Two Lahaina residents who had fought for years to build a new fire station to protect their community watched as a deadly blaze consumed their homes this month.
Joseph Pluta and Rick Nava said they had already arranged for a land donation, secured more than $400,000 toward the project and worked out logistics to ship a modular fire station to west Maui.
It was too late.
Pluta, 74, said he woke up in a cloud of smoke as a smoke alarm blared around 3 a.m., then dived out of his window as the wildfire began to overtake his home.
“I rolled up and looked up and my total house was in flames,” said Pluta, who is a real estate broker and leads the nonprofit West Maui Taxpayers Association.
Nava, 64, said he fled Lahaina with six other family members, including two grandchildren, as fires burned on both sides of the main access road.
“The family is intact. No belongings, no house,” he said, summarizing his situation now.
Conditions in Maui were harrowing for firefighters as hurricane-strength winds sent flames roaring through overgrown grasses, but the Lahaina residents believe having an additional fire station — and the resources to staff it — could have saved lives.
“If we would have had 15 more firemen and one more firetruck, we’d have hundreds of more people living today,” Pluta said, referring to the total staffing for a 24-hour fire station.
When Hurricane Lane struck Hawaii in 2018, multiple wildfires erupted in high winds on Maui’s dry side. The wildfires, which were in the Lahaina area, destroyed more than 20 structures and about 30 vehicles.
For Lahaina residents, the brush with disaster served as another wake-up call to the devastation possible from increasingly destructive wildfires — especially during a battering storm like Lane.
“The fire came very close to where I live,” Nava said. “We thought it was important to the county to figure out what was going on here and to address the issue for safety.”
They pushed for the fire station, additional firebreaks and more. Nava and Pluta set up community meetings and demanded local officials prepare a more comprehensive fire response.
Pluta said he pleaded with officials, including Herman Andaya, who recently resigned as the director of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, to work with his community and incorporate a new, all-hazards plan for West Maui into the agency’s overall emergency documentation. That request was denied, he said. Pluta said he sought — and was prevented — from sharing copies of an after-action report that outlined lessons to be learned from the county’s 2018 response to Lane.
“There’s blood on the hands of our politicians,” Pluta said, adding that he was told not to talk about the report.
Andaya, who quit last Thursday citing health reasons amid criticism for his agency’s response to the Lahaina fire, did not respond to a request for comment. County officials declined a request for comment about the fire station and other plans.
To build the fire station, Pluta and Nava convinced a local real estate developer to donate two acres. Another West Maui resident, Thomas English, suggested they pursue a modular fire station building to cut down on construction costs, which are higher on the island.
English found a Canadian company, Extreme Modular Buildings, to build the station and the group priced out shipping and logistics costs to truck the station to California, send it on a barge to Maui and then truck it to its new home on the island. Maui county officials planned to fast-track zoning, according to Pluta.
The group had even measured the dimensions of the “pali” tunnel on Maui to ensure the station could squeeze through to its destination.
“We just didn’t have the money,” Nava said.
The group decided to crowdsource the project. By the time the fire hit, the group had secured more than $400,000 of the $2 million goal for the fire station, with a fundraising event planned for December.
The site of the potential fire station is about 6 miles from the center of Lahaina. Maui Fire Chief Bradford Ventura helped select the location. County documents, including emails and meeting minutes from the fire and public safety commission, show the station was a topic of discussion last year, but often described as being in its early stages.
“We definitely support the idea from WMIF and would like to see them be successful in completing this project,” Deputy Fire Chief Gavin Fujioka told the Maui News last year, referring to Pluta’s nonprofit fund with an acronym.
Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen was supportive of the effort and donated $1,000 toward it, according to Pluta. Pluta said he signed a nonbinding agreement with the previous mayoral administration and the landowner assuring, in principle, that the station would be staffed for use and that the county would provide a fire truck.
Earlier this year, Pluta promoted the project during an annual meeting for his nonprofit group.
“We’re really worried Lahaina is in danger,” Pluta said in a speech available on YouTube, referring to concerns after a fire last year. “Had the wind been blowing downhill instead of uphill like it did, we might not be talking here today because that fire could have just came across like the one did in August of 2018.”
Both Nava and Pluta are now homeless. Pluta is staying at a friend’s condo in another part of Maui. Nava is temporarily staying at a resort near Lahaina.
“If the smoke alarm hadn’t gone off at 3 a.m. I’d be dead,” Pluta said. “A minute more and I would have been dead.”
He said he narrowly escaped death several times on the night Lahaina burned.
After leaping from his first-story bathroom window, Pluta said he landed on his head, picking up a few scratches and scrapes. He got up to see the window consumed by flames within seconds. His neighbors’ houses were on fire, too. Pluta was wearing only a pair of shorts — he didn’t even have shoes.
“Embers and flames were all around me in the wind singeing my body,” he said.
Pluta said he headed for the ocean. A fire utility truck happened to drive nearby. In shock and covered in soot, he hitched a ride to a bus, which brought him to a shelter at Maui Preparatory Academy, where other survivors were gathered.
At the shelter, he found a bathroom vanity, cupped his hands and tried to suck up enough water to rinse the soot out of his mouth. Then he climbed a small hill to find cellphone service and called his family. For the Vietnam veteran, who developed post-traumatic stress disorder because of the war, it was the most horrifying night of his life.
Tourists from Seattle later gave him a T-shirt and a pair of size 13 shoes, oversized for his feet. It was an overwhelming gift for someone who suddenly had nothing at all.
Pluta and Nava recognize that a single fire station may not have prevented this disaster entirely. But they say community leaders lost sight of their responsibility to public safety in Maui.
West Maui’s 2014 community wildfire protection plan, the latest plan available, said “fire safety zones for all neighborhoods and areas of Western Maui” were yet to be determined.
“The community should not have to build a fire station,” Nava said. “It should be built by the government.”