PARADISE ON FIRE

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

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

MORNING: HOWLING WINDS THEN A BRUSH FIRE

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, 8 August 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 800 kilometers 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 and wires fallen in the neighbourhood, had snapped-leading several neighbours to later question whether electrical equipment had started the blaze.