Lahaina Aquatic Center to reopen soon after volunteers led effort to clean up the fire mess

LAHAINA — When Maui County Pool Manager Duke Sevilla first saw the Lahaina Aquatic Center a few days after the devastating fire of Aug. 8, 2023, he was amazed that none of it had burned despite being surrounded by destruction.

Sevilla believes the pool and the adjacent skate park escaped most of the fire damage because the service road behind them on the mauna side acted as a firebreak.

But despite this good fortune, the facility was a big mess, with the pool filled with black ash and fire debris strewn everywhere. Three dead cats were found on the deck and a deceased owl was in the water.

For 11 months, the aquatic center, which had been an important part of the Lahaina community, remained in this tattered condition as the county dealt with more pressing priorities following the disaster that destroyed much of Lahaina town, causing at least 102 deaths and leaving more than 12,000 residents without homes.

As time went on, some people voiced frustration during community meetings that nothing was being done by the county to reopen the pool that survived the fire and was an important place to many residents of Lahaina.

But in July, LeCamieann Shiffler, a volunteer from Lahaina who now lives in Kīhei, spearheaded a community-led effort that now has pool users hopeful the aquatic center can reopen in October. Much of the support came from the nonprofit she is part of called Red Lightning, which is dedicated to solving disaster problems through strategic partnerships.

Shiffler said in a text that she and John Berglund, the Salvation Army’s emergency disaster services director, drove into the fire impact zone to visit the Lahaina Lighthouse Corps complex that had burned to the ground and is next to the aquatic center. During that trip, Berglund told Shiffler he would love to see the pool reopen for the community.

Since the Lahaina Aquatic Center opened in 1993 — with an 8-lane, 50-meter by 25-yard competition pool that is 4- to 6-feet deep, a 15- by 20-foot keiki pool and a fountain — it has been a popular place for kids and adults to hang out on hot days or exercise with water aerobics and recreational lap swimming. And a week before the wildfire, the Lahaina Swim Club had 142 registered swimmers from the learn-to-swim group to the elite, competitive swimmers, with a waiting list of 36, according to coach Jen Wiseman.

Shiffler said it was agreed that reopening the pool “would be amazing,” so she and the Red Lightning group began to figure out how to make it happen. For starters, Shiffler contacted Zeke Kalua, an executive assistant to Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen, who arranged a July meeting at the pool with Shiffler and some of her volunteers.

“About a month ago, I get a call that this group Red Lightning wants to come in and I didn’t know who this group was,” Sevilla said. 

After researching them, Sevilla was encouraged. 

“I started to think, ‘Okay, we’ve got some good people here,’ ” Sevilla said. ”And so once we started and they said that, ‘Oh, we can do this, this, this.’ And when they came in and they started work, they did a fantastic job as far as I’m concerned.”

Within a week of the meeting, the Red Lightning team began cleaning the facility and pool filled with water that sat stagnant for months and was ladened with sludge and ash from the fire. And when the pool water test came back clear of contaminants, other community volunteers came to the center on Aug. 3 to help.

“We had 30 friends, family and members from the Lahaina Swim Club there helping,” Shiffler said.

It also was a healing effort for many. The fire destroyed the homes of 32 of the club’s members and of its president, Bob Dezotell.

Dezotell, despite his own loss, kept an eye on the facility when he could over the past year. He said most of the sludgy substance was green algae that grew while the 450,000 gallons of water was left untreated. This sludge was removed by wheelbarrows after the water was drained.

“If you put your face close to the water it would smell like an old smell of algae,” Dezotell said. “Some of it had already settled to the bottom over time. As algae dies it kind of goes to the bottom. And then when they started to drain the pool, it compressed it, condensed it, it got to be about a two-inch layer on the bottom.”

A team of 30 volunteers from the Hawaiʻi District Council 50 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades gave the facility a fresh new paint job, with company PPG donating 100 gallons of paint.

A team from West Maui Landscaping also worked on the cleanup of the vegetation. 

“The kind of work they all put in, holy cow,” said Sevilla, who estimates it saved the county as much as $500,000, including $100,000 for the paint job.

Shiffler said pool pump mechanic Andre Lacour has been Maui County’s go-to guy in the whole process, guiding other county workers.

“He knows all of the pool really well,” Shiffler said.

For the kids, teenagers and adults who used the pool and miss it, the cleanup progress is appreciated.

“It means a lot for me and my team and my coaches,” said Jake McGill, a senior at Lahainaluna High School who was the state high school runner-up in the 50-yard freestyle in February and has frequented the pool since he began competing for the Lahaina Swim Club in sixth grade.

“Really excited for it,” he added. “And, hopefully (it’s) going to make life easier for lots of our team so we aren’t driving to Kīhei most days, trying to car pool, find rides and all that.”

Since the fires, many members of the Lahaina Swim Club and Lahainaluna High School swim team have had to travel the 45 minutes each way to train and compete at the Kīhei Aquatic Center. This includes McGill’s 13-year-old brother Sheamus and 9-year-old sister Victoria.

And last week, even swimming in Kīhei was not possible due to the facility being closed for renovations.

McGill, who plans to study architecture in college so he can return to West Maui and help with the rebuild of his hometown, said reopening the aquatic center has “gotten me really excited for what’s to come just in the total story of the Lahaina rebuild.”

After it was built, the aquatic center instantly became part of the community, a gathering place in West Maui for all ages. It was the site of the 1994 USA Swimming Western Zones and 1997 Pan Pacific Masters Championships. Over the years, it has been the place many people young and old have learned to swim, as well as hosting numerous competitions, daily lap swimming and senior water aerobics.

In July, the Lahaina Swim Club took 14 swimmers to the age group state meet on Oʻahu. Jack Pope, a six-time state high school champion for Lahainaluna before swimming collegiately at University of the Pacific, led that team to the state meet, and has been one of the coaches to guide workouts in Kīhei for the past year.

“I mean, it’s like coming home,” Pope said about the looming reopening of the the Lahaina Aquatic Center after a club team practice on Monday. “When you’re coming back from a trip and you smell that beautiful Maui air, there’s nothing like swimming in Lahaina. That’s for sure.”

Pope has been a keen observer of the process of restoring the pool where he grew up swimming. He has been focused on keeping the West Maui swimmers who wanted to keep competing in the water, albeit in South Maui.

“It’s a testament to these guys’ resilience and making it all the way there,” Pope said. “I did my best to show up for them every day, but they’re the ones, the parents, everyone down in Kīhei, that’s the real heroes of the story.”

Shiffler of Red Lightning credited county pool manager Sevilla for supporting the community efforts. Swim coach Wiseman added that Kim Ball, a member of Bissen’s Lahaina Advisory Team, and Lahainaluna athletic director Jon Conrad also have been instrumental in the effort as well.

But Sevilla and Wiseman both were adamant that Shiffler has been the driving force, with Wiseman saying: “She just dropped out of the sky, like an angel.”

The Lahaina Aquatic Center has some amenities that will not be available at the beginning of the reopening — including the scoreboard has been inoperable for “five or six years,” according to Dezotell.

The 70-year-old said he wants to turn over the Lahaina Swim Club’s presidency to someone younger, but he won’t until the aquatic center is reopened.

“So I came into this because the club needed a president, and so I stepped in and took over as president,” Dezotell said. “And I was just trying to shepherd it through first COVID and then the fire. But yeah, I’m all about getting the kids back in the water and then I’m going to find a younger parent who has skin in the game to step in because someone’s going to have to carry it forward.”

Dezotell said the fitration system was saved because the power was turned off at 6 a.m. the day after the fire that prevented the sludge from flowing through it.

“Oh, yeah, that was a lucky break, right?” he said. “Very lucky.”

Shiffler said she is close to getting the pool operable, with water expected to be able to be put back into it soon. The opening on Aug. 1 of Honoapi’ilani Highway in lower Lahaina has been important in expediting the effort as it provided a route for people to go to the pool via automobile.

For Shiffler, who grew up near the pool, the project has been gratifying.

“So we could just come right over and use the pool when I was a kid,” she said. “I mean, this was, growing up in this heat, this was one of our gathering places. When it opened it was such a welcome addition to the community. … I’ve always had a passion in recreation and doing anything to get the youth into something more constructive and safe. That’s why we need this place open.”