
What was left of Miles and Aparna Patrie's west Maui home after the August 8 wildfire
MAUI, HI (KFGO) – Last week, North Dakota native Miles Patrie and his family were among the thousands of people on the west coast of Maui who fled as a raging wildfire consumed entire neighborhoods and towns over the course of just a few hours. Over 100 people died trying to escape the blazes on Tuesday, August 8. It is now the deadliest wildfire incident in the U.S. in over a century and the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history.
Patrie grew up on a farm outside the tiny town of Bowdon, in the central part of the state, where his parents still live. He went to NDSU and made his way to Washington, D.C. after graduation. He worked for U.S. Senator Kent Conrad, and the USDA on food and food assistance policy. He met his wife, Aparna, an attorney, in Washington.
They lived and worked in the nation’s capitol for a decade, but when the COVID pandemic began to take hold in 2020 and their condo there sustained significant water damage rendering it uninhabitable, Miles and Aparna decided to make a temporary move to another place near and dear to their hearts: Maui.
It was their favorite place to vacation. They even got married there. They visited every chance they got. It seemed like a natural spot to encamp with their two young boys for a stint.
Maui was good to them. Their planned six months there came and went, and the Patries decided to make the island their permanent home.
Their jobs allowed them to work from Hawaii. They sold their D.C. condo. They welcomed a baby girl into their family. In November of last year, they bought a home on the west side of the island, adjacent to historic Lahaina Town.
The electricity and wifi went out in the Patries’ home around 5:00 a.m last Tuesday. The winds were howling. A hurricane was passing south of Hawaii’s Big Island. Miles and Aparna went to a coffee shop which still had internet access, in order to work. Their au pair stayed home with their kids.
When Miles and Aparna returned home that afternoon to relieve the au pair, they noticed the roof on their house had lost shingles in the high winds. A neighbor helped Miles prop up a fence that was in danger of blowing over. Then Aparna noticed a plume of smoke and alerted Miles.
“I went to the end of our driveway and I looked and I saw a big black cloud that was basically in the next neighborhood over at that point. It looked super ominous, like it was going to come our way. I said, ‘we have to go, we have to get out of here,” Miles said.
Their sons had gone to a friend’s house a few miles north earlier in the day. Aparna called a friend to see if they could shelter at their house. Miles grabbed some important documents and things for their kids. They got their 18-month old daughter into the car, and evacuated less than ten minutes after they noticed the smoke. As they pulled out of their driveway, they lost cell reception and would not get it back for days.
Their au pair had left for the day. They had no way to reach the 24-year-old from Argentina who had been living with them as part of a cultural and social exchange program. They were terrified for her safety.
“We had no idea where she was or how to contact her. We were really worried that she was going to go back to the house. I went back a couple of times that night to try to find her. That was the toughest, toughest part,” Miles said, his voice breaking.
A police officer was guarding the entrance to the neighborhood when Miles went back for the first time at 8:00 p.m.
“He just told me – your neighborhood is on fire, you can’t go. He didn’t provide any other details. I didn’t know if maybe our house was still standing. When I went back around 3:00 a.m., that police officer gave me a little bit more detail about where exactly the fire had gone. At that point, based on what he said, it seemed like we had probably lost our house,” he said.
Miles and Aparna managed to track their au pair down the next day, by going to the neighborhood they knew her friends lived in, in a town eight miles north of Lahaina. They didn’t know which house the friends lived in, but the au pair happened to see them walking down the street and ran out to see them. Miles said it was a moment of great relief.
On Thursday, Miles and Aparna were allowed back into their neighborhood.
“We saw that our house was completely gone. Just the concrete foundation and block walls were left. Pretty much the entire neighborhood was incinerated. There were a few houses left standing – kind of inexplicably, it seems random. But the fire just came down so fast. It was a very unusual circumstance where we had winds going the opposite direction than they usually go. Instead of coming in from the ocean, they were coming down from the mountain. It gets really dry because the rainy seasons in winter and we had lower humidity than we usually do. We had almost hurricane level winds. With power lines getting knocked down or any other kind of spark, it just ignited and moved down really fast,” he said.
Miles said they had no warning of the fire.
“I think they’re doing an investigation as to that. There is a siren system that they test every week. It didn’t go off. There’s an alert system that we get on our cell phones for other kinds of warnings, like high surf, but we didn’t get anything this time. So there were just a lot of people that didn’t get any warning, ourselves included. Luckily we saw the smoke in time, and we had some other neighbors outside talking about it, trying to figure out what they were doing. It was very chaotic,” he said.
Patrie said their au pair lost her passport and documents in the fire, as well as a considerable amount of cash she had been saving up for an educational program she planned to complete after her time with the family was finished. He said they regretted not having been able to save those and other sentimental items before they evacuated, but overall they feel very fortunate. They have a place to stay. They have friends and family helping them research and navigate the logistical challenges they now face. Friends have collected clothes for their kids. People have brought them food.
“In some ways, oddly enough, living here kind of reminds me of North Dakota in the way that the community has come together after this disaster. People have been really working day and night to help out at the emergency shelters and figure out ways to get food to the other side of the island,” he said. “It’s really an amazing place, not just because of the things you read about – the whales and dolphins and rainbows and amazing beaches – but the people here are really great too. It has that small town feel and sense of community. It’s really a heartbreaking time for people here. But, right now, we hope to stay.”
Miles said in the days following the fire he had been able to track down most of their neighbors. The neighbor who had helped him prop up his fence was already volunteering the next day, serving food to people. He said he thought most folks on their block had gotten out safely, but worried about an elderly couple down the street who were hard of hearing.
The Patries are currently looking for a home to move into on the west side of the island so that their boys can return to their school, which is re-opening on Monday.
“A lot of the housing on the west side is gone,” Miles said. “There are thousands of people trying to figure out where to live and very few homes available. Just trying to imagine the rebuilding and how long that’s going to take, what steps they need to take to clean up and redo some of the infrastructure before the rebuilding can happen, what it’s going to look like to try to find a contractor and architect, and get materials into west Maui for that many buildings, the whole thing is very daunting. It’s overwhelming.”
Miles says the Maui Food Bank is a great place to contribute to if people are looking to help with immediate assistance. But he urged people to remember that the impacts of the devastation in west Maui will take a long time to mitigate.
“One of the main ways people can help is just to not forget about this. News stories come up and go away. But six months or a year from now – that’s when people here are going to need the most help. Just not forgetting and checking in with folks here about what they need further on down the road would be really helpful,” he said.
Below are additional charities and fundraising efforts the Patries recommend for people looking to make contributions to help Maui recover:
–Hawaii Community Foundation- Maui Strong Fund
–Sponsor a student – Maui Prep
–Maui Rapid Response- Mutual Aid Fund
-Common Ground Collective- Maui Rapid Response
-Maui United Way- Fire Disaster Relief Fund
-Individual verified Go Fund Me campaigns
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