Tait Maxfeldt stood on the two-story roof, watching Lahaina burn. Then, when the strong Hurricane Dora-spawned 60-to-80 mph winds shifted, ” he realized – “we were next.”
Sirens shrieked in the streets below as Lahaina police, overwhelmed by the intensity and speed of the fireball, ordered an all-point evacuation.
Maxfeldt, a Class of 1999 Boerne High graduate, heeded the call and got out with little more than a backpack of belongings.
The body count will continue, Maxfeldt said, until hundreds of still-missing people are accounted
for after the raging wildfires swept through the historic, tourist attraction city of 12,000 on the western tip of the Hawaii island of Maui that he had called home for the past 22 years.
The fire began Aug. 8 after Hurricane Dora passed by the island, its 80 and 90 mph winds causing damage, knocking down power lines and leaving portions of the island without power.
Maxfeldt, who formerly worked for Lahaina Printsellers on Front Street, was working construction at the time. Lahaina Printsellers was just a block from Fleetwood’s On Front Street, a restaurant and bar owned by Mick Fleetwood, of Fleetwood Mac.
“I got a call about 7:30 a.m. (Aug. 8) that power lines were down, so I went to check on the work site,” he said of The Old Chart House, a historic 10,000-square-foot restaurant – a hangout for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley when they were filming 1961’s “Blue Hawaii” -- restoration project.
The company he worked for had just wrapped up work on a gargantuan nine-bedroom palatial home in Lahaina before landing the Chart House job.
“We worked a little bit. I locked up about noon, and went back to the house,” said Maxfeldt, who has lived in the city for the past 22 years. The smoke and the smell heightened his awareness that something was indeed wrong.
He lived on the second floor of a home less than a mile from town.
“It was about 3 or 4 o’clock,” he said. “We stood up on the roof, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” Thick, choking, dense, black smoke hovered over the city, obscuring the flames below.
“The smoke was just billowing, rolling. Once we saw the fire, when the wind blowing 60 miles an hour, cleared, it was an astounding, horrible sight, really.”
Then, the winds shifted. “I stood on the roof, watching, and taking pictures. I had my girlfriend, Jaime, pack her important stuff. ‘Leave anything you don’t need,” he recalled telling her.
Then the police evacuation began.
The wind got up to 60-80 mph, shingles were starting to blow off the roof, and I knew we had to get out of there.”
The couple threw what few things they could grab in their car and fled.
“We started right about dusk. We hit the highway and it was a big chaotic roadblock,” he said.
As he drove out, they stopped to look back, knowing full well the blaze that had just consumed Lahaina’s Front Street properties was headed for their home. The fire eventually swept into his neighborhood about two hours after Lahaina was destroyed.
“As we left, there was a massive orange glow behind us, and massive black smoke – there must’ve been 30-to-60-foot walls of flames in every direction.”
Maxfeldt and Jaime made it to the home of some friends who operate a tourist zip-lining company a few miles away. The fires burned through the night Tuesday, he said. “On Wednesday, they were still fighting it,” he added.
Up at dawn on Thursday, Maxfeldt drove back toward town and parked at police station about a mile from where his house once stood.
“I hiked in right at sunrise. I was the only person out there. I walked through … and everything was smoldering, so it was still dangerous, and power lines were down everywhere,” he said.
“Hundreds, literally hundreds of houses were gone, as far as the eye could see,” he said. “There were dead animals, and birds, everywhere. It smelled like hell.”
Along the journey, he said he walked far enough to re-establish cellphone service.
“All my friends wanted me to go see if their homes were damaged,” he said.
‘They asked, ‘What’s there?’ ‘Nothing, there’s nothing there,’ I told them.”
They were confused and asked him, “What do you mean, nothing?”
He said he repeated, “Everything’s gone. There’s nothing left.”
Maxfeldt’s house, gone. Lahaina Printsellers. Gone. The nine-bedroom estate. Gone. Fleetwood’s restaurant, burnt out and in ashes. The Chart House. Gone.
“It looked like an atomic bomb had dropped. The sadness is (when taking the roof photos) I had no idea I was witnessing hundreds of people being burned alive,” he said.
“I was in a position to see things that nobody else was able to see. I saw the aftermath; things were still smoldering. It was much worse, by magnitude, than any of us were thinking. You can’t put it into words, really.”
Hurricane Dora’s winds downed power lines and knocked out power ahead of the fires, “which probably started the fire,” he said.
With no power, the city’s schools dismissed for the day. Maxfeldt said kids were sent home without parents being notified, with power – and phone service – knocked out.
“Schools had the students stay home or they were sent home. Parents were not contacted, so (the children) were staying with grandparents,” Maxfeldt said. “Many homes here are multi-generational, as is the custom. You’ll see three, four generations in one home.”
He fears many of the children sent home, along with their elderly relatives in the homes, were likely unable to escape.
“They are estimating that hundreds of kids and elderly may have perished. The death toll is going to go up over the next couple of days,” he said, with some city officials expecting it to triple from the 98 deaths reported early on Wednesday, Aug. 16.
A compounding factor, he said, was a wildfire that burned on the other side of the 727-square-foot island the previous week. “They had pulled several … trucks and firefighters to go battle that blaze,” he said.
“If we hadn’t had a hurricane, this would’ve been controlled,” he said. “If the power didn’t go out, they wouldn’t have sent the kids home. If there hadn’t been the fire on the other side of the island … this ended up being the perfect storm. A nightmare perfect storm.”
The Red Cross gave Tait and Jaime Rae $700 to leave the island.
“They were trying to get all the tourists off the island, something like 40,000 or 50,000,” he said.
The flight he booked was reportedly delayed – meaning it was either canceled outright, or the jet was being diverted to evacuate tourists.
“I had a friend who works there and she squeezed us into a flight that was leaving immediately,” he said, the couple having to sit in an aisle.
“When we flew out Monday (Aug. 14), we were crying. I hadn’t showered in four days. I have friends who are still stuck there. They are eating out of bread lines,” he said. “But the tears evolved into tears of joy. We were safe.”
Tait and Jaime flew into LAX and were staying at a friend’s Airbnb.
“I lost about $50,000 of artwork, four guitars, all my belongings,” he said. “Jaime lost everything.”
Tait said he is not sure about returning to Lahaina when all is said and done.
“It’s going to take a long time to recover. And then what? The attraction of the town, its people, its history, will all be gone.”
His saga will bring Jaime and him to Boerne on Tuesday, where they will hug family and friends, tell of their harrowing experience, and start to rebuild their lives.
A GoFundMe account has been set up for Tait and Jaime to start a recovery:
https://gofund.me/cfc0e407
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