She Survived the Maui Wildfires. She Couldn’t Survive the Year After.
The New York Times
Edralina Diezon was working as a janitor and sending money to her family in the Philippines when wildfires destroyed everything she had. The road to rebuilding her life proved to be perilous.
As a whirlwind of flames nearly encircled the Lahaina Gateway shopping center on Aug. 8, 2023, Edralina Diezon hid in a storage room, surrounded by mops, buckets and brooms. Terrified, Ms. Diezon, who worked 80 hours a week as a janitor, did not leave for two days and two nights. When she finally emerged, starving and disoriented, the neighborhood where she lived was gone.
Ms. Diezon, 69, wandered the charred streets for a few hours before encountering a police officer who took her to a hotel that had been turned into a shelter. Eventually, she would move into the beachfront Royal Lahaina Resort and Bungalows, along with more than 1,000 of Maui’s 8,000 displaced survivors.
One year ago, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century turned Lahaina, on Maui, into a town of ash and ghosts. Buses still did not run in September. Streetlights did not shine. Stores left standing were shuttered. Employees and customers did not populate the Lahaina Gateway. But Ms. Diezon still showed up to her janitorial job every day, unsure of where she would eventually live.
Each year, millions of people in the United States are displaced from their homes because of fires, hurricanes and other weather-related disasters — and then find themselves struggling to rebuild their lives, as Ms. Diezon did.
Nearly half of Maui’s wildfire survivors lost their jobs, according to the preliminary results from 679 people in a University of Hawaii study, which aims to track more than 1,000 people over the next decade. Thirteen percent of survivors in the study still do not have health insurance, and 40 percent of households are experiencing low food security.
For Ms. Diezon, managing her livelihood became an arduous daily undertaking that involved navigating a confusing and often uncoordinated network of organizations that provided aid, housing and other support. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United Way had begun to provide services, and celebrities pledged funds for fire victims. Locals also set up Venmo donation funds for families, but Ms. Diezon did not have an account.
