I have been thinking about the fire that raced through Lahaina on the island of Maui a few days ago.

I am remembering interviews with survivors that I read recently in the New York Times. I may not be getting the interview details perfectly here, and was unable to locate the exact article again, but the main ideas have stayed with me. One woman who was interviewed said that she and her husband had just checked into their hotel and, of course, were excited to be starting their vacation when their cell phones chimed an alert that they should evacuate immediately, that there was a dangerous fire in the area. She said that since they were from the West, they hurried back to their rental car and started driving toward safety. While they were doing that, they saw people still checking in at the hotel and others heading to the beach or playing in the waves.

In other words, it seems like not everybody got that warning. Or if they got it, they didn’t think it applied to them or that it was that serious. She said that it was lucky that they still had their phones on, that they hadn’t turned them off to nap or just because sometimes that’s what you do on vacation: when you finally get checked in at your hotel after a day of travel, you turn off your phone and let that vacation feeling begin.

She and her husband are alive today. I wonder what happened to the folks who were just checking in at the hotel or the people playing in the waves? How long until fire started raining down into the ocean, until cars started burning and people started jumping over that rock wall that separated the road from the sea, and then floated in the water for hours before help finally arrived?

It’s hard to take in the enormity of that tragedy, of the lives lost, both human and animal.

I wrote a piece several years ago titled “Not a Prepper (but Maybe I Should Be)” after we had a snowstorm that dropped several feet of snow on our little town one night, a storm that knocked out our cell phone towers and electricity, too. We woke up one December morning to three feet of snow on the road out of town and three feet of snow on the highway and hundreds of trees down. Suddenly, there was no way in or out of town. It took days for the roads to clear, days for cell phone service to return, and even longer for the electricity. It was strange, to go to bed with electricity and a connection to the world, and to wake up the next day and be completely isolated. We were lucky; I don’t think there were any lasting negative ramifications from that storm. No heart attacks or strokes in our town that resulted in deaths or injuries because we were suddenly cut off from the rest of civilization. Continue Reading…