Maui rescuers compare aftermath of wildfires to 9/11 and Ground Zero
LAHAINA, Hawaii — The aftermath of the apocalyptic wildfires that ravaged the island of Maui is “not unlike 9/11” for Hawaiian first responders, some of whom have experienced the toll of both tragedies first hand, an official said.
Stephen Bjune from FEMA Urban Search and Rescue described rescue crews on the ground sorting through leveled neighborhoods for bodies with scant hope of finding survivors — noting “a lot of similarities” in overall destruction to Ground Zero.
“This is a sacred and special place to the people of Maui and everybody on this island at least knew, if not loved, somebody in that community,” Bjune, a public information officer for the agency, told The Post in an exclusive interview.
“This is a very personal thing. So it’s not unlike 9/11, which was very personal to New York and the country.”
Like the 2001 New York City terrorist attack, the firefighters and police who are diligently scouring the rubble once frequented the decimated buildings.
Many rescuers lost their own homes in the Maui inferno, the deadliest wildfire in US history.
“That’s been pretty powerful and pretty impactful to think that they lost everything and here they are still working day in day in and day out,” said Bjune, who added that some of the responders to the fire also helped work in the aftermath of the Sept. 2001 attack in Manhattan.
“A lot of the folks here who responded to 9/11 said there’s a lot of similarities here… the ash and the destruction,” he said.
“The fact that they’re still working nonstop has really pushed us to keep up with them. If they can do it, we certainly have to.”
At least 114 people were killed by the flames, though officials expect the death toll to rise as authorities continue to search through the remaining 22% of the burn area.
Most of the recovered bodies that have been found thus far are “partial remains,” not whole charred corpses, making it incredibly difficult to discern identities or even if the victims are children.
Asked if they were finding families, Bjune said: “That one’s kind of tricky because of the totalness of the destruction and the heat of the fire. There’s not as much whole, to piece the puzzle together. There isn’t much to work with.
“This is not the business of being able to rescue folks and bring them back. What we’re dealing here with is closure for families and accountability for our community.”
The 1,000-degree wildfires were so destructive that trained search crews are struggling to locate where houses once stood, finding only a few cinder blocks, lone brick walls and occasional stones sprinkled in a lot.
The homes in the dense community of Lahaina had once stood butted up against one another, making for a complex search that’s forcing rescue teams to comb through the wreck slowly.
“I’ve been to some of the biggest hurricanes and tornadoes on the books, but I’ve never seen this level of total destruction before,” Bjune said.
FEMA anticipated the search to be finished in the next few days, “not weeks.”
Responding teams, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, have already begun searching through multi-story buildings ahead of schedule, which they are accomplishing by “delayering,” or deconstructing, buildings from the top down so they can be safely searched at ground level.
The skeletal structures have been too weakened and compromised by the fire to risk putting a responder inside, the federal spokesperson said.
“We just bring the tall structure down to us. We’re taking that huge piece that has all the risk to it, that doesn’t allow us to put a canine up there to run through it, and we bring it down to us. Then the canine runs through, determines if there is or isn’t something, and then we move that to the side and the next piece comes down,” said Bjune.
Excavators and front-end loaders have been brought into the disaster zone to dismantle and scour large multi-story buildings as other rescue teams continue working to finish wide-area searches.
Thousands of displaced residents have been placed in shelters, hotels and Airbnb units, while tens of thousands of homes and businesses are still without power.
The cause of the wildfires is under investigation.
