Just a whiff of smoke is enough to transport Sue Brimeyer back to that day. To the acrid smell of charred homes as flaming debris rained down and fire raged through Lahaina. And to the earthshaking feeling her very heritage was going up in smoke.
“It was obvious people wouldn’t survive – you can’t outrun a fire like that,” she said, recounting her escape from the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, which swept through the Hawaiian island of Maui on Aug. 8, 2023.
The 77-year-old grandmother survived a harrowing night in the firestorm, her 10-year-old grandson in tow. But it scarred her in ways that make reliving it particularly painful, even now.
What the fire wrought marks a colossal loss for Hawaii, for Hawaiian families like Brimeyer’s, and the world. The wildfire devastated a people and a way of life already under threat. From rampant overdevelopment to soaring housing costs and from water shortages to the climate change that fueled the fire that day, Maui has long wrestled with a laundry list of crises.
The inferno took 102 lives, the most recent in March when 68-year-old Claudette Heermance succumbed to her injuries, and brought an international spotlight to the island’s struggles. A year later, there are signs of renewal emerging from the rubble, hints of Old Hawaii being reborn. But for Brimeyer, the memories are hard to get past.
She spent the night amid the embers, jumping from house to house to dodge the flames. When she found a safe spot for her grandson to rest, she assessed the remains of her burned-out neighborhood, where three generations of her family lived. Her own home, gone; her daughter’s home – built on land granted to the family in the Great Māhele led by King Kamehameha III before the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy – torched.
“There was nothing left of it.”
A scramble to escape the Lahaina inferno
There was smoke in the sky earlier that day from a distant fire on the other side of town, but Brimeyer had assumed it was under control. Then it showed up on her doorstep.
“There was no warning, no sirens or anything like that,” she said. “I saw embers coming down outside the kitchen window. I went outside and I saw that the house across the street was on fire.”
That’s when survival mode kicked in.
A few blocks away, Brimeyer’s daughter, Kehaunani Kaʻauwai, was trapped as thick, black, smoke raced toward her home.
“It was a wall of smoke about six stories high,” she…
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