Maui Wildfires Leave Restaurant Workers Devastated—And Grappling With Tourism

28.08.2023 - 19:35 / cntraveler.com

As Naiwi Teruya watched flames engulf his Lāhainā apartment on the evening of August 8, his first thought was, “I need to get to my kids,” says the 35-year-old executive chef of Down the Hatch, a casual seafood joint that once stood on Lāhainā’s iconic Front Street. Teruya pushed through scorching winds and dodged dangling power lines in the darkness as he headed north on foot. “People were crying and screaming, you could hear things exploding, and I felt like the fire was chasing me,” he says.

Four miles later, Teruya was able to stop and breathe. Surveying the luxury hotels that line the sandy shores of Kāʻanapali, a crescent-shaped beach town beloved by visitors, he was struck by the realization that while his home and restaurant were gone, “all the tourists were sipping mai tais” at the resort bars. “I was looking for my family, with literally nothing but the clothes on my back,” says Teruya, whose Native Hawaiian family has lived on Maui for generations. “The resentment was heavy.”

Even before the fires, two Mauis existed: One where locals, who have long mourned losing their land to colonization— historic Lāhainā is where the monarch who united all the Hawaiian islands, Kamehameha the Great, established his kingdom—often struggle to find housing and work multiple jobs, usually in the restaurant and tourism industries, to make ends meet. And one intensely developed for visitors, who come to dine on fresh fish, snorkel in jewel-toned waters, and watch a traditional Hawaiian hula.

It’s the latter Maui, according to some of the locals I spoke with for this story, that turned the Lāhainā surrounds, once a lush wetland, into bone-dry fuel for the flames. “Without placing specific blame, this whole thing is related to poor land management, water diversion, and climate change,” says Lee Anne Wong, whose restaurant, Papa‘aina, was housed in Lāhainā’s historic Pioneer Inn and burned to the ground. Experts say the proliferation of nonnative grasses—brought to the island by sugar and pineapple barrons in the 18th century—combined with gusts from Hurricane Dora passing about 500 miles south, created the destructive conditions.

Some 115 of the town’s roughly 12,700 residents have been confirmed dead, while search efforts for the estimated 1,000 still missing continue as another dangerous fire quietly burns just 25 miles away. Maui’s profound reliance on tourism dollars—which represent 70 percent of the island’s economy, by some estimates—means that many grieving locals must continue working as they reckon with immense loss. Tori, a 35-year-old property manager who requested that Bon Appétit withhold her last name to avoid repercussions at her job, spends her days pleasing tourists, then her nights volunteering