LAHAINA, Hawaii – Three survivors of the deadly wildfires that ripped through Maui said Wednesday that when all hell broke out, the town’s main escape route was partially blocked by Hawaiian Electric trucks clearing downed lines and replacing power poles. broken.
The result was “epic bumper-to-bumper traffic as we tried to get away,” said 26-year-old resident Cole Millington. “There were no police in sight. What there were were Hawaiian Electric trucks arriving with new telephone poles.”
“Instead of waiting for everyone to get out, they were blocking the only exit with their big trucks.”
Millington and one of her roommates, Caitlin Carroll, said that when they began to flee Lahaina around 4 pm on August 8, Hawaiian Electric workers were already removing downed power lines from the Honoapiilani Expressway.
“I get it,” Millington said. “You don’t want to run over live wires. But they were also starting to move poles while we were all trying to get out. We told them to move off the road and let us through.”
Millington and Carroll, 27, said they and other drivers were yelling for teams to move out of the way.
“It didn’t make sense what they were doing,” Millington said. “They could see the sky was black. They could see the city was on fire. They could see the wind was still whipping around. But they were already starting to put up new power poles.”
Carroll said he saw several drivers get out of their vehicles with chainsaws and run to help power crews clear downed poles.
“But they signaled to them not to go through,” he said. “It would be one thing if they were removing downed power lines to let us through. But their trucks were on our escape routes, and they were already trying to fix the poles, replace the poles, while we were sitting there. It didn’t make sense.”
Hawaiian Electric spokesman Darren Pai said he would investigate whether the company’s trucks caused the highway closure.
Video Millington recorded the day the fires broke out appears to show Hawaiian Electric trucks on the highway.
Amanda Cassidy, a 33-year-old Lahaina resident, said she and her boyfriend encountered a similar situation when they tried to escape their neighborhood using Lahainaluna Road as flames engulfed their rental home.
He said he saw police blocking roads while utility crews worked downed lines.
“When there are thousands of people in vehicles trying to get away, you have to think about something else,” Cassidy said, referring to public service. “That’s our lifeline, our escape route, and they cut it off for us? There was no other way out.”
Cassidy, who survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said her Lahaina home was surrounded by overhead power lines that should have been secured and dry vegetation that should have been cut down before last week’s blazes.
“It’s very, very sad and disappointing. This could have been prevented years ago,” he said.
Cassidy estimated that he spent 20 minutes in front of the people who were forced to abandon their vehicles and jump into the sea to escape the flames.
Hawaiian Electric, the state’s largest electric utility, was also the subject of a lawsuit Wednesday alleging it contributed to prepare the ground for years of negligence in the wildfires and for failing to plan to shut down electrical systems before ferocious winds blew across Maui. This is the fourth lawsuit filed against the company in relation to the forest fires.
Hawaiian Electric declined to comment on the lawsuits, saying it would violate internal policy. Pai said Hawaiian Electric was aware of the allegations but remained focused on restoring power to Maui.
He stressed that “the cause of the fire has not been determined, and we will work with the state and county as they conduct their review.”
As investigators tried to figure out what sparked the massive fires, which have killed at least 110 people, reduced historic Lahaina to smoking ruins and caused more than $7 billion worth of damage, NBC News ireported last week that the state’s emergency warning sirens did not go off to alert unsuspecting residents.
Millington said Wednesday on MSNBC that the day the fires broke out he realized something was wrong when he “noticed a big column of black smoke from my bedroom window.”
Millington, who said he lost his home and business to the fires, notified his roommates, and 15 minutes later they were all “leaving” the parking lot in their cars.
But the main highway out of Lahaina in West Maui was already clogged, and it took them “more than three hours” to get to the center of the island. He said that he could see the llamas chewing on Lahaina “in my rear view mirror.”
