LAHAINA, Hawaii – “At 3 a.m., I started to smell smoke. My partner was telling me that there was a fire that was in the town right next to us.”
On Aug. 8, Brianna Simon woke up to the smell of a wildfire growing near her home in upcountry Maui. It wasn’t the first time Simon – a Lana’i native who moved to Spokane with her family in 2007 – had seen parts of Maui on fire.
She attempted to go back to bed, knowing she might have a boat trip scheduled for her job, working as a naturalist for the Pacific Whale Foundation. She went to work with a “fire go bag” in case the fire reached her house and she couldn’t return. It wasn’t until later in the afternoon she heard of the damage occurring on the other side of the island.
“We had no idea what was happening in Lahaina until sunset, nightfall,” Simon said. “We knew that everything was nearly gone.”
It wasn’t until the next morning, when seeing if they could rescue their boats that Simon saw the damage with her own eyes.
“We got there, Lahaina was still on fire. There were apartment buildings that were still engulfed in flames, there were still tornadoes of black smoke that was just piling up towards Mala,” Simon said. “We were wearing respirators, we got onto our boat, and we pulled up to every boat, looking for people that were hanging onto mooring balls. We were just advised to help out with the Coast Guard efforts in search-and-rescue. So that was a lot of what my Wednesday looked like.”
By the evening of Aug. 9, the focus shifted towards getting help to those trapped and to those who lost everything.
“People couldn’t go out, people couldn’t go in, everything’s on fire,” Simon recalled.
They loaded up their vessels with goods to help people on the other side. As of publication, Simon says the crew from Pacific Whale Foundation is approaching their 10th trip.
“We’re not seeing anything from the government as far as getting supplies to (people in Lahaina),” Simon said. “Everything right now is just a community effort.”
To help out the community effort, Simon recommends the Pacific Whale Foundation Ohana Relief Fund, the Hawaii Community Foundation or the Maui United Way.
Simon, who has strong family ties to Lahaina, says the rebuilding process will be a long one.
“It’s gonna be a long time before we can even clean up. They’re still finding bodies, unfortunately, all over the place,” she said. “There’s still thousands of people displaced. There’s 1,000 people still missing. So it’s going to be a continuous effort, and I don’t want to lose the momentum we have.”
Simon has also set up a GoFundMe to help rebuild their family home in Lahaina, The Asato Ohana, which her great-grandmother got 70 years ago. Simon’s relatives who have checked the area say the only thing left standing is the mailbox.
