For many Lahaina residents, the hotel program meant living at work, because the hospitality industry is the main employer in West Maui. The night of the fire, after making sure his family was safe, Kekoa Mowat returned to the Hyatt Regency, where he was head of security, to calm the 2,000 tourists staying there; later he had to coordinate their evacuation plans. Once they were gone, he had to find accommodations for displaced fire victims, his family included. For months, 56 members of his ohana, or family, occupied the entire 21st floor.
For Randy Dadez, looking after his family became another full time job, along with driving for the Kapalua Resort. His youngest child, Kobe, who was 8, woke up most nights terrified. When Kobe returned to school a month after the fire, he repeatedly asked the nurse to call his parents to make sure they were still alive. Samara, who was about to turn 13, hid in the school bathroom during recess and lunch because students at her new middle school bullied her for being without a home. Rhaliyah tried therapy, without success — most practitioners were counseling from the mainland over video calls; she felt they could never understand what she went through.
“When housing remains unstable, the disaster continues,” says Ruben Juarez, who leads the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study and published its findings this year in JAMA Psychiatry. “Obviously not through the flames but through chronic stress, disrupted sleep and repeated displacement.” He told me that one in five people he surveyed felt insecure about their housing situation — that is, they were experiencing anxiety about affording rent, facing another move or making children change schools again. These individuals, he says, were dealing with “some of the worst mental-health outcomes,” including suicidal thoughts. One study found that the combined rate of deaths by suicide and overdose in Maui in August 2023 was by far the highest it had been in 10 years.
When tourism resumed, just two months later, vacationers stayed in the same resorts as the survivors. Living next to them was complicated, Rhaliyah told me; the family wasn’t comfortable leaving their rooms, and it felt awkward to have to cope with the disaster’s aftermath while the neighboring room was occupied by a couple on their honeymoon. She says the tourists seemed intent on overlooking the fire’s devastation.