A pair of tourists escaped Maui’s deadly fires by jumping into the swimming pool at a Lahaina condominium complex.
Kristina Lee-Garrido, 54, and her childhood best friend were visiting the island on vacation when Hurricane Dora hit.
The two arrived in Lahaina on August 6, in part to celebrate the friend’s birthday, and spent the following day lounging at the pool of a condominium apartment they were renting. The following day, they woke up to no power or internet as the hurricane’s winds swept through Lahaina. At around 5 p.m., Lee-Garrido woke from a nap to discover that a cabana at the front of the complex was on fire and that smoke was already filling their room.
They quickly grabbed their wallets, electronics, towels, and wetwash cloths to cover their mouths before heading out.
The pool was the only place Lee-Garrido could think of that might be safe during the fire. Through thick smoke, it took them 10 minutes to get to the pool, dodging embers that fell around them.
Kristina Lee-Garrido, 54, and her childhood best friend were on vacation when the Maui wildfires broke out. The pair took refuge for 3 hours in their condo’s swimming pool.
By Marcelle Dibrell Page 4 Service Industry News September 1, 2023
No one was there when they got to the pool, and they hadn’t seen anyone around the complex along the way.
Lee-Garrido wondered if they’d slept through some kind of alarm, but by then it was too late.
As they jumped into the pool, they tried to figure out how to get help. They had no idea that all of Lahaina was on fire, so at first it seemed like everything might be OK with only the cabana burning and the winds dying down.
They didn’t have cell service, but the friend was able to enable her iPhone’s SOS feature by pressing the power button and volume at the same time. An emergency responder told them to stay put in the pool and informed them of the extent of the inferno. They were told to send another message if they felt they were in danger.
Within the next two hours, the winds had picked up again, and before long, each of the complex’s apartments had caught fire. They reached out to emergency responders once more.
About a half hour later, they heard a loud clanging at the back gate, which Lee-Garrido’s friend had noticed was kept locked the day before. The firefighters were breaking it down.
Three firefighters helped the two out of the pool and to a fire truck waiting outside the complex. It was only on the drive to a triage area that they got any idea of the extent of the calamity. Everything was on fire.
After a few days at shelters, Lee-Garrido finally made it back to the mainland and to her home in Issaquah, Washington, where she turned on the TV to find news of the Maui wildfires on every channel.
“That is when I fell apart,” she said. “That is when I realized what had just happened.”
