Westminster couple home from Hawaii aim to help those devastated by the Maui wildfires
It was the trip of a lifetime for Kris and Jennifer Lucander. In fact, when the Westminster couple touched down in Honolulu on July 28, they figured they had crossed another item off of their bucket list. They had arrived in paradise.
“We had planned this trip for over a year,” Jen explained. “And it was just stunningly beautiful everywhere you looked.”
But while the two sailed on catamarans, rode ATVs, and took a helicopter tour during their three-island vacation, there were some signs that trouble might be looming just over the horizon. The winds had begun to pick up, but that’s not unusual in Hawaii. On TV, there were graphs showing elevated risks for wildfires due to the dry conditions.
No high-danger warnings
“But there were never warnings telling you to avoid certain areas, or high-danger warnings,” Jen said.
But in Maui on the second-to-last day of their trip, it was clear that something had gone wrong. The couple awakened in their Airbnb to find that the power was off. Annoying, Kris admitted, but not exactly alarming.
“That was just inconvenient for us, but then when we started driving around you started to see some more firetrucks – just a few of them going through – and you could see some brushfires, but I didn’t really think anything of it at the time at that point,” said Kris, who teaches music at Westminster Elementary School. “But there were some telephone poles down in the road, so we couldn’t access everything that we wanted to do.”
The brush fires appeared to be far off in the distance at that point, according to Jen.
Panic at the grocery store was first clue something was wrong
But a visit to a Safeway grocery store caused the couple to reconsider the situation. Kris said the store was filled with people trying to grab food and supplies, a scene he said was reminiscent of the kind of behavior witnessed back in New England in the days before a Nor’easter hits the region.
“At that point, the winds were really, really picking up, and we decided to just head to the airport and book a room at a hotel for the night, and just get ready for our flight (the next day),” Kris said, a decision Jen later called the “best $500 we ever spent.” “But when we packed up and got in the car, that’s when we noticed that everything was really going downhill.”
Journey to the airport
Route 30, the only road to the airport, it turned out, had been closed due to fallen trees and powerlines. The Lucanders couldn’t move forward, they couldn’t turn around, and the flames from the wildfires were drawing closer. At that point, officials diverted all traffic to a secondary road.
“It was really windy as we were driving down that road, you could see smoke and flames in the distance, and there was debris flying everywhere,” said Jen, who is the administrator at the Brighton School in Framingham. “We thought we were going to be impaled because we were in a soft-top jeep.”
Having determined that conditions were too hazardous to continue their journey to the airport, the couple decided to seek temporary shelter at the Lahaina Shores Beach Resort while they waited for the roads to be cleared. They stayed for about an hour before they realized they had to make another attempt to reach the airport.
“Slowly, the thick, black smoke – like a huge cloud – was moving eastward towards us, and you could start to see flames burning the last bits of foliage before it hit the hotel,” Kris said. “That’s when we said ‘screw this’ and got in the car and just hoped that we could get through.”
The couple invited a young woman to join them on their journey, Jen said. The woman had lost contact with her boyfriend who had gone out for a hike earlier in the day.
“She sat down next to me, crying because her boyfriend had the car and she had no way to evacuate,” Jen explained. “I told her not to worry, that we had a jeep, and she could jump in with us.”
At photo taken by Kris just before the trio hit the road shows a column of flames just yards away from the hotel parking lot.
Roads cleared by ordinary people
Expecting once again to find the roads difficult to navigate or even impassable, they found that their route to the airport had been cleared for travel. But it wasn’t emergency workers or island officials that had opened the road, according to Jen.
“It was everyday people, just good Samaritans, who were out there moving trees and debris out of the way,” she said.
Kris said he was thankful he had rented a jeep for the trip as he now found himself white-knuckling the steering wheel as he navigated around the debris and power lines that had yet to be moved, all the while worrying that the high winds could suddenly make the roads impassable again. To make matters worse, the GPS navigation system in the vehicle was of little use during the five-hour journey on the narrow, cliff-side roads to the airport hotel. (The trip typically would only take 45 minutes, Kris said.)
No flight delays - a safe trip home
Despite concerns that the windy conditions might cause their flight to be delayed or even canceled, the couple made their connecting flight to Honolulu and arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport at 7 a.m. on Thursday.
“It was just such a surreal experience,” said Jen. “Because looking at all of the footage, now that reporters can go in there (to areas affected by the wildfires), we can see all of these places that we were at just a couple of days before, enjoying and visiting with people – and now it’s all just burned down to the ground.”
A photo of the couple at the Old Lahaina Luau depicts a location that Kris said was one of the spots devastated by the deadly wildfires, which have killed at least 55 people.
“I saw a picture of the luau building and it was all in flames,” Kris said.
Home safe and looking to help people of Maui
Now that they are safely home, the Lucanders are looking to help the people of Maui, who Kris said will be feeling the effects of the wildfires for a long time.
“The death toll is going up, and search and recovery efforts will take days,” he said. “I don’t foresee the electric grid alone to be up for a month. The mass amount of destruction is something we will never forget. It is truly an apocalyptic scene.”
The couple are asking anyone who would like to help out to donate a check to the Westminster Lions Club (Westminster Lions Club, PO Box 618, Westminster, MA 01473 c/o Maui efforts), where the Lucanders are members. Kris said he would also tag the Lions Club International for help, and that all money collected would be sent directly to the people of Maui.
“We can clearly see that there are going to be shortages of food and water, so it just makes sense for us to try to help out as quickly as we can because their infrastructure is going to be down for a long time,” Kris said.
Collected donations will be sent to Maui by Monday, Aug. 28, according to Kris.
This article originally appeared on Gardner News: Westminster couple escape Maui wildfire, use Lions Club to aid residents
