New York Times Correspondent Reports on the Wildfires in Maui

We spent several hours walking through Lahaina, and, really, it’s a scene of immense devastation. I mean, it’s a mile-long spread of destroyed homes and rubble and ashes. There’s still properties that are smoldering. It was really just difficult to comprehend what we were looking at yesterday in Lahaina. It’s really a place that brings a lot of joy to a lot of people. For the locals, they have a really cherished sense of community in Lahaina. For the tourists, it’s a place where many people have some of their fondest life memories. Some of them had minutes or even just seconds before they realized they needed to get out. We met one man who was there and realized he didn’t have really any chance to evacuate, and he ended up lying face down in the dirt at a baseball field and spent hours as embers were flying overhead and around him. He called it like a, you know, a sandstorm of heat that he could not get away from. There’s so much work left to be done there. I think a lot of residents are pretty alarmed at how little support they’ve seen so far. The community has really stood up to fend for itself, driving pickup trucks out of town to get bottles of water, driving boats out to pick up gas for the community, to see the level of suffering and devastation and grief there. It’s, you know, it was really difficult to process, and it’s hard to think about where Lahaina is going to go from here.