PARADISE ON FIRE

The historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii, was burning, overwhelmed by the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history For many, the only escape was to leap into the ocean.

- Joshua Partlow, John Farrell, Brady Dennis, Brianna Sacks and Joanna Slater

LISA VORPAHL, a bank teller, woke to the sound of someone shuffling on her lanai, a Hawaiian-style patio. It was 3 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. She looked out her bedroom window along a dry, grassy slope overlooking her slice of tropical paradise in Lahaina, Hawaii, and realized it was just the wind.

Alexa Caskey couldn't sleep either. On the farm where she grew taro and breadfruit for her plant-based restaurant, she listened to gusts that would soon dislodge her garage door and topple the Hong Kong orchid tree outside.

Photographer Rachael Zimmerman woke up before dawn in her condo on Front Street, Lahaina's seaside boulevard of restaurants and surf shops, to howls rattling her window screens.

If there was any warning on that fitful night that Hawaii was about to endure one of the most horrific and deadly natural disasters in the state's history, it was only the wind.

For two days, the National Weather Service in Honolulu had been sending

out ominous alerts about powerful easterly gusts, whipped up by Hurricane Dora passing 500 miles to the south. The gusts hit Maui at a time when much of the tropical island had been parched by severe drought, including the drier leeward side that includes Lahaina.

The next time Vorpahl woke up, she smelled smoke. The power was out.

A fire had started in the dry grass near her home on Lahainaluna Road, on a slope just east of the highway that bypasses downtown. Power poles had fallen in the neighborhood, and wires had snapped-leading several neighbors to later question whether electrical equipment had started the blaze.

Maui County authorities got the first reports of the fire at 6:37 a.m., and not long afterward, police were circulating in Vorpahl's neighborhood, calling out on megaphones for people to evacuate. Using a nearby hydrant, firefighters doused the flames.