Jarom Ayoso is eager to get back to the property where he and his wife rented a house for nearly 15 years. His son was able to get in the day after the fire and took video of the destruction. When high winds on Maui brought down power poles, the electrical wires were bare, uninsulated metal that could spark on contact with the dry grass below.
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But there, in the midst of the destruction, was the seemingly untouched red roof of Millikin’s home. This home, overseen by a Native Hawaiian carpenter who headed most construction projects for the Pioneer Mill Co., was built from California redwood, Millikin said, which has some natural fire-resistant properties. But so was the historic house next door, which burned completely in the Aug. 8 fire. Millikin and his wife bought the property in 2021, working with the county on a historic preservation plan before embarking on a nearly two-year renovation project. They did much of the work themselves, along with a local carpenter and the help of neighbors. After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places.
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Still, Callies said, given Lahaina’s proximity to the ocean, it’s conceivable someone would go to court to limit or stop rebuilding, even if property owners wanted to go back home. Pattie Tamura, whose family owns the house believes it survived due to its concrete walls. In an interaction with the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, Tamura shared that the house was built by her grandfather using cement to help it withstand bugs and dry rot. For hours until the morning, they alternated between fits of tears and restless sleep while parked on the roadside, stuck in traffic. Unable to get into Lahaina, Alicia Kalepa sent her 17-year-old twin daughters by boat to check on the family's property. It wasn’t until the girls returned by driving a winding and narrow road north of Lahaina that she got confirmation that the vast majority of Leiali’i was unscathed.
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Still, Evans said the state wouldn’t likely impose a retreat from the coastal zone if the community didn’t want it. Green said the decision on how fast to rebuild homes in the burn zone lies with Maui County. But he said the state wants to remove state-level impediments to rebuilding homes destroyed by the fire. Second, Evans said, a new county Recovery Permitting Center will hasten the process for obtaining building permits, the main land use entitlement needed now that the coastal zone law is suspended. Authorities have divided the burned area into 17 zones and dozens of sub-zones. Residents or property owners of the first area to be cleared for reentry — known as Zone 1C, along Kaniau Road in the north part of Lahaina — will be allowed to return Monday and Tuesday on supervised visits.
Workers with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands erected a temporary black screen to protect Kalepa's house from any potentially toxic dust that might blow over from a house that burned just outside the homestead’s boundary. While Tamura admitted that her family’s home always appeared out of place given that houses in the city were primarily made of wood, she says her family is now thankful for her grandfather’s foresight. Along with the red house and church, aerial footage from local KITV shows that a few more buildings were spared, with the houses standing amid the eerie hellscape. A single home on a block bordering the ocean in West Maui miraculously survived the wildfires that destroyed the resort city of Lahaina.
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He, his wife, their four children and their French bulldog piled into his Honda Civic to escape the flames. As they drove off, he said, he imagined the temple as protecting their home. Hironaka reflected on how his feelings toward reentry have changed as the weeks have passed — and as the magnitude of losing the temple, along with his home on the temple grounds, has set in. Melody Lukela-Singh plans to take a hazardous-materials course before visiting the Front Street property where the house she lived in with about a dozen relatives once stood. However, Tamura is not very eager to visit her cousin's family in Lahaina to see the house. It's not clear how much the efforts of Saribay and others contributed to the neighborhood's survival.
But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted. Even the most well-prepared homes can still catch fire from neighboring structures, experts say. They first heard about the fire from a man who lives in Lahainaluna, a neighborhood about three and a half miles away, and uses two rooms beneath the house as a workshop. Some have also speculated the home was saved by sprinklers, Atwater Millikin said.
"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said. In this case, a regular asphalt composition roof would likely have done just as good a job as metal, as most have a Class A fire resistance rating, she added. The couple, who was visiting family in Massachusetts when the fire started, had recently renovated the home, but not with the express goal of hardening it against flames. Some people might want to sift through the ashes for any belongings or mementos that survived, but officials are urging them not to for fear of stirring up toxic dust that could endanger them or their neighbors downwind. Other residents said they didn’t have immediate plans to return to the properties because jobs or the hassle of obtaining a pass to reenter the burn zone would keep them away. Although Native Hawaiians including Saribay live throughout Lahaina, the Villages of Leiali’i is the only community in West Maui exclusively for Hawaiians.
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Atwater Millikin also said she and her husband replaced the asphalt roof with a metal one. "It's a 100% wood house, so it's not like we fireproofed it or anything," Atwater Millikin told the outlet. They hadn't made any efforts to fireproof their home, they told local news outlets. The 100-year-old wood house on Front Street is still standing as most of the town of Lahaina has been destroyed. Unable to get into Lahaina, Alicia Kalepa sent her 17-year-old twin daughters by boat to check on the family’s property.
Notably, the wildfires in Lahaina were aggravated by strong winds caused by Hurricane Dora. The tragedy is reportedly the worst wildfire disaster in the United States in more than a century. US President Joe Biden had declared the wildfires in Hawaii as a "major disaster". Saribay, who livestreamed his actions for hours on Instagram, focused on flames taking down a house just outside Leiali’i. His group connected garden hoses and he broke down a homesteader's fence to keep the fire out of the community, he said. The sight was similar to the Maria Lanakila Catholic Church, a historic building in Lahaina that also appeared unscathed by the fires that killed at least 106 people.
The current homeowner told Civil Beat that he and his wife bought the property in 2021 and worked with the county on a historic preservation plan before starting a renovation project. Kocher worries that surreal images such as the one of the Lahaina house can lend themselves to conspiracy theories if people don’t understand the science behind how fires spread. She recalled when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speculated that the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people when it destroyed the California town of Paradise, might have been started by a laser beam in space. “If shrubs and bushes, especially flammable ones, are right up next to the house and embers catch them on fire, the heat can burst the window and it goes right into the home from there,” she said. Its past installments have found attendees stealthing their way through a Victorian home and embarking on a Blade Runner-esque bounty hunt. You can also float between rooms of the mansion, and even get a peek behind the scenes with a VIP ticket.
Instead, he and his wife are using it as a symbol of hope amid the destruction that has killed more than 100 and left more than 800 missing. Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes. "They're part of our ohana," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."
When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric. The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to. By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service, which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite. Atwater Millikin is an artist who makes paintings of New England coastal scenery, and her husband is a recently retired portfolio manager.
Records show he and his wife Dora Millikin bought the house in May 2021 after what he told the Civil Beat was a long time of bicycling by. Maui county records show the house at its current location at 271 Front Street is 81 years old, and sits on more than 11,000 square feet of property at 271 Front Street in the city that was once the long-standing capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the morning, a friend called and sent them a picture from a helicopter flyover of Lahaina.
A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks. The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen. "Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR.
In the immediate home ignition zone – the area up to 5 feet around your home – using crushed stone or gravel is a vital part of reducing the risk of the structure being set ablaze. According to the National Fire Protection Association, reducing flammable vegetation in this area is crucial. The group also says metal roofing, removing dead debris or flammable materials from porch areas and using fire-resistant house siding can help homes withstand fires.
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