By Kirstin Downey, reporter for Civil Beat.
“Normally thousands of visitors would be in the tourist mecca on any given day. But an organized effort by tourism officials helped get them out.”
An amazing account of the heroes behind the scenes that you haven’t heard about.
“Even as the fires in Lahaina were still burning, even before top state officials knew the magnitude of the disaster, a handful of tourism managers on Maui moved quickly to orchestrate an airlift of some 12,000 visitors off the island and out of harm’s way.”
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“Between the night of Aug. 8, when the fires struck Lahaina, and continuing through the next week, hotel industry executives, tourism officials and tour bus operators organized and operated the exodus.
The prompt and purposeful airlift of tourists removed them from further risk and got them out of the way of rescue workers who descended on the island from all over the United States. It also freed up hundreds of rooms for local residents who had been displaced and were confronting the magnitude of their losses.
In West Maui, a major mecca for tourism, only one tourist is believed to have died in the fire. This story of what happened to all the tourists unfolded in the background of the cataclysmic wildfire that destroyed much of Lahaina and took the lives of at least 99 people.
The heroes behind the scenes. A handful of people are getting accolades for what they did, including Lisa Paulson, executive director of the Maui Hotel and Lodging Association, and Roni Gonsalves, Maui station manager for Polynesian Adventure Tours. Both are longtime Maui residents who stepped forward during the crisis.
“Lisa Paulson is a saint; she is an incredible person,” said hotel industry veteran Jimmy Tokioka, director of the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, who has been involved in the disaster recovery effort from the first day.
“Roni Gonsalves is a hero for sure,” said Sherry Duong, executive director of the Maui Visitors Bureau.
The picture is just emerging and is still unclear because many officials on Maui have declined to answer specific questions about what happened during the fires and in their aftermath. County officials have remained mum about what transpired in the emergency operations center and what roles that may have played in the visitor rescue. Public relations officials at the major hotel chains present on the island declined to make their employees available for interviews for this story.
Across the world, the first news accounts of the Lahaina disaster, reported in newspapers, on television screens and via social media, captured the furious scramble of tourists off the island. […]
By about 10:30 that night, Paulson knew that people needed to be evacuated out of West Maui.
“Priority one was getting everybody out,” she said. “Everybody pivoted right away.”
Working with county transportation officials and various tour bus company operators, Paulson began coordinating a transportation system that would do just that.
But to help people escape, others would have to pass through the burn zone to take them out.
Maui’s bus drivers would need to risk their own lives to drive through Lahaina to extract people from danger…”
READ MORE of this amazing article – thanks to Civil Beat, and the details of how people pulled together to help visitors escape in the midst of chaos.
Civil Beat – https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/10/how-tourists-escaped-a-fiery-west-maui-after-the-blaze/
Deadly Clear 