KIHEI, Hawaii – Sanford Hill calls his escape from death “dumb luck.”
He is in temporary accommodation on the other side of Mauiat his nursing home in lahaina. The wildfire destroyed everything, and Hill struggles to understand how he did it, wondering how many of his neighbors, all over the age of 62, also managed to escape.
There are no answers.
“We have no way of knowing who survived,” Hill, 72, told NBC News.
More than a week after the wildfire tore through West Maui, authorities have only publicly identified two victims, and they affirm that they have recovered 106 human remains in the area calcined by the fire that have not yet been identified. This figure could double, according to the authorities.
Hill knows of only three neighbors who have escaped, and some of those neighbors have heard of a handful of others. But that’s all. He has called the company that owns the 34-unit low-rent building, Hale Mahaolu Eono, but staff have told him they don’t have any information.
Relatives of the missing Hale Mahaolu Eono residents say they have also been unable to get help from the company, Hale Mahaolu.
Clifford Abihai told NBC News that he was looking for his 98-year-old grandmother and had traveled from California to try to find her. But no one in Lahaina has been able to tell him anything.
“It’s frustrating, very frustrating,” she said, adding that she has gone to tents and missing persons shelters, talked to the Red Cross and posted flyers seeking information about her grandmother. “All I want is confirmation that she is safe.”
She described her grandmother as “the strongest of all in our family,” someone who walked a mile every day and always had a smile on her face. She said that she wanted him to know that he was still looking for her.
“I felt powerless in California, I feel powerless here,” he said. “But ultimately, I’m going to keep trying. I’m not going to stop.”
A woman whose 90-year-old grandmother lived in the building and is now missing said she felt “trapped” as she waited for any news.
“We can’t go in. We can’t search. We can’t look,” Danielle Yakut said. “We don’t know where she is, and I just try not to think about anything other than finding her.”
Company officials did not immediately return messages from NBC News seeking comment about the residents who remain unaccounted for.
“It’s hard to talk about it, because I don’t really know who’s gone,” Hill said. “I haven’t considered it yet.”
Like thousands of other Lahaina residents, Hill and many of his Hale Mahaolu Eono neighbors stayed home for the first half of Aug. 8, watching firefighters try to put out a fire east of town. He says that he received an alert about the fire on his phone, but that there was no urgency. A building manager was telling the tenants that they might have to evacuate. But later it was learned that the fire had been controlled and the firefighters left.
Hill went to a dentist appointment.
“I wasn’t worried, nobody else was,” Hill recalls. “Everybody else was home. Nobody evacuated. Nobody left.”
Then the fire reignited on the outskirts of the city and advanced rapidly, fueled by the winds. As he was returning from his appointment, Hill said he saw black smoke heading into Lahaina from the east, where police had blocked off the Lahaina Beltway.
Near his home, Hill encountered a woman trying to flee on foot. She told him that the city was burning. Authorities have said that emergency sirens in the area did not sound at any time.
The woman got into Hill’s car and they drove off.
That night they stayed at a friend’s house. The next morning, Hill, who said he has a neurological condition that requires daily medication, went to a hospital for a fresh supply. She spent the next night in a shelter, then moved to a hotel and then to Kihei’s temporary home.
Hill said she moved to Hale Mahaolu Eono in 2016 after a period of homelessness. The cheap rent – $144 a month – made it easy for her to live comfortably in one of Hawaii’s hottest areas on her $914 monthly Social Security check.
Now, like hundreds of others, she has no idea how she’s going to find a permanent home. He also lost a computer containing decades of photographs of Maui, images that told the community’s story about him.
He is angry with the authorities, because it seems that the fire caught them off guard and they did not issue more serious warnings.
He says he feels lucky to be alive, guilty for surviving, and unable to understand it.
“I haven’t gotten used to the idea yet. Right now it’s survival.”
This article It was originally published in English by jon schuppe for our sister network NBCNews.com. For more from NBC News enter here.
