Lahaina burn zone slowly transforming from ‘ghost town’ to big construction zone

LAHAINA — On sweltering summer nights, when there was no electricity to run even a fan inside his Lahaina home, Kyle Agawa would sit in a chair in his front yard, drink a beer and listen to Jawaiian songs on the radio by the light of a lantern. 

The music was the only sound piercing the silence of his Kaniau Road neighborhood, which had been reduced to mostly smoking piles of rubble after the devastating wildfire of Aug. 8, 2023, roared through the seaside town.

“Ghost town,” Agawa recalled. “Nobody was around.” 

Agawa’s home, surrounded on three sides by homes that burned to the ground, was one of the few improbable survivors in the Lahaina burn zone, where more than 2,200 structures were destroyed.

For more than a year, he and others who returned to surviving homes have been living in an empty town filled with the sounds of demolition, debris removal and construction by day — and silence by night. 

While they’re happy to be home and now see people rebuilding, they miss their neighbors and long for the day when the community will return.  

“It’s bittersweet knowing that when you walk through the neighborhood, it’s not going to be the same houses you remember,” said Janeen Tempo, who has been living in her parents’ home after losing her own in Puamana. 

Residents likely won’t know for years how many of their neighbors will be back. The University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization reported in January that at least 430 to 510 Maui residents had already moved out of state because of the fire. More than 80% of the people impacted by the fire were estimated to still be displaced as of March, including 42.5% displaced outside of West Maui, according to a UHERO survey of more than 900 people.

But even with the flow of departures, there are signs all across Lahaina of people planning to return. Many streets in the burn zone have homes under construction. In Lahaina, eight homes have been completed so far, and 368 building permits have been issued, with 301 others being processed, according to Maui County’s recovery dashboard as of Thursday. 

But most have not even started to rebuild, and it will still be years before the town is completely rebuilt.

Agawa was one of the first to move back into his home. The day after the fire, with the roads barricaded to cars, he walked from Kā‘anapali, where he’d evacuated, to his Wahikuli neighborhood near the Lahaina Civic Center.

Climbing up the hill, he was shocked. Aside from some trees and an aluminum storage shed that burned in his backyard, his home was completely intact. He thinks the lack of shrubbery in his front yard and the metal rain gutter helped spare the structure. The houses all around him looked “like one bomb went off.”

Friends told him it wasn’t safe to be in the burn zone. But Agawa just wanted to be home. He cleaned out the soot and hooked up his fridge and microwave to a generator. 

For the next several weeks, Agawa lived like the protagonist of an apocalyptic movie. He scooped swimming pool water from a neighbor’s deserted lot to flush out his toilet. He walked to the nearby beach park to shower. He cooked saimin over a butane camp stove and ate cans of Spam and pork and beans.

For awhile, he was alone. There were no friendly faces, no cars on the road.

“Unreal,” Agawa said of the emptiness. 

Then, the cleanup came. Federal agencies and volunteers in full-body suits cleaned out the hazardous materials and heavy debris. Maui County reopened the zone to residents in September 2023, and Agawa watched his neighbors come back to sift through the ashes. In October 2023, the county lifted the unsafe water advisory for homes in his area.

Eventually the bustle gave way to the sounds of construction in the distance. Save for one home up the block, most of Agawa’s neighborhood hasn’t started rebuilding yet. The lots around him are covered in gravel and weeds. 

On a May afternoon nearly two years after the fire, his neighborhood still was quiet. Agawa was passing the time the same as he did on the day of the fire — drinking beers with his buddy Lance Taguchi. Over cans of Miller and Bud Light, and containers of pan-fried lup cheong and dried cuttlefish, they watched basketball and recalled what it was like watching the smoke from Agawa’s yard and evacuating at around 10:30 p.m. 

Agawa, a 64-year-old retired mail carrier and 1979 Lahainaluna graduate, grew up in a home on Lahainaluna Road that burned down in the fire. He admits he liked the quiet before the town became a construction zone. But, he said, it “feels good” to see his hometown rebuild.

MISSING FAMILIAR FACES

When Tempo and her family came back to her parents’ Lokia Street home after the fire, they found someone had broken the windows and raided food cans from the pantry. It was jarring at a time when the whole community was suffering. 

“But then, you also feel like compassion, understanding,” Tempo said. “My mom will always say that well, if someone’s going to break in … that means they need something more than us.” 

The home where Tempo grew up and where her parents live now escaped the flames despite being surrounded by homes that burned. Tempo’s home in Puamana wasn’t so lucky. After the fire, she and her teenage son went to live with her parents. 

Even though the home was still standing, the family didn’t move back until June. First they had to wait for the area to be cleared of debris. Then they had to replace the carpets, furniture and the fridge with spoiled food.

Shortly before they returned, construction began on nearby Ka La‘i Ola, one of the largest temporary housing communities erected after the fire. Every day Tempo could hear the blasting of construction and see the floodlights shining into her parents’ home. 

That’s part of why she isn’t ready to rebuild yet. She wants to wait until construction is done in her neighborhood. But also, she’s struggled to nail down a blueprint. None of them are quite like her old house. But then she remembers she can’t bring it back.

“It is hard to kind of get used to,” Tempo said. “You still have that sentimental feeling, that nostalgic feeling. …  (But) everything is going to be new. So that is kind of shellshock.” 

Tempo grew up in the same Lokia Street home riding bikes and playing soccer with the other kids. She was used to seeing people she knew around town. For her, that’s one of the hardest parts about moving back to Lahaina while it’s still mostly empty. Some people have moved away temporarily, others for good. When she thinks about what she wants to see in Lahaina in the next few years, her first thought is the faces of the people she knows and loves. 

“With what’s going on, we don’t know who’s going to be back,” Tempo said. 

NEIGHBORHOODS SLOWLY RETURNING

When Nell Laird-Woods fell and fractured her pelvis on the front porch of her Lahaina home in February and called out for help, her neighbors rushed to her aid. They helped her up, put away her groceries and had an ambulance there in 15 minutes. 

“That’s the kind of neighborhood it is,” Laird-Woods said. 

She was fortunate that her accident happened at a time when her neighbors were rebuilding. Many neighborhoods look like hers now — a hodgepodge of surviving homes and rebuilding ones. 

In August 2023, her corner-lot home in the Kauaula neighborhood was surrounded on all sides by destruction. The heat bubbled up the paint on one side of her home. A wall on the other side of her property is stained red from a boat that turned into “a puddle of fiberglass.”

But today, her home is a miniature oasis, with green grass and palm trees, and a recently renovated pool. Her property is bordered by a block wall and a wide buffer of stones, which she thinks helped protect her home. At first, she felt survivor’s guilt. 

“Why me?” she wondered. “But I figured God had a plan.” 

Laird-Woods lived at her friend’s vacation rental before sewer service was restored to her area and she moved back in May 2024. 

“My mentality was such that, as long as I can flush and shower, I’m going home,” Laird-Woods said. “I’ll carry all the water, refill water jugs, bring bags of ice, but I’m going home.”

The neighborhood was empty aside from the birds that flocked to her mango tree. The 77-year-old said she is “a homebody,” so the silence didn’t bother her. However, she couldn’t walk her dogs like she used to because the heavy equipment chewed up the streets during the cleanup. 

Living in Lahaina after the fire was “so weird, because you simply did not know where you were, because all your landmarks were gone.” She missed places like Kimo’s, where she sat at the bar, ordered steak and listened to live music.

Laird-Woods loved that her neighborhood was full of local families, and she wants it to stay that way. After the fire and a medical scare in November, she changed her will to deed the property to the Lahaina Community Land Trust, which is working to keep burned properties locally owned. 

She said she’s grateful to be in Lahaina and “watch it rise around me.” The neighbors who rushed to her aid were the first to start rebuilding in the area. Her favorite thing is “watching trusses fly,” which happened recently at a friend’s home nearby. 

“Everything happens for a reason. I’m a big believer in that,” Laird-Woods said. “And sometimes it takes awhile for that reason to manifest itself to you, but it eventually does so.” 

HARD TO STAY

Not everyone whose homes survived ended up staying. Theo Morrison, executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, moved to Wailuku after the fire. 

“It was like, God, do I really want to live here?” Morrison said. “Everything I knew as my neighborhood was gone.”

Morrison’s home was among a small pocket of structures that survived just north of the Lahaina Gateway Center. However, the foundation’s offices were destroyed, along with many of the historic buildings the organization oversees. 

Part of Morrison’s job used to be walking down Front Street to check on the museums and chat with merchants to keep up with the happenings in town.

But after the fire, the foundation’s office relocated to a building owned by the Sugar Museum in Central Maui. 

Morrison’s son, a firefighter, also lost his home, so mother and son moved to his girlfriend’s home in Wailuku. Morrison realized she didn’t want to commute every day. 

“It was a difficult decision for me because I’m a real Lahaina person,” said Morrison, who has owned her home since 1990.

Morrison waited until nearby homes had been cleared of debris before she got her house cleaned and fixed up, about eight months after the fire. She found renters who’d been staying in hotels and wanted to move in right away. 

Despite her temporary move, she’s “definitely going to keep my home” and will either move back there or into an ‘ohana unit that her son plans to put on his property. One day, the foundation’s offices will return to Lahaina, too. Still, it aches to be so far away. 

“Every time I go to Lahaina for something, I go, ‘Why don’t I live there?’” Morrison said. “So I still sort of go through that.”