Warning: This story contains details that some readers may find distressing
Lahaina, once Hawaii’s royal capital, is now a crematorium.
“We pick up remains and they fall apart,” said Maui County police chief John Pelletier on Saturday, four days after a massive wildfire tore downhill through dry brush and grass and engulfed the island’s western edge.
Close to 100 deaths have been confirmed, making the Lahaina wildfires the deadliest in the US in more than a century.
But just 3% of Lahaina’s charred ruins have been searched so far, stoking fears that the death toll will continue its sharp climb.
“None of us really know the size of it yet,” chief Pelletier warned, growing visibly emotional.
Dozens of survivors shared their stories of escape and loss with the BBC, helping to piece together a more complete picture of the tragedy that unfolded on Tuesday, when fires moving at a mile per minute consumed the town.
One thing seemed to unite their accounts: residents say they had no official warning before they fled for their lives, raising painful questions about the effectiveness of the emergency response and whether more people could have been saved.
On Tuesday morning, Lahaina residents woke up to find their power was out. Phones hadn’t charged, alarm clocks stayed quiet and air conditioners shut down.
For Les Munn, a 42-year-old resident, the outage announced itself in a dropped call to the country’s east coast. He had woken up at 4:00am that day to accommodate the six-hour time difference. Mid-conversation, the connection was cut.
But the outage alone wasn’t especially concerning, Munn said.
“I just thought it was going to be another blackout,” he said, noting the trade winds that frequently hammer the coast.
Munn, like most others, assumed this outage was linked to nearby Hurricane Dora, which authorities had warned could bring gusts of up to 65mph (105kph) to Maui.
And at that time, the local fires apparently fuelled by Dora’s winds seemed insignificant.
By 9:55am, officials had declared the Lahaina brush fire “100% contained”. Residents were given no indication it would flare up again.
Richard Tenison, a homeless Lahaina resident, woke up to the rushing winds. Standing up near the door of a pharmacy where he had set up for the night, he watched as his bedding was carried by the wind into the harbour.
The weather was building, said Lynn Robison, who lived in the heart of the historic town. By 8am she got her first whiff of smoke, an odour that would build throughout the day. But at that point concerns were muted. Hawaii was used to storms.
By around 3:00pm, things began to turn.
