Real Survival Stories - Hawaii Wildfire: Ocean or Inferno? (Part 2 of 2)

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

We return to Annelise Cochran and the Lahaina wildfire. As the blaze intensifies, she and her neighbours must band together to keep each other going. But as the night deepens, new and unexpected travails present themselves. The locals will find themselves trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea… A Noiser production, written by Joe Viner. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions Annelise is a listener to the show who got in touch with her incredible story. If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. It's around 9 p.m. on August August 8th, 2023. Fire illuminates the night sky above the southwest coast of Maui, where the small town of Lahaina has been ablaze for more than five hours. With its streets of historic wooden buildings and dry, brittle vegetation, this quaint seaside settlement is like a tinderbox. Flames, fueled by hurricane-force winds, have rampaged through the town. Entire residential blocks have been reduced to smoldering piles of ash.

Burnt-out shells of cars line the sidewalks, their hubcaps melted into pools of liquid aluminium. Here and there, charred timber frameworks rise above the devastation, blackened skeletons that once were churches, schools, municipal buildings. Along the shoreline, at the base of a five-foot-high sea wall, a group of townsfolk have taken shelter. They huddle together on the rocks and in the ocean, breathing what little air they can suck through the fabric of their clothes. Among them is 30-year-old Annalise Cochran. Annalise lets the seawater lap around her chest and shoulders. She's been submerged like this for over four hours,

dodging the flaming debris that's carried with the waves. She's exhausted, bruised, burned, and now the fire isn't her only problem. Hours spent in the ocean have lowered her body temperature to a dangerous extent. She's wracked with violent, convulsive shivers. I was shaking like a leaf, and I realized that, like, we made it through the smoke, we made it through the flames, and now we have to make it through hypothermia.

Like, now you're freezing to death in the middle of a fire. Annalise looks up beyond the seawall. Along the street, scorched palm trees are backlit by the furnace-like glow of the fire. The land is a black and orange hellscape of heat and smoke. But the ocean is sucking the life from Annalise's body. She's stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. Throughout the night, everything felt like it was the only choice we had. Well, we had to get into the ocean because there was a fire and people like, wow, that's so brave of you.

And it's like, no, it was really just the only choice. And kind of the same thing. It's like now I'm in hypothermia in the ocean. My only choice now is to go back into the fire. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives.

In this episode, we return to Annalise Cochran. As the Hawaiian wildfire continues to rage, she and her fellow Lahainans must band together. But as the night deepens, the blaze will intensify and new, unexpected travails will present themselves. Some of these pieces of debris were so large that they would hit the ocean and they wouldn't go out. And so the waves would start pushing flaming debris at you. Even the ocean could burn you. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. 6pm on Tuesday, August 8th, 2023, in Lahaina.

The long sea wall separates the Pacific Ocean from Front Street, Lahaina's bustling main thoroughfare. At the base of this partition, Annalise hunkers down among the waves. Dozens of people cling to the rocks, all sheltering from the wildfire that rages just beyond this five-foot wall. It's slightly before sundown, but the smoke filling the sky has drawn a screen of hazy darkness over the island. It might as well be midnight. Tentatively, Annalise lifts her head and peers along the seafront.

She squints, her eyes streaming from the acrid smoke. She can see that some buildings along Front Street have already burned down, reduced to red-hot, glowing embers. The situation is abject, but Annalise remains proactive. I was determined that I was not just going to pick a spot and sit there, but that I was going to be active throughout the night to consistently monitor for the best situation. And that's very boat-minded, kind of just be like constantly reassessing.

In normal times, Annalise works as a vessel supervisor for a whale conservation non-profit. Spending her days aboard boats, she's trained to expect the unexpected and to respond when things go wrong. With her t-shirt clamped over her mouth, she shouts over the roar of the waves, urging others to follow her as she seeks out safer positions along the wall. One person remains close to Annalise throughout,

her neighbor, Atina. As a selfless pillar of the community, she has also stepped up to provide guidance and reassurance anytime that anybody along the entire rock wall would start to cough and we would hear it a tina would just shout in their direction spit it out i just thought it's like it didn't she didn't care who it was how far away they were she just knew that like she needed to remind them like whatever that is in you, get

it out. And she would also, every time that the wind shifted direction, which was multiple times throughout the night, it was constantly shifting back and forth. Every time the wind shifted, she would call out to everybody, okay, the wind shifted. Turn your head this direction to breathe. She'd be like, turn your head left and breathe. Turn your head right and breathe. It's exactly this kind of teamwork, this community spirit, that has made Lahaina such a special place to live. Right now, it could also be vital for everyone's survival. Suddenly the wind changes direction again, and Atina bellows instructions.

Everyone, turn your head. As the evening draws on, this routine is repeated time and again. Turn to the right and breathe. Turn to the left. Breathe. heard only in Canada, reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. As nightfall beckons, the fire shows no sign of dying down. In fact, it intensifies.

Flurries of scaldingly hot embers descend from the sky. Immediately, people begin splashing water on those around them, dousing any fiery fragments that might have landed. Worse still, huge pieces of flaming debris crash into the ocean around them. Rather than being extinguished by the water, the objects continue to burn, surging towards the shore on the crest of each wave. Avoiding them requires ceaseless vigilance.

The whole night we were constantly you know, constantly like splashing water onto the burning debris around you that's coming in with the waves. And you're also checking over your shoulder because we'd all put our bags up as high as we could on the rocks, but the embers are falling on your bags and it's catching your bags on fire.

So every once in a while, you'd hear somebody shout out like, hey, there's a bag down there on fire. And everybody would like turn around and see if it's their bag and try to run and extinguish it. From sky, sea and land, danger is coming from all directions, all angles. fire and everybody would like turn around and see if it's their bag and try to run and extinguish it from sky sea and land danger is coming from all directions all angles annalise sits semi-reclined at the base of the wall her body pressed against the rocks she can feel them getting hotter beneath

her like a stove top warming up in one hand she clutches a blue Ikea bag, filled with precious items she managed to retrieve from her apartment before evacuating. Some photographs, a few pieces of jewelry, a scrapbook filled with memories. She flits her eyes left and right, keeping track of the fire's progress along Front Street. As she stares into the flames, the roar of the inferno becomes muffled and dreamlike and the flickering orange fingers take on a hypnotic quality. At some point the night began to almost feel more calm. It's like when you're staring into a campfire

and the world slows down a little bit. Fire is kind of magical. It's beautiful to watch in a weird way. it's not just a trick of the mind the ferocity of the blaze has lessened slightly the buildings along the shorefront have been totally incinerated and with no more fresh timber to feed on the inferno has started to dwindle. But there's still no let-up from the wind, which is keeping the fire oxygenated and alive. Even so, Annalise allows herself a degree of optimism. Maybe the worst of it is behind them. As it turns out, this period of peace and quiet is merely the calm before the storm.

You start to hear these like ominous sounds in the distance at first. It was like pretty far away. You just hear these like little pops. And then the pops getting closer and closer and closer. And you realize like these are actually pretty big. Whatever this is, it's far away, but it's a big noise that's happening. And they're getting closer and closer and closer. We were like, are these transformers? Are these propane tanks?

Like, what is this that we're hearing, like, exploding off in the distance? Are these gas stations? We couldn't tell. The explosions are getting closer. But what are they? Annalise glances over at Atina, whose face is etched with fear and confusion. She turns to her elderly next-door neighbor Freeman, who's sitting on the rocks nearby with his eyes closed. Up and down the sea wall, people crane their necks and mutter in anxious huddles until, slowly, it dawns on them. It started to piece together. It's like, oh, these are the cars that are in the roads that are starting to catch on fire. And the road that I was on, you have to remember that all the cars were parked bumper to bumper.

There was two lanes that were supposed to be going two different directions, but there's cars parked in both lanes, as well as cars on either side of those lanes parked on both sides of the road. So it's four cars wide, bumper to bumper for blocks. And so like the tail end of those cars start to explode and start coming closer to us. And I remember being instantly so scared. up at the boulders separating her from the cars on Front Street. It suddenly feels like nowhere is safe. Some of the cars are literally one foot on the other side of these rocks. They're like

pressed up against the rocks almost. If that car explodes, what's going to happen to this rock wall? Like how could these rocks stay intact? Are they going to fall on our heads? Do we have to go out into the ocean? Or if we go out into the ocean, are we going to get hit by pieces of car that's exploding and we should be ducking for safety behind this wall? You know, it's like, what is even the best place to be if that car next to me explodes all of a sudden? And we were so torn on what to even do. And it felt like we had very little time because we just kept hearing them getting closer closer and closer annalise scans the shoreline the cars are parked so close together there's barely an inch between

them but then she sees it a gap between two vehicles about 20 feet further along the wall maybe if they can position themselves by that gap they'll be safe from the brunt of the explosions. She runs the plan by Tina, who nods in agreement. There is just one problem. Freeman. The 80-year-old is frail and shaky on his feet. Trying to get him up and moving could endanger both him and others. But they can't leave him here alone. It's an impossible dilemma. And in the end, it's Freeman who decides for them.

One of my favorite things about Freeman is the man could not help himself from smiling. And he never had an answer besides everything's all good. Like it's great. Things are great. So we'd check in throughout the night and be like, Freeman, how are you doing? Expecting him to be like, oh, I'm hanging in there. But every single time he'd throw up a shaka, which is like why he's like, I'm a-okay. It's pinky and thumb out. He'd be like, I'm good. I'm good. It was just crazy. And so he just was like super calm. And he's like, no, go. You should go. We were like, well, we don't want to leave you behind. He's like, no, like you go.

He was very, very strongly with us doing that. I think he really, he loved Atina so deeply. He wanted her to be safe. With Freeman's blessing, Annalise and Atina leave him where he is and begin inching their way towards the gap in the parked cars. The rocks are slippery underfoot, partially submerged beneath the churning surf. The bedraggled duo trip and stumble their way along the shoreline.

And still the blasts get louder, closer. The sound would shake the ground. We're on these, you know, boulders, and you'd feel the boulders moving underneath of you like an earthquake every single time one of the cars would explode. And you would get, even the cars that were a little bit further away from us,

you would get hit with this wall of just heat that would come off of the explosion in just this wave that would just wash over you. It was like sticky air. It was gross, and it smelled horrible. Coughing and gagging, they scramble on. Eventually, they reach the gap beneath the cars where they hunker down and brace themselves.

But now, an invisible menace is starting to take hold. At one point, I remember, I don't even remember what I was going to say to Atina, but I turned around to say something to her. And when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I had no voice anymore. It's like I'd been to 16 rock concerts consecutively over the last week. And I was like, I was trying to talk and like just barely a whisper was coming out and I was like, I can't talk.

I remember just squeaking out like, I can't talk. The chemical fumes have choked her voice box. When Atina tries to reassure Annalise, she too is unable to speak. All the women can do is hold on to each other. And we were both just like confused. I remember whispering to her, hold my hand, don't talk. And so we held hands and we just promised each other

like not to speak unless we had to. And we would just squeeze each other's hand every couple of seconds, just be like, I'm still here. Are you still there? And we'd wait for the other person to squeeze back. While Annalise and Etina grip one another tightly, the fumes around them are getting thicker. Meanwhile, fiery debris continues to wash ashore and blistering embers blow horizontally on the wind.

With the air quality worsening, it's getting harder for Annalise to supply her brain with oxygen. Until now, quick thinking has kept her alive. I started to lose consciousness actually before the cars closest to us began to explode. I lost consciousness from the fumes of the cars a couple of cars away still. And at that point, I remember I lost a lot of time. Time gets really weird for me from then on out. I don't have as good of a concept of like how long things took because I was slipping in and out of consciousness and I'm really not sure how long those periods were. Black spots appear.

Periods of emptiness punctuated by snapshot images of the scenes around her. And in this semi-lucid state, Annalise starts experiencing strange sensations. I did feel this, like, strong pull. It was like, you need to go this way. And it's funny because the direction that it was, like, telling me to go was actually, if I were to open my eyes and look, was into the fire.

It's about 9pm Annalise drifts in and out of consciousness She's slumped on the rocks at the base of the wall Where the tide rhythmically washes in and out Lapping around her chin I remember more than once Going unconscious and feeling Just the cool sensation of water on my lips And being like, that was the thing that I was like, oh, you have to pick your head up and breathe. Like, you're going to drown yourself here.

And for somebody who loves the ocean so much and who felt so much comfort in the ocean, it really, truly felt like the ocean telling me to stay alive each time. And it's like, hey, wake up, little girl. Like, get up. You got things to do. Annalise's eyes snap open. The air seems clearer now. The toxic fumes have somewhat dissipated and she can breathe more freely. A sudden intake of oxygen brings her faculties roaring back. I became fully alert all of a sudden and was just there.

And Atina had the same feeling. Like we were just there now and we could breathe. And I remember looking at her and we could talk again. And I was just like, oh my God, like we made it through. We made it through this. But then I just remember very quickly, she was like, hey, you're shaking. And she was right.

I hadn't really noticed, but I was shaking very, very badly. Annalise has been submerged in cold water for over four hours. It's a cruel irony that in the midst of this wildfire, the greatest danger right now is hypothermia. I was shaking like a leaf, and I realized that we made it through the smoke. We made it through the flames. we made it through the exploding cars. And now we have to make it through hypothermia. Like now you're freezing to death in the middle of a fire.

There's only one thing for it. Cautiously, Annalise starts climbing up over the boulders towards the top of the seawall. As she does, powerful waves of heat radiate from the fire. The ferocious wind has finally started to lessen, which allows her to lift her head above the partition. And for the first time, she can properly assess the scale of the devastation. You could see, you know, just how much of the town was gone.

It was demolished. It was flattened. You could see views that you'd never imagined before. It's like, how could you stand on the ocean in Lahaina and look up and see, you know, that part of town

or that part of town or that far up the mountain? Like, there was always a tree there. There was always a building in the way. And all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I can see way too much. Everything's gone. Embers drift down onto her head and neck and arms, burning her skin. But she hardly pays them any notice.

Reaching into her bag, she removes her cell phone. With trembling fingers, she dials. I turned on my phone and I called 911. I told them where we were and that we needed to be rescued. And my call actually went through, which was remarkable. And they told me that they knew that there was people there, but that they didn't have a way to get to us. They were going to try, but there wasn't they didn't have a way to get to us. They were going to try,

but there wasn't like a clearly defined way of how to get to us. There were still areas of fire in the town. The roads were full of debris. Emergency units were being called to other places. The Coast Guard was out in the water with a boat, but they were having trouble getting into shore to collect us. The roads are blocked.

The ocean is rough and the shoreline rocky. There's little Annalise or any of her fellow survivors can do. But at least they have survived. As she looks around, she sees others having this same realization. No one is celebrating just yet, but in the quiet, solemn stillness, there is a sense of collective relief. Annalise turns to Atina. They need to find Freeman, who they haven't seen since the car started exploding. We realized it was time to check in on Freeman, and I called over to Atina that I was going to go.

And so I started walking to him on the roadside. And because I was on the road, I could walk a little bit quicker than Atina, who was down on the rock wall, who also started walking towards him. Annalise limps along the ash-covered sidewalk. She spots Freeman sitting where they left him, with his back to the fire facing the ocean. She climbs back over the wall and picks her way down to him.

His eyes are closed, and he's unresponsive. It's clear that in the time they've been apart, Freeman has tragically died. Annalise's first thought is to perform CPR. But she hesitates. There's no knowing how long Freeman has been without oxygen, and attempting chest compressions on these sharp, jagged rocks would likely cause further damage. I didn't know how much I could afford to put into something that was going to be futile

and that was heartbreaking that was so heartbreaking because I wanted so badly just to do something for him and we felt so powerless I felt like the only thing I could do was really like spare Atina that same feeling Atina who him deeply, they had a long connection as deep friends, would take him out every single week in her car and she would drive him around Lahaina. He loved Lahaina. He was passionate about Lahaina. He had been there his entire life. He had gone to school there. Any chance he had to talk about Lahaina, he would. He was so passionate about it. And his mobility had gone talk about Lahaina, he would. He was so passionate about it. And his mobility had gone down. And so she would take these opportunities once a week to

just let him see Lahaina again, which in retrospect, I'm just so glad she did. A couple of years ago, commercial developers tried to turn their apartment complex into vacation rentals. Freeman gave an interview to reporters asserting his opposition to the scheme. One particular statement he made stands out. He had said a quote, he said, I was born in Lahaina and I will die in Lahaina. And I hate to say that that is what happened,

but I also feel so much relief in my heart that there never had to be a moment where Lahaina didn't exist for Freeman because that it's hard for all of us to not have it. He wouldn't have gone on anyway. It was his place. And so it almost makes sense to me that Freeman and Lahaina would disappear on the same day because they seemed to be intertwined. They were one in the same. Annalise sets herself down on a boulder next to a tina. As a kindness, she tells her that Freeman isn't responding right now, but he might just be unconscious from the fumes.

A funereal silence descends over the seawall. Everyone seems to be mourning some kind of loss, be it their town, their home, a friend, a neighbor. Behind them, the last few flames crackle and spit. The ocean rolls gently against the shoreline. An hour passes and bleeds into the next. We were just so depleted and so drained and we were so heartbroken. And we didn't know what to say to each other. It's gone. It's all gone. And that's really the only thought we had was just like, it's gone. Everything's gone. The people are

gone. The town is gone. Everything's just gone. Three hours after speaking to 911, Annalise at last hears a familiar sound. The faint chug of a boat's engine. She looks out to sea. Smoke hangs in the air like fog, but through the haze, she can make out the glimmer of red pilot lights. It's the Coast Guard. But it's immediately clear

that reaching Annalise and her fellow survivors is going to be a huge challenge. I'm looking at this very rocky, shallow coastline that we're up against. The Coast Guard is going to come in and rescue you. And I'm like, in their inflatable boat, they're going to come across this sharp, shallow reef. I highly doubt that. Like, really highly doubt that. Annalise watches the Coast Guard's boats, three in total, weave through the smoke. Occasionally they stop to pull people out of the water.

It's unclear if they're still alive. Then another rescue boat arrives, different to the Coast Guard vessels. It's a tourist boat, crewed, no doubt, by ordinary people endangering themselves to help others. They immediately were listening to the radio,ering themselves to help others. They immediately were listening to the radio, jumped in to help the Coast Guard pull people out of the water. So commendable, such a testament to the type of people we have in Hawaii. The community we have here is insane in the amount of respect and love and care they have for one another.

The Aloha spirit is no joke, runs really, really deep in Hawaii. And so that boat company was showing that. Their crew were helping people out of the water. But due to the swaying seas and shallow reef, the boats are unable to make it to land. There's no way of reaching the people clustered along the shore. In the end, the crew of the tourist boat

comes up with an inspired solution. The crew grabbed one of their surfboards that we use for lifeguarding and just paddled it out to us and started grabbing people one at a time and paddling them out over the reef back to the boat. Which, you know, so cool to see people just take it into their own hands. As a rescuer paddles the surfboard her way, it seems Annalise is finally going to get off this perilous strip of rocks. But then she looks down at her bag. It's full of precious rescued items. And I realize there is no way that I and this other guy and my entirekea bag are getting on a surfboard and getting out to that boat. Especially not with all the stuff staying dry.

Even if we can manage to balance it, like there is no way it is getting out there dry. And that was devastating because now I'm clutching on to all I own in this earth now. Annalise hugs the bag to her chest. She'll only abandon it once every other possibility has been exhausted. Just as she's racking her brain for a solution, she catches sight of something approaching through the wreckage along Front Street. A pair of blue flashing lights. I saw the first actual lights from an emergency vehicle all night.

There was fire trucks that were coming down the road. And they were still like half a mile, maybe a little bit more down the road. And they could not get to us. There was too much debris in the road. Annalise joins others, frantically waving and shouting. It's not clear yet if the firefighters have seen them, concealed as they are in the smog and the darkness. Just then a man rushes past Annalise to get to the surfboard. He's wearing a head torch. Annalise asks to borrow it. He goes, I don't even want it anymore, and just throws it at me and then just takes off and gets on that surfboard and paddles out.

And so I was stuck there like holding this headlamp. I was like, well, thank you. And started, I just used my hand to kind of cover the front and flashed the Morse code for SOS at the fire trucks. This seems to catch the firefighters' attention. Moments later, they clear the debris and reach the crowd on the sea wall. At last, help has reached Anneliese. She and Etina help each other across the partition. Then they join the procession of survivors trudging down Front Street towards the waiting fire trucks.

It's about 1 a.m. Annalise sits inside a stationary fire truck in a supermarket parking lot. The mood is somber and reflective as they wait for the vehicle to take them to a shelter which has been set up in a local school gymnasium. It seems, finally, they are safe. But then, slowly, Annalise begins feeling something unusual. Something frightening.

Her seat is warming up beneath her. I just remember feeling the seat of my, like where I was sitting in the truck, getting really, really hot. And then it just got hotter and hotter and hotter. And I was like, oh my God, there's an ember underneath the car. And at first I didn't want to like make a big thing about it.

But then I was like, wait, I've seen too many cars explode tonight. Like I'm not going to have this car explode while we're in it. She jumps up, startled, and asks if anyone else can feel what she can. But she is met with blank expressions. After a moment, Atina reaches over.

Atina put her hand underneath to feel my seat, and then she just looked at me with heartbroken eyes, and she goes, it's not hot. And it was that moment that i realized like i am burning it is not the seat that is burning like i am very badly burnt like much more than i realized and i think that was the first moment where i was like oh my god i'm hurt the adrenaline has just pushed me through a lot but i'm not like just sitting on these hot rocks all night not even just the embers falling on, but just sitting on a rock that was too hot. I've burnt all of the skin off of my rear end without even realizing.

And that was like a moment of where it all hit me of, this is personally really hard now. When they reach the shelter, medics immediately treat her scorched skin with antibiotic ointment. There's also concern about her respiratory health. They conduct a preliminary exam to assess the extent of the smoke inhalation. They give her an inhaler to mitigate any symptoms. Then, Annalise finds a corner of the gymnasium to lie down and rest.

She smiles at some fellow survivors from the se wall, easily recognizable by the cuts on their legs and the patch of raw skin across their noses where their shirts have been held clamped for eight hours. Over the course of the next few days, a sense of solidarity emerges in the collective grief. Music becomes a vital way of lifting spirits in the shelter. It was kind of fun because you'd be in the shelter and you're like at your lowest, you're devastated, you're hurting from your burns, you know, you're contemplating everything you've lost and how to move forward in your life. And then you hear like one guy over in the corner of the gymnasium pick up the ukulele and start playing. And then somebody else picks up a guitar and starts playing along with him. And then somebody else grabs a pair of spoons from the dining hall area and starts playing spoons. And then somebody else is just banging on their lap. And all of a sudden, half of the gymnasium is singing and it's beautiful and it sounds so good and everybody's contributing. There's something about that that's so visceral it's so like magical and beautiful and it's it is the only way to heal but as time

passes the harsh reality of life after the fire sets in over a hundred people are confirmed to have lost their lives in the blaze with an unknown number missing and unaccounted for. Almost every building in the town has been destroyed. Five months after the fire, as many as 6,000 remain housed in temporary accommodation. As for Annalise, she recuperates on Maui for a few weeks before flying to Maryland to move back in with her mum. Life had been incredibly difficult for her ever since. I immediately, after the fire, started having really, really bad health issues that can't necessarily be directly related to the fire, but really bear resemblance of things being related to this fire.

Since the fire happened, I've had one cancer scare, and it's really, really likely that I will get cancer in my future because of the things I breathed in that night, even though it's fortunately not now. There's so much to grapple with. Life is still so hard. I currently am still unemployed at this moment because I can't work with my health issues that I've been having. I had to move away from Hawaii and the place that I loved and my friends and the people. So my life looks really different. And honestly, reflecting on it right now,

my life feels really sad compared to where it felt before. And so it's hard because it's like people want to just congratulate you and celebrate your survival, and I just want to cry because it's like I don't feel like I gained anything by surviving in a way. But one thing Annalise is determined to take from the ordeal is the knowledge that her experience, and the experience of so many Lahainans, might provide life-saving lessons for others. One of my friend's moms hosted a swim class for her neighborhood kids in honor of Maui, and they donated all the proceeds to the victims of the fire. And to know that 15 kids now would feel more confident jumping into the ocean if they needed to, you know, it's such a specific situation, and maybe they don't need that. But to be able to swim is a big life skill. And for somebody to hear this and realize, I do want my kid or my spouse or whatever to be comfortable in the ocean.

Like, do that now then. Like, plan for those kinds of things. Plan for whatever situation you're currently uncomfortable with. Go get comfortable with it while you're safe and you can, because you just never know. In the aftermath of the fire, there has, unsurprisingly, been a push for accountability. For her part, Annalise laments the centuries-long process of land

mismanagement that has altered the environment of Lahaina. This, plus climate change, likely created the ideal conditions for the fire to spread as quickly as it did. It's crazy to me that we we could know so much and then take so many steps back because even the landscape of Lahaina has changed so much. It used to be a wetland and now it's a desert. We get less than 10 inches of rainfall a year and none of that water is retained because we've filled in the wetland and put a baseball field there. As for the future of Lahaina, Annalise is hopeful that the town will be rebuilt eventually, and that she will return home one day. She urges developers to learn from the wisdom of indigenous Hawaiian culture. Indigenous people have supported this land, and the land has supported them for way, way longer than it has supported colonists. And so I much more value the opinion

on what to do with that land of the indigenous people because they have been managing that land longer and have been more successful with that land for a much longer period of time. They know their land and we have to trust that. Whatever the future holds, the town stuck together, even during this most devastating tragedy.

Somebody at the shelter said, this is my favorite quote, they said, Lahaina, it's the kind of place where somebody can have two pieces of bread and they'll offer you one. I think one final reminder is like learn from the community of Hawaii to be those kinds of people in the face of disaster. Be loving and supportive. And I think everybody should take that lesson away. You survive to help other people also survive. Next time on Real Survival Stories, we meet 37-year-old Canadian Jill Hyneth. As a professional cave diver, she has one of the most dangerous jobs on Earth,

exploring sub-aquatic tunnels and caverns. In 2001, she travels to the Southern Ocean, attempting to become the first person to swim inside an iceberg. But Jill gets more than she bargained for. When an icy underwater cave threatens to trap her forever, every breath becomes precious, and every decision becomes life or death. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen now without waiting a week by subscribing to Noisa Plus.