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MAALAEA, Hawaii —

After an exhausting day battling to protect his family’s home in Lahaina against hurricane-like wind — it felled trees, tore apart roofs and knocked down power lines — Bryce Baraoidan figured things couldn’t get much worse.

Then he saw dense black smoke blowing his way.

Like so many others in Lahaina, who had lost electricity and internet service hours before the flames arrived Tuesday, Baraoidan and his family were completely cut off from 21st century information sources.

They had nothing to rely on but their five senses and what he called the “coconut telegraph”: friends and neighbors running up and down the street warning, “the fire’s a mile away,” “half a mile,” “a few blocks.”

When they finally made the decision to flee, they drove straight into the nightmare of what surely will go down as the deadliest traffic jam in U.S. history.
A woman and a man sit on the tailgate of a pickup truck
Bre Cummins, left, and Bryce Baraoidan recount their horrific experiences of surviving the raging wildfire that raced through Lahaina.

There’s only one main road running along the coast of West Maui. To the north, it winds through steep mountains and narrows to one lane around harrowing turns perched high above the ocean. Almost nobody running for their life would choose that.

So the road south quickly became an inferno. And a graveyard.

Chaos and terror: Failed communications left Maui residents trapped by fire. Scores died in their cars. There are stories of a couple found in each other’s arms. The bones of one man were found in the back seat on top of the bones of his beloved golden retriever.

“It was bumper to bumper, and I felt like the fire was moving a lot faster than the traffic,” Baraoidan said. “I can’t even imagine all the cars behind me that were stuck. There were so many cars behind me.”

Stories of panicked people jumping into the ocean in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves are all too familiar by now, the images will probably be among the most enduring of what has become the nation’s deadliest wildfire in the last century.

“All of those people were in the traffic jam,” Baraoidan said. “All of those people jumping in the water, they were escaping their cars, escaping the heat.”

His own trip out began in haste. He and his father were originally determined to stay and fight, go down “like captains on a sinking ship,” he said, until they heard a nearby gas station explode.

... It was obviously time to run.

Baraoidan grabbed his favorite jacket, a memory disk with cherished photos, and his pitbull, Dash.

... In his light brown Toyota Tacoma, with his usually fearless dog turned backward in the passenger’s seat — ears down, tail between his legs and face buried in the upholstery – Baraoidan tried to steer them both to safety.


For a moment, they cruised in silence and Baraoidan felt confident they were going to be OK. “Me and my dog were just chilling,” he said. “I wasn’t too panicked, I wasn’t really shook.”

But that screaming wind, which had awakened him at 10 a.m. by slamming a piece of wood into his bedroom window and served as a relentless soundtrack all day long, soon blasted him out of his moment of peace.

Before he even reached the main road, wind-driven branches started crashing into his truck with astonishing force. “I thought my windshield was going to break at one point,” Baraoidan said.

Then he hit the traffic jam.

In another brief video he shot from the driver’s seat, brake lights block his way forward and an enormous column of rising black smoke fills his rearview mirror.

But the oncoming lane, northbound, is clear. Asked why he didn’t swing out into that lane and stomp on the accelerator, the soft-spoken Baraoidan seemed surprised.

“I feel like it was just so chaotic,” he said. If he had caused an accident, making things worse for his neighbors, “I could never forgive myself.”

And, so, like everybody else, he sat there, sandwiched between the towering West Maui mountains on his left and the sparkling Pacific Ocean on his right.

“I just did my best to, like, stay put and stay calm,” Baraoidan said.

As is so often the case in natural disasters, the survivors can’t really explain how or why luck spared them and not others. But luck was on Baradoidan’s side. The flames didn’t reach his vehicle. His whole family survived

.... But one indelible image he might spend the rest of his life trying to forget is of the police pulling a body out of a house and loading it into a van. “They weren’t using a body bag, they were using trash bags, because I think they don’t have any more body bags.”

As of Saturday evening, the official death toll had reached 89.

“It’s going to go way, way higher” than that, Baraoidan said.

By Sunday, the number was up to 93. So far, few have been identified. Many more remain unaccounted for — perhaps as many as 1,000 people, according to some accounts.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup.

$5 Billion to build a wall? We can't afford that! That's insane!

$200 Billion to Ukraine? No problem!

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Radical Global Climate Warming Change Eco Terrorists and libtards rack up another 1,000 deaths.

Hawaii Electric knew they needed to improve the insulation on Power Lines ( which started this fire), back in 2019.

But then they were forced to reallocate all of their funds to the "100% Renewable Energy" Laws and goals.

Silly humans were using up too much O2 anyhow.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Silly humans were using up too much O2 anyhow.

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Cenas apocalípticas na Colúmbia Britânica em meio a uma batalha desesperada para salvar West Kelowna.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
The title of this thread has changed over the weekend, now that the Hawaii wildfire has spread across the border into Canada. Of course, both places ruled by Ultra-Libtards.

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