One of the many abandoned cars near the shoreline of the Hawaiian island of Maui exploded, shaking the earth and blanketing the dozens of people bobbing in the ocean with a brief blast of heat.
In the chilly Pacific waters, where they had spent hours fighting against the powerful pull of tides, the wave of warmth was welcome.
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“We needed it,” Etina Hingano said before pausing. “That one time.”
Hingano, 54, watched from the ocean — her head and singed hand resting on a rock — as the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history scorched her historic hometown of Lahaina last week.
The rest of Hingano’s body was submerged in the water so she would not get burned again by falling embers. Her face was caked in a layer of ash, which felt like paper when she splashed water on it.
Around her, a crying toddler clutched a stranger’s neck, a family of five floated on a drifting piece of plywood, an elderly woman in a wheelchair sat on a pile of rocks, two teenagers rubbed their mother’s arms to keep her warm.
In the pitch-black afternoon, when only the orange of the embers pierced through the thick plumes of smoke, Hingano stopped shivering for a moment. But then the noxious fumes came, burning her throat and starving her body of the little oxygen it had.
“I just remember thinking to myself, I’m going to die,” she said.
When wind-fueled wildfires ripped through parts of Maui last Tuesday, it gave residents and tourists seeking refuge from the flames only seconds to weigh their risks. Fearing the blaze more than open water, about 40 people scaled Lahaina’s seawall and plunged into the Pacific, several survivors said.
In the nine hours that they waited in roughly waist-deep water to be rescued, they battled hypothermia and lack of oxygen, as they summoned strength to stay awake, dodge embers and avoid being swept out to sea.