you have a huge wet winter, that will influence fire risk to a greater degree than actual drought conditions.”

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Planning to visit Hawaii? Here’s what you need to know.

On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, travelers have written that major hotels near the wildfires in Maui have closed and been evacuated. Several popular resorts, including Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa at Ka’anapali Beach and the Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club, did not have power on Wednesday.

Most travel insurance policies have trip cancellation coverage for natural disasters, but it’s important to read the fine print of your policy to see if wildfires are covered under the reasons for trip cancellation or interruption.

The wildfires have upended tourism, leaving travelers with many more questions about what to do.

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Climate change has intensified the threat of wildfires in Hawaii.

“The fire hazards have gone way up,” said Josh Stanbro, who previously served as chief resilience officer for Honolulu.

He said the underlying dry conditions were exacerbated by unusually strong winds from Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm that was moving across the Pacific hundreds of miles to the south.

“This is part of a long-term trend that is directly related to climate changes,” Mr. Stanbro said.

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