Trinette Furtado, who grew up in Lahaina but moved away due to high housing costs, said much of her ʻohana was still living there at the time of the fires.
As she drove over the crest of the bypass into her burned hometown, she described how she was feeling.
“I'm sad," she said. "I'm sad to come and see you know that it doesn't look as devastated as it did in those first months, but it isn't the Lahaina that I know.”
The Lahaina that she knows is people gathering, going to the beach, and talking story on the street or in the store.
“It's that community — that's what makes me sad, is that it's become so torn and so fractured that it's really hard for people to remember what it was like when we were all like a kakoʻo thing when we were all together.”
She recalled the days immediately following the fire.
“When you first came in, you could definitely see all the burn parts. There was no even this dry grass, none of this stuff here. It was burnt devastation, and it was heartbreaking. And then on top of that, to see visitors come, as disaster visitors, 'looky loos,' as if the people that had suffered this loss weren't even there.”
She’s done a lot of outreach to displaced Lahaina residents over the past year and has seen many struggle.
“And that's what makes me sad when I come in here because I know that there are so many folks that have fallen through all of the quote, 'safety nets,' because they weren't so safe and they weren't made for them," she said.
Furtado said a one-size-fits-all approach is not working.
“Not a single person here experienced the fire in the exact same way as another, but that's the way services and things like that are being given — as if we all had the same thing happen.”
Meanwhile, recovery efforts continue.
“We still have people that haven't even had the opportunity to have their feelings about losing what they lost, and now they're expected to go ahead and clean their properties and have a construction crew and know all of these things," she said.
Nearly a year after the fire, Furtado said certain needs of fire survivors are still not being met.
“There very much still is this huge ʻeha, there's this hurt, because while ostensibly, needs are being addressed, intimately, internally — I mean, down to the naʻau, needs are not being addressed because people are being expected to be in a space, in a place of mind, in a space of economic certainty," she said.
"They're expected to be in places where they're not. And they can't get to without further help.”
