‘It’s just completely gone’: Harrowing Maui fire escape for Bay Area vacationer

Dave Hovis and his friends hardly noticed the advisories for strong wind gusts from Hurricane Dora passing far off shore earlier this week as they enjoyed a relaxing vacation in a friend’s waterfront home at Baby Beach in Maui. The next day, they were ramming through a gate to escape the deadly wildfire that destroyed the nearby resort town of Lahaina. “We were just hanging out in the pool and, like, boom! All this wind hit,” Hovis, 32, a San Francisco technology startup company manager, said Thursday in a telephone interview with the Bay Area News Group as he boarded a plane back to the Bay Area.

“But the hurricane was 600 miles south so we thought, no big deal. ” On Monday, Hovis, vacationing with four others this week at a friend’s home on the island, said they secured the inflatable pool floats and other loose items and didn’t think much more about it. But by morning, electrical power and cellular service were out.

“We just hunkered down in the house,” Hovis said. “It just got smokier and smokier and we thought ‘OK, it’s just like a brush fire kind of thing. And then it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

We’re all Northern California guys. We realized the winds were driving the fire. ” On Tuesday, Hurricane Dora passing hundreds of miles south of the Hawaiian Islands was blamed for wind gusts of 60-80 mph that knocked out power that evening and grounded firefighting helicopters as fire crews battled multiple blazes around Lahaina and inland in the island upcountry.

By Wednesday afternoon, authorities confirmed 36 people dead from the fires that had sent some people fleeing into the ocean, making it the country’s deadliest wildfire since the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, near Chico. The fires destroyed at least 271 structures. Still, they didn’t realize how much danger they were in.

They got an evacuation notice late Tuesday afternoon, packed their bags in their car and began spraying water on their friend’s house to protect it from the encroaching flames. When the blaze reached the end of their road they joined others helping neighbors hose down their houses to protect them. “Then we saw the palm trees go up,” Hovis said, and the smoke got so thick “we couldn’t breathe.

” They got to their car but with the power out, a gate at the driveway wouldn’t open to let them out, and they couldn’t move it by hand. “We had to ram the gate to get out, which was kind of harrowing,” Hovis said. “It was pretty scary.

There was lots and lots and lots of traffic, downed power lines everywhere, no cell service, just person-to-person information. No one knew what was going on. We were lucky to get out.

” The five vacationing friends spent the next several hours on gridlocked roadways trying to find a hotel away from the danger. They ended up at a Sheraton a mile or two away that let them stay overnight in its ballroom. The next day, with the main road in Lahaina closed, his friend’s father who owned the home where they’d been staying arranged for a fishing boat to pick them up and take them to another friend’s time share.

As the boat cruised along the shore, they passed by Baby Beach where they’d been relaxing just a day before at the pool. Hovis said it reminded him of photos of villages destroyed in the Vietnam War. “It was a beautiful property, but it’s just completely gone,” Hovis said.

The fires on the island have claimed at least three dozen lives. But Hovis and his friends were able to arrange a flight out of Maui Thursday morning on a private jet to Oakland. “We’re happy everyone’s alive,” Hovis said.

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