Kendall Stanley: Island nightmare

The ocean on one side and a wall of flames on the other — one can hardly imagine the life and death decisions residents of Lahaina made when a wildfire swept through their town, killing as of this writing 100 with many more remains to be found.

As one article I read after the fire noted, urban areas were considered a fire break, a place where wildfires tended to die out. Not anymore.

California was the scene of two fires that swept through urban areas, Santa Rosa and Paradise. While some people tragically died in those blazes, many more were able to escape.

In Lahaina, there was no place to escape.

Many residents were complaining about the lack of activated sirens warning them of the coming inferno, lack of help getting back to their homes and the slowness of finding missing relatives feared lost to the blaze.

Teams have arrived to sift through the destroyed town, trying to find remains and then matching those through DNA to other family members. It is a long and tedious process.

There are many story threads that flow from the disaster. How do you reclaim the history of a town where Hawaiian royalty once ruled? How can residents, living in a community where the median house price is $1 million, afford to rebuild? How long would it even take to rebuild? How can you rebuild in such a way that a catastrophic fire can’t ravage the town again? What lessons can be learned that can be shared with other island communities that are in similar locations?

The bigger question — where and how do you even start to rebuild Lahaina?

Already, real estate agents and land speculators were calling survivors seeking to buy their land. If you’ve ever wondered how low some people will go, there’s your answer.

For the islanders, however, too much history on the island will keep them there.

But where to start? Where do you begin to put the thousands of tons of rubble that was once a town? Think about that in terms of Cadillac, which is about 2,000 people less than Lanaina’s 12,000. Where would all of the buildings go if you had to rebuild?

Just thinking of crushing and getting rid of all the cars that sit charred and incinerated along the roads gives me a headache.

Affordable housing was always an issue on the island and for many Hawaiians housing is a multi-generational unit. Grandparents, cousins, aunties and other family members reside under one roof in part because of Hawaiian culture and in part because it is very expensive to live on the island.

Even if you can get a house quickly built on the island, which is unlikely, how do you go about getting all new stuff — clothing, furniture, a vehicle and finding food at what has to be new supermarkets.

As I was writing this Canadian officials were telling residents to abandon Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, because of approaching wildfires. Unlike Lahaina, however, they had somewhere to safely go and the time and ability to get there.

Some 33 million acres have burned in Canada this year, an area about the size of Alabama.

Hopefully, unlike Lanai, Yellowknife will be missed by the firestorm.

A sad day

It’s an image etched in the minds of hundreds of us — Sean Pollion and Dennis Starkey side by side on the bench, elbows on their knees and heads together as they worked their coaching magic with the Petoskey High School’s boys’ basketball team. What a duo they were for nearly 30 years!

And now, half that equation is gone.

Pollion died recently, a shock to the community that will continue to be felt.

For many years he was the head of the North Central Michigan College Foundation but really his passion was basketball.

Beside working with Starkey for 27 years, he then switched to the girls’ team where he helped coach his daughter, Ellie.

“First class,” “great guy,” “kind” are some of the words people used in describing him in the comments in his obituary.

What comes through is how saddened and shocked we all are that one minute Sean was with us and the next minute he no longer was.

We miss you coach, RIP.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: Island nightmare