Through the afternoon and into evening, Kohler and her crewmates chased the fire across the mountainside, in neighborhoods above downtown Lahaina. They hollered at people watering their homes with garden hoses to get out. They picked spots to fight the fire, the streams from their hoses bending sideways with the wind, and taking cover behind their trucks when the toxic plumes swept toward them, only to move again because the heat prevented them from getting close enough to make a difference.
“As we’re going, these people are yelling at us, ‘Our house is on fire, our house is on fire.’ We’re like, ‘We have to go this way. I’m sorry.’ It was just devastating,” Kohler said. “It’s like, how do we make it so that there’s less damage, you know, so all this whole place doesn’t burn?”
They made their way to Komo Mai Street, in the Kahoma subdivision. Setting up with another crew, they connected to a hydrant and began hitting flames. After a while, a captain called out, “We need more pressure.”
Kohler checked the intake line and saw the water pressure had dropped.
It is not clear why some fire hydrants ran dry. Power outages were one factor. Others may include the fire’s destruction of water lines and many crews tapping into the system at the same time.
“You know, sometimes when you’re in a nightmare, you can tell yourself that and then you wake up. And you’re like, yes, we’re in a nightmare,” Kohler said. “And we weren’t in a nightmare. It was very real.”
The crew retreated to an industrial area farther north. They found a hydrant with water and then made a brief stand at a church and a storage facility, Kohler said. They moved to Wahikuli, a northern neighborhood where Kohler lived with her husband and their 12-year-old twins, but the hydrants they tried were dry.
They drove to a brush line above the neighborhood to catch their breath and figure out what to do next. Then they got a call that they were going to be given a break. It was around 8:30 p.m.
“The thought of relief was relieving. And in a sense, the thought of relief was terrifying,” Kohler said. “It’s like, wait, no, we need to stay here and fight this thing till we’re done. Like, we’re not done yet.”
She and her crewmates got into pickup trucks for the drive back to the station. On the way, Kohler saw her home still standing. She was in “mission mode,” she said, and didn’t think of going in.
When Kohler arrived at the station, she found her husband, Jonny Varona, who is also a firefighter, and their children. Without anyone to care for the kids, he’d remained with them through the day.
Varona asked if she wanted him to swap into work for her. “I can’t stop now,” she told him.
She asked him to go to their house, less than a mile away, to get cash and jewelry and other irreplaceable things. But he worried he wouldn’t make it back.
He took the kids to Napili, where many evacuees had sought safety. Kohler went back to work.
She and her colleagues spent the next several hours driving to and from the Lahaina waterfront, past burning buildings, helping to evacuate people who’d been pulled from the ocean.
“We were on robotic mode where we just got to keep doing what we can to help who we can,” she said.
During those runs, Kohler would catch a glimpse of her home. For a while, the house seemed safe. Then she saw that one side of her street was on fire.
Then, around midnight, she saw that her home was on fire.
“I had already accepted it. I think I knew this whole town’s going to burn down, why not my house? Only seems fair, to be honest.”
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