Couple with local ties lose home on Maui

On the morning of August 8 at 4 a.m. in Lahaina, a historic town in Maui, Hawaii, the power went out at Adrienne Mitchell's house on Front Street. She and her fiancé, Alex Leach, thought little of it, as the power would occasionally go out on the small resort town on the northwest side of the island. Unbeknownst to them at the time, by the end of the day their home and nearly everything they owned would be destroyed by wildfires. For Mitchell, a Maine native who grew up summering on Boyden's Lake in Perry, it was a singular experience.
It happened fast. The winds were "very high" that morning, gusting up to 70 mph, Mitchell recalls. "We looked outside and there were three power lines down."
Once daylight arrived, Mitchell aimed to get her bearings. "I went outside, and a tree blew down right next to my neighbor's house. I said to myself that I wouldn't be leaving that day." She called out from work.
As a contractor, Leach was in demand to repair damage from the winds. He spent the morning working on blown out skylights around the community. At 2 p.m. he came home, and the couple set out to the gas station, where they bought the last two bags of ice. "Our thought at the time was just saving our food," Mitchell says, referring to the cold goods in their powerless refrigerator and freezer.
"Around 4 p.m. we started seeing smoke out our window," Mitchell recalls. They weren't that worried at first, as the wind was blowing 60 mph away from the house. "We were keeping an eye on it. We got our clothing together, our passports."
What the pair didn't know was that a small fire sparked by electrical wires on the opposite side of town had kicked up again in the high winds. At 4:45 p.m. the fire department was dispatched to the site, and people started fleeing the city.
There was "serious traffic" outside the house, which would have made it difficult to leave anyway, Mitchell says. "There were cop cars too, but none of them had their lights on." That weighed into their decision to stay as long as they did. "They weren't telling us to evacuate. We thought it was still on the mountain."
The town's all hazard sirens were completely silent, and that factored into the couple's decision to stay, too. "If there was a real emergency, they would have sounded," they reasoned.
The 80 sirens weren't sounded, Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator Herman Andaya said later, because they were typically used for tsunamis and would have sent residents fleeing inland to the fire. He would resign nine days later.
Finally, around 7:30 p.m. Mitchell and Leach made the decision to leave. "We were the last people to leave our neighborhood. We could see the orange glow, and we were like, 'We've got to go.'"
The couple took everything they could with them, including their cat. They got onto the highway and watched the flames from a distance for a time.
They found out later that, by the time they'd left, one of their friends who lived down the street from them had been in the ocean for an hour with a towel over her face trying to breath in the hot smokey air. "She'd gotten stuck," Mitchell says. Their friend was OK, but many were not.
After getting a few hours of sleep in their car, Mitchell and Leach woke up around 6 a.m. and tried to head back in to Lahaina. The police had the road blocked, and they were told to seek shelter on the other side of the island. They did so for the next day or so, and then tried to come back to see what had happened to their home.
Two days after the fire, the couple saw aerial footage videos posted online by a helicopter touring company. "Looking at that, we were able to see our house was just white ash."
Three days later, the duo joined other residents in parking along the connecting road and walking in to Lahaina to see what they could find. They walked to the property next to theirs but couldn't get onto their lot due to the downed power lines.
"There was barely anything left," Mitchell recalls. They'd converted a guest room into a workout room that contained a solid steel squat rack. "It was just all bent and twisted." Little else could be seen. "There was the shell of my car."
Over a month later, Lahaina -- which was 80% destroyed by the wildfire, one of the deadliest in American history with an estimated 97 lives lost -- remains tightly restricted. "We haven't been able to pick through the ashes," Mitchell says.

Couple now regrouping
Mitchell and Leach consider themselves among the lucky ones, having kept their lives and the clothes on their backs, but they have a long way to go before they are stable. They were provided with temporary shelter in housing that is usually rented out as an Airbnb; they can stay there through November. Their cat could not stay with them but was rehomed with a former owner.
Knowing their accommodations are finite in duration, "it feels like an old-fashioned timer, ticking in the background," Mitchell says. "We need to find somewhere."
The couple plan to stay in Hawaii, which has been their home for 14 years. Mitchell, the daughter of David Mitchell -- formerly of Eastport -- was raised in Maine, spending her summers in Eastport and nearby communities. In high school, she travelled to Hawaii to work at a jet ski rental company owned by her aunt and uncle. After college, she made the decision to move there full time. It's been a good fit, but finding out what their next step will be has been a challenge. "We're still trying to wrap our heads around it," Mitchell says.
Mitchell and Leach have started a GoFundMe to help raise funds to restart their lives after the fire. To contribute, visit www.gofundme.com/f/help alex adrienne rebuild after lahaina fire.