Rubble, charred scrap and a gray blanket of ashes. It’s all that remains in the old town of Hawaii’s former capital, Lahaina, after the brutal fire that turned it to dust in just four hours and is on pace to become the deadliest in recent US history, after leave at least 93 dead and a thousand missing. Its residents were able to return this Saturday for the first time to collect their belongings, although they have barely managed to rescue a handful of objects. The authorities calculate that the reconstruction will exceed 5,000 million dollars (about 4,500 million euros). But something cannot be recovered: the enormous historical legacy that the flames have devoured.
Lahaina, in the northwest of the island of Maui, had a double identity: on the one hand, an idyllic tourist port, visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year attracted by its sun —in the native language, Lahaina means “cruel sun”— , its motley shops and its gastronomic offer. But it was also a gateway to the archipelago’s past, both its independent and colonial-era history, and a pillar of Hawaiian identity.
Its history spans centuries. It was one of the favorite places of the kings of Maui. King Kamehameha, who united the Hawaiian archipelago into a single kingdom after defeating the chiefs of the rest of the islands, made it his court. Over time it ended up being designated the capital in the 19th century.
The History Museum, housed in the old courthouse, housed relics from the era when Hawaii had yet to be discovered by Western explorers. The oldest building, the Baldwin house, was a symbol of the arrival of the first missionaries who settled there, now transformed into a museum of the time and a center for the dissemination of Hawaiian culture, home to traditional music festivals. The Wo Hing Museum, a small wooden building built by Cantonese immigrants to serve as a temple and community kitchen, treasured the past of Maui’s thriving Chinese-Hawaiian community. Hawaiian kings, queens, princesses, and chiefs were buried in the Waiola Church Cemetery.
Lahaina’s greatest symbol, a banyan tree brought from India by Christian missionaries 150 years ago and considered the oldest living tree on the island, covered an entire 2,000-square-meter park with its multiple trunks. Generation after generation had gathered in its shadow. Planted in 1873, it had witnessed the conversion of the archipelago: from an independent kingdom to a United States territory at the dawn of the 20th century, and later to a State of the Union, in 1959.
Everything has been devoured or damaged by the flames. The fire, fueled by the winds of a distant hurricane, spread rapidly, before the relics had been brought to safety. The 122-year-old Pioneer Inn hotel is also history, in whose rooms authors such as Mark Twain or Jack London had stayed. The last queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, also stayed at the inn.
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The banyan tree so beloved by Lahaina residents, from whose branches buckets of water were hung to stimulate the growth of its aerial roots, still stands, but it has lost its leaves and its branches are scorched. It is still unknown if the underground roots were affected and if the tree will be able to revive.
“There is nothing that brought me to tears more today than the thought of the banyan tree in my hometown of Lahaina,” a person who goes by the name HawaiiDelilah wrote on X (formerly Twitter). But “we will rebuild” and “Maui’s natural beauty will be forever,” she added.
The loss of the cultural and historical legacy is especially evident in what until Tuesday was Front Street, its main street, and the surrounding area. Rows of small colored wooden houses on a promenade that was also a journey through the history of the island and its past as the center of political power in the archipelago and the center of commercial exchange in the Pacific.
If for centuries Hawaii was isolated from the rest of the world, visited only by the canoes of other Polynesian kingdoms, history changed with the arrival of white explorers. In the early 19th century, fleets of American whaling ships began arriving in Lahaina. In the middle of that century, more than 400 ships dedicated to hunting these animals docked in the port of that city every year, and the behavior of its sailors did not stop scandalizing the other large Western group residing in the city: the missionaries who They were trying to convert the local population.
In 1845 the capital was moved to Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. With the decline of the whaling industry, the island’s economy became dependent on another sector, the vast pineapple and sugar cane plantations, which took up most of Maui’s arable land. Thousands of Chinese and Japanese immigrants came to work as day laborers in the fields; many stayed. In 1898, a coup overthrew the queen and made the archipelago US territory.
The testimony of that past has been revealed to be very fragile. The old wood and textiles from many of the shops that dotted the neighborhood have been propitious food for the llamas. The images show that, in the old town, hardly anything has been left standing. The old court building has lost its roof and its interior has been consumed. From the Baldwin house, from the satellite images, only the garden wall seems to remain standing.
“They were all wooden buildings, plank buildings, little shops, all very close together. Maybe only separated by an alley between them,” Lahaina Restoration Foundation director Theo Morrison told ABC News. “So, sure, they burned like matches.”
Not everything is lost. The documents kept by the History Museum, for example, were digitized. But historic buildings “are structures that cannot be replaced,” Morrison argued immediately after the disaster.
Particularly hit by the catastrophe —which is on its way to overcoming the fire that destroyed the Californian town of Paradise in 2018 and left 85 dead—, the native Hawaiian population has remained settled in Lahaina. A population that, as in the rest of the island and the archipelago, had seen the conversion of their ancestral lands into plantations that monopolized the water supply and dried up their land first, and then into luxury hotels and tourist accommodation that have triggered the housing prices and being driven out of the real estate market: this community represents 10% of Maui’s residents (35,000 total), but they account for 50% of the homeless. Many of them lived in old and fragile houses, inherited over generations, and not necessarily insured. The fire has taken them.
Having these communities will be essential for a good reconstruction, as declared by the founder of the association Nuestro Hawai, Kaniela Ing, on NBC. “There has to be a lot of will and clear intervention to ensure that federal and philanthropic resources support native residents, not to stop serious damage like this, but also to put us on a positive path.”
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