Sanford Hill calls his escape from death “dumb luck.”
The 72-year-old sits in temporary housing on the other side of Maui from his senior living facility in Lahaina. It was destroyed in the wildfire, and Hill is struggling to process how he made it — and wondering how many of his neighbors, all 62 or older, also got out.
Like thousands of other residents of Lahaina, Hill and many of his neighbors at Hale Mahaolu Eono stayed home for the first half of Aug. 8, watching firefighters trying to extinguish a fire to the east of town. He said he received an alert about the fire on his phone but there was no urgency to it. A building manager went around telling tenants they may have to evacuate. But word went around later that the fire had been contained, and the firefighters left.
“I wasn’t worried about it, nobody else was,” Hill recalled, saying he went to a dentist appointment. ”Everybody else was home. Nobody evacuated. Nobody left.”
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Then the fire outside town reignited and was moving fast, fed by whipping winds. Driving back from his appointment, Hill said he saw black smoke billowing toward Lahaina from the east, where police had blocked off Lahaina Bypass.
Near home, Hill encountered a woman trying to flee on foot. The town was burning, she told him. Officials have said that the area’s emergency sirens never sounded. The woman got into Hill’s car and they drove away.
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