When Fire Struck Lahaina, Hawai‘i’s Private Sector Rushed in to Help

In the week after the Aug. 8 fire, as Lahaina lay in ruins, questions began circulating at First Hawaiian Bank: Did the safe-deposit boxes and, more importantly, the customers’ belongings inside, survive the fire? And, if they did, could a team get them out and back to customers, some of whom had lost everything else they had?

All the bank’s employees and retirees had been located and were safe, but the Lahaina branch had burned to the ground, along with more than 2,000 other structures. Access to the town was restricted to emergency crews.

While photos of the bank showed only rock pillars and stones remaining, the fate of the vault, where the boxes were kept, was less clear.

“You could see part of the vault wall but not the door,” says Robert Harrison, the bank’s chairman, president and CEO. “We knew everything was gone at that point … but it felt possible that the vault had survived.”

While the optimists were hopeful its contents were intact as well, “the realists were more skeptical,” says Bill Weeshoff, a senior VP and marketing communications division manager at FHB. It seemed far more likely that the fire’s extreme heat would have destroyed the metal boxes and everything inside them.

Before leaving with the safe-deposit boxes, the bank’s extraction team left a lei made with foliage from the First Hawaiian Center in Honolulu at the destroyed Lahaina branch. | Photo: courtesy of First Hawaiian Bank

But the bank had to try. Danielle Yafuso, a senior VP and bank properties manager, began organizing the mission’s complicated logistics. She applied for permission to enter, hired a team of experts to help with the extraction, and organized equipment to be flown and shipped to Maui, including a special forklift designed for moving safe-deposit boxes.

All the pieces came together to enter Lahaina on Friday morning, Sept. 1, as Yafuso traveled to the site with Executive VP Cameron Nekota and four other employees. They were accompanied by the entourage of contractors, a vault specialist, moving company employees and members of the Maui County Police Department.

The scene on the ground was bleak. The shattered remnants of structures surrounded the bank site, now rubble. Federal marshals and ATF agents patrolled the area.

“It was very sobering for all of us … just the gravity of what we saw when we got there,” says Nekota.

Wearing respirators and protective clothing, the extraction team began drilling through the vault’s thick wall to create an entry point. The work continued through the heat of the afternoon, as anxiety rose. The job was far more difficult than anyone had expected.

“It was like watching the (prison escape) movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ play out over the course of the day, just because of the nature of what was going on and the fact that we were all on edge being down there,” recalls Nekota.

The O‘ahu team had planned to finish by early afternoon and fly home, but as the sun retreated, some of them booked hotel rooms, while others from the Maui-based crew agreed to return the next day, on Saturday. Two federal marshals stayed at the site overnight.

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“A Bright Spot”

At FHB’s Wailuku branch, after the “mass chaos” of the initial post-fire days, Lisa Tomihama, a senior VP and region manager for Maui, turned her attention to customer outreach.

She and her team repeatedly contacted the 350 clients with safe-deposit boxes in Lahaina, many of whom were staying in shelters and with friends and family members. They gave updates about the recovery effort and tried to alleviate customers’ worries.

But no one really knew what the outcome would be. “There was a lot of anxiety on our part too,” says Tomihama. “The million-dollar question was, what is the condition of the contents?”

On Saturday, Sept. 2, the answer finally arrived: An opening had been cut into the vault’s wall and the bank’s team had stepped inside. The optimists were right. All the safe-deposit boxes were intact, and even many keys hanging from the locks were pristine.

“I thought for sure nothing was going to survive,” says Nekota, who was one of the first to enter the vault. “At that moment – being around all that tragedy and that really apocalyptic situation — to see things preserved in that way … it was a happy emotion in a sea of chaos, and a big relief to know there was something good we could deliver to people who were dealing with so much.”

It wasn’t until after 8 p.m. on Saturday and many trips later – some in Nekota’s rented pickup truck – that the Lahaina vault’s cash, files, equipment and safe-deposit boxes were safely secured in the Wailuku branch’s vault.

On Tuesday morning, Sept. 5, the Wailuku branch opened solely for customers to retrieve their belongings. Locksmiths were on hand to help. It was an unexpectedly cathartic experience for everyone.

“One customer was crying,” says Tomihama. “She had lost her home, and the only thing remaining was the contents of her box. What she was most anxious for was her grandmother’s wedding ring, which she thought had been lost forever.”

Over several days, more people arrived, some traveling from the mainland. They retrieved passports, birth certificates, social security cards, family heirlooms and funds.

The documents, in particular, gave people “a feeling of safety and completeness,” says Harrison. “Your stress level goes down, and there’s so much stress on folks right now.”

Tomihama agrees. “The emotional impact it had on these customers of being united with their precious belongings – to give them a bright spot amidst all the tragedy – they said they’ll never forget this. And I never will either.”

First Hawaiian Bank has worked to find long-term housing for their employees who lost their homes and started an employee emergency cash fund. It set up loan deferrals and forbearances for customers, as well as waivers of banking fees.

The bank donated $250,000 to the Hawai‘i Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund and helped launch the Hawaii Banker’s Association’s Aloha for Maui, a program involving eight local banks that accept monetary donations to help the recovery. By late September, FHB had raised $540,000 through its branch network.

Empty Seats, Full Cargo Holds

In the early hours of Aug. 9, Daniel Chun, Alaska Airlines’ regional VP in Hawai‘i, got an urgent request from Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke’s office: Stop the flow of tourists into Maui. Current visitors would need to be evacuated and arrivals discouraged from coming as hotels filled up with emergency crews and displaced residents.

Alaska Airlines immediately put out notices that people should cancel and reschedule their trips, which most did. But the company maintained its eight daily flights from the continental U.S. to Maui as a way to keep evacuees flowing out and emergency relief supplies flowing in.

“Within the first 24 hours, we had teams in Seattle (Alaska Air’s headquarters) purchase pallets and pallets of supplies from Costco, everything from water and pillows to towels and diapers,” says Chun.

He estimates that 180,000 pounds of relief supplies were flown into Maui during the first three days after the Lahaina fire. To date, he says well over 200,000 pounds of supplies were transported, though “we sort of lost count after a while.”

In addition, several rescue flights to Honolulu were added – the first time Alaska has made inter-island runs. The flights brought visitors fleeing from Maui to Honolulu, then returned with goods from O‘ahu.

Some of those goods were piles of donations left at the state Capitol in an Aug. 11 relief drive organized by Maui’s three state senators, Angus McKelvey, Gilbert Keith-Agaran and Lynn DeCoite. Goods were trucked to the Honolulu Airport, where they were loaded by hand into Alaska’s small planes and flown to Kahului.

“The outpouring of support from the world has been quite overwhelming,” says Chun.

From the Maui airport, supplies from the continental U.S. and O‘ahu traveled on trucks and buses to community hubs in West and Upcountry Maui. Chun joined one caravan, and says people would take only what they needed, saying they wanted to ensure that everyone got a share.

“Our Maui team did a lot of the heavy lifting,” says Chun of the nearly 100 staff on the ground there. He says they even came to the airport on their days off to help distribute water, snacks and bedding to stranded tourists trying to get home.

But as the weeks wore on, concerns mounted about “what the economic hurt was going to be for the island overall,” says Chun. In August, visitor arrivals to Maui fell nearly 58% and spending fell 49%, according to the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

“There were people who lost everything in the fires, and now they were at risk of losing their jobs and their businesses,” says Chun. His team partnered with Maui small businesses to disseminate the message that visitors were welcome outside the crisis zones.

The company also set up a program with the nonprofit Kanu Hawaii to distribute 27 million free miles to Maui residents impacted by the wildfires. Chun says the travel miles can cover anything from a mental-health break to a trip to tour colleges. (See kanuhawaii.org to apply). And the company and its employees made a $150,000 donation to the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

“We don’t have infinite resources so we need to make sure that we’re investing in the right places,” says Chun. “We want to have the greatest amount of impact and fill the gaps. … This is going to be a very, very long road, and we are committed.”

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Emergency Equipment Arrives by Sea

While cargo areas in Alaska’s planes were packed with critical supplies, Hawai‘i’s largest interisland shipping company, Young Brothers, loaded its barges to Kahului with much larger items, including 20 containers of bottled water and ready-to-eat meals for FEMA, vehicles for Hawaiian Electric Co. and Verizon, a mobile medical unit operated by Kaiser Permanente and a mobile clinic used by Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies.

Those critical supplies and equipment were delivered in the early days of the relief effort. In total, about 110 containers of supplies were incorporated into the four weekly sailings that Young Brothers runs from Honolulu to Maui, which includes a new barge for vehicles.

While some shipments were reimbursed, about $50,000 was transported as in-kind donations, says Chris Martin, VP of operations for Young Brothers. The company also sent extra chassis to Maui so containers of relief supplies could be pulled to Lahaina by trucks.

“Everyone was reaching out to help so we could get critical cargo to Lahaina as quickly as possible,” says Martin. “Even the livestock community was offering their trucking capacity. I’ve been in the tug and barge industry for almost 27 years now, and I’ve never seen this much support.”

While critical needs have slowed, Young Brothers continues to store dozens of containers of donations at its Honolulu and Kahului piers, including items like play sets, beds and clothing. Martin says the company is working with Maui County officials to distribute the items once people are in long-term housing. The company has also loaned chassis to organizations that are storing excess donations.

The result is that the company has run low of containers and chassis. “For something like this, with the need to respond immediately, it can sometimes deplete your inventory of equipment,” he says.

Young Brothers is now trying to secure more containers and chassis, which is part of a $100 million investment in upgrading its fleet. The goal, says Martin, is to continue helping the relief effort by storing goods for future use, while maintaining efficient service to the Neighbor Islands through the busy holiday season.

The company is matching up to $125,000 in donations to the Hawai‘i Foodbank, which supports its counterpart on Maui. Donations can be made at bit.ly/3ETlZme.

Mental Health Concerns

David Tumilowicz, Senior Director of Community Health at Kaiser Permanente, says the organization’s experience with wildfires in California helped it quickly grasp how far-reaching the disaster’s impact would be, and to respond with a multitude of services.

When the Lahaina Clinic was destroyed, Kaiser Permanente contacted patients and switched them to virtual visits or nearby facilities. A team of pharmacists and couriers traveled back and forth to Lahaina to deliver medications and prescription refills – a particular challenge for people with ongoing health conditions who lost their medications.

Kaiser Permanente opened first aid stations in Lahaina and other spots, which were free to the entire community. Giant mobile health clinics, shipped from O‘ahu and California, were set up in Lahaina.

By early October, the mobile clinics had moved to Kā‘anapali, with free shuttle service from Lahaina, and offered first aid, pediatric care, a pharmacy, vaccinations and some ob-gyn services to everyone.

Kaiser Permanente shipped two mobile health clinics from O‘ahu and California to West Maui, where both members and non-members can access free services. | Photo: courtesy of Kaiser Permanente

Providing free services to non-members is “the right thing to do,” says Tumilowicz. “As a nonprofit healthcare system, our mission is to increase access to high-quality health care to everyone.”

A free support line was launched for anyone affected by the wildfires to help them manage stress and build coping skills. In October, free parenting classes were offered to help people deal with the emotional and psychological needs of their children after the tragedy, and free classes were launched on how to heal after loss.

Tumilowicz says the outpouring of support and camaraderie has been strong on Maui, but it’s overlaid with a “heavy feeling” on the island, as people process what’s happened.

“It’s not just as simple as the trauma that people survived. It’s the fact that the entire fabric of the community, the reason why you get up in the morning – your job, your family, your volunteer network – that’s gone. People have lost so much,” he says.

Healthcare professionals on Maui tell him that mental-health needs have spiked. He worries that the resulting stress will create a cascade of other physical ailments, which can linger through people’s lives, and even through generations.

In his role at Kaiser Permanente, Tumilowicz is responsible for awarding grants to community-based organizations working in areas such as affordable housing, food security, education and mental health.

At the start of the emergency, Kaiser Permanente donated more than $1 million in immediate grants and employee contributions to the Hawai‘i branches of the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army, the Maui Food Bank, Maui Health Foundation, Hawai‘i Community Foundation and Maui United Way.

“We are getting as much support as we can via funding, via providers, via technical assistance – whatever it may be – for both the short- and long-term recovery,” Tumilowicz says.

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