'My everything – gone in a matter of moments'

Twisted and charred aluminum mixed with shards of glass still litter the floor of the industrial warehouse where Victoria Martocci once ran her diving business. After a forest fire swept through West Maui, all that remained of her 36-foot boat, the Extended Horizons II, were a few engines.

That was six months ago, but Ms. Martocci and her husband, Erik Stein, who are wondering whether to rebuild the company he started in 1983, said the same questions filled their minds. “What will this island look like?” asked Mrs. Martocci. “Will things ever be nearly the same?”

What started as a wildfire erupted in early August in the town of Lahaina, a popular tourist destination, nearly leveling the town, destroying large parts of West Maui and killing at least a hundred people in the deadliest forest fire in the country in more than a century.

The local economy is still in crisis.

By some estimates, rebuilding the city will cost more than $5 billion and take several years. And tense divisions still exist over whether Lahaina, whose economy has long been almost entirely dependent on tourism, should consider a new path forward.

Debates about the ethics of traveling to decimated tourist destinations played out on social media after an earthquake in Morocco and forest fires in Greece last year. But the situation is particularly dire for Maui.

State and federal officials last summer sought shelter for thousands of residents who lost their homes. They have moved people to local hotels and temporary rental properties where many still live. They often shared a wall with vacationers whose reality seemed far from theirs. Other displaced people live in tents on the beach, and some restaurant owners started working from food trucks.

According to the Hawaii Small Business Development Center, about 600 small businesses — half the number registered in Lahaina before the fires — are still not operational.

A recent report from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization predicted that statewide visitor spending this year would decline by about 5 percent, or $1 billion, starting in 2023. The decline in tourism is almost entirely limited to Maui, the report said.

Carl Bonham, the organization's executive director, said the extent and speed of Maui's recovery remain an open question. It depends, Mr. Bonham said, on several factors, including how quickly “displaced residents can be moved from hotels to more permanent housing, the speed of ongoing cleanup efforts, the size and duration of support programs.”

In the weeks after the fires, politicians, Hollywood movie stars, local activists and even the state's tourism board urged travelers to avoid parts of the devastated island.

“Maui is not the place to be on vacation right now,” actor Jason Momoa, a native of Hawaii, wrote on Instagram. “Don't convince yourself that your presence is necessary on an island that is suffering so much.”

Some here believe these reports have had a lasting effect on tourism.

A month after the fires, Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, announced that West Maui communities around Lahaina would officially reopen in October. It was an attempt, he said in an interview, to save the local economy.

“If we were not clear and very direct about when we would reopen, the lingering effects of uncertainty would destroy the entire economy on Maui,” Mr. Green said. “People stopped coming back.”

Despite the proclamation, the return was slow. Many business owners have recently received approval from the U.S. Small Business Administration for reconstruction loans. The agency has approved about $290 million in loans — about $101 million for businesses and nearly $189 million for residential properties. The state and several nonprofits have also made grants available to help small business owners.

But life in Lahaina still feels like limbo.

Tanna Swanson, a close friend of Ms. Martocci and Mr. Stein, spends a lot of time at the couple's home north of Lahaina, where she makes 2,000-piece puzzles to pass the time and distract herself. She owned the Maui Guest House, a five-bedroom bed-and-breakfast that burned down in the flames. It was also her house.

Since then, she has stayed in a stream of hotels and couch surfed at friends' homes, moving eight times. In December, Ms. Swanson, 66, received a $270,000 Small Business Administration loan.

She wouldn't have received it — the mountains of paperwork and emotional toll of the process had long put her off, she said — if she hadn't personally met a Small Business Administration representative who came to Maui to meet with business owners.

She hopes for more such direct relief, she said, to reduce bureaucratic delays.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Swanson used her visitor's pass to enter her neighborhood, which local authorities have sealed off to prevent looting of burned properties.

The desolate swimming pool and a few molten steel address numbers on a concrete wall are all that remain of the bed-and-breakfast, where since 1988 she welcomed guests from all over the world, who enjoyed ocean views from the upper deck. .

She looked at the scorched palm trees and thought about her former employees – five at the time of the fires – and how they, like her, had lost their livelihoods overnight.

“My everything – gone in moments,” she said. “It's not just me. It's the whole community, the whole island.”

An hour away, along two-lane roads where a few tourists still stop to see humpback whales in the waters below, Britney Alejo-Fishell owns Haku Maui.

Her shop in Makawao, a rural part of Maui far from Lahaina, sells traditional Hawaiian leis and hosts workshops on how to make them. A large part of its turnover comes from celebrations among tourists, who flocked to the island in the past. That has all but dried up, said Ms. Alejo-Fishell, who said her profits fell 80 percent last fall after the fires. Since then, she has seen a slight increase.

Before teaching a lei-making class one morning, she discussed the problems her family business had faced in recent years. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she was forced to close her business for a year, and just a few months after business started to recover to pre-pandemic levels, fires engulfed West Maui. She lives on a lower income and hesitates to take out government loans.

“The phone started ringing with order cancellations, and it continues to do so,” she said. “We had survived Covid, but now this is a second Covid situation.”

Ms. Alejo-Fishell, a native Hawaiian, said the wildfires had affected many acquaintances, including friends who had lost loved ones and their homes.

“They are grieving and will continue to be for a while,” she said. But, she added, “tourism is our economy, and we need it to survive.”

Back in Lahaina, the tragedy of August 8 is repeated for Mrs. Martocci. She had a diving expedition planned for that day, but canceled it due to high winds. Hoping to check on the warehouse, she and Mr. Stein raced down Honoapi'ilani Highway, which was choked with traffic because of downed power lines and the growing stream of evacuees. The couple turned away, but they spoke on the phone to Mrs. Swanson, who told them she had been evacuated and had seen thick black smoke, indicative of a structural fire, heading toward their warehouse.

“We didn't know if it was gone, but we had a feeling,” Ms. Martocci said.

In recent months, she and Mr. Stein have begun working to save their business. They considered whether it made sense to move, but Ms. Martocci had never felt more at peace than in the clear blue waters off Maui.

They recently partnered with the Small Business Administration and received a $700,000 loan. But at 64, Mr. Stein feels uneasy about taking on the debt he would have to rebuild, especially considering how much uncertainty still exists.

He needs a renewed permit from the state boating department to operate his business, but to get one he needs a boat — and for now, the marine facility they've used for the past four decades remains partially closed.

“We're in such a holding pattern,” he said. “There is no idea when the situation will ease.”

Ms. Martocci said she has come to think of their community as a painful Venn diagram, where everyone knows someone who has lost a loved one, a home or a business. Some lost all three.

“The place we all knew and loved has been changed forever,” she said. “We just know we have to keep moving forward and find some sense of normalcy.”