Table Of Content
- Cat reunites with family after surviving Maui wildfires 6 months ago: ‘It’s a beautiful thing’
- 'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina
- Watch: New videos show how Maui families escaped the wildfires
- See the nearly 100-year-old "miracle house" that survived the Lahaina wildfire and now sits on a block of ash
In fires like the one in Lahaina, there are enormous amounts of flaming embers that are flying through the air. And if there’s something next to the house that is combustible — a wood fence, a bush, dry grass — that’s often what will ignite the structure, Wara said. "So many people have lost everything, and we need to look out for each other and rebuild. Everybody needs to help rebuild." The blazes destroyed most of the historic Maui town of Lahaina and the fires are now considered the worst natural disaster in Hawaii state history.
Cat reunites with family after surviving Maui wildfires 6 months ago: ‘It’s a beautiful thing’
The real story behind that photo of a weirdly unscathed house in the rubble of Lahaina - Brunswick News
The real story behind that photo of a weirdly unscathed house in the rubble of Lahaina.
Posted: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
They first heard about the fire from a man who lives in Lahainaluna, a neighborhood about three and a half miles away, and uses two rooms beneath the house as a workshop. “A ‘noncombustible zone’ near the home and under the deck is an excellent strategy to reduce the vulnerability of the home to a wind-blown ember exposure,” Quarles wrote in an email. “We lost neighbors in this, and neighbors lost everything,” Atwater Millikin told The Times.
'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina
However, any combustibles were largely removed from the under-deck area, which also faced the ocean. Fire crews battled multiple fires in the popular tourist destination of West Maui and an inland mountainous region. Firefighters struggled to reach some areas that were cut off by downed trees and power lines. However, owner Dora Atwater Millikin put it down to a handful of routine changes during a recent renovation — none of which were aimed at surviving such a disaster.
Watch: New videos show how Maui families escaped the wildfires
The red-roofed home that survived the fires in Lahaina is now a ray of hope - NPR
The red-roofed home that survived the fires in Lahaina is now a ray of hope.
Posted: Thu, 24 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
“If shrubs and bushes, especially flammable ones, are right up next to the house and embers catch them on fire, the heat can burst the window and it goes right into the home from there,” she said. On a section of Front Street in the town of Lahaina, every structure has been charred and replaced with squares of ash – except one. Right along the sea wall lies a single house with a red roof, green porch and a seemingly unharmed vehicle in a largely unscathed driveway.
Add Global News to Home Screen
The historic structure on Front Street is the last house standing in a neighborhood reduced to rubble. The house at 271 Front St. in Lahaina survived a wildfire because of its metal roof, a lack of vegetation along its dripline, "and a lot of divine intervention," its owner says. Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited." Kocher worries that surreal images such as the one of the Lahaina house can lend themselves to conspiracy theories if people don’t understand the science behind how fires spread. She recalled when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speculated that the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people when it destroyed the California town of Paradise, might have been started by a laser beam in space. In this case, a regular asphalt composition roof would likely have done just as good a job as metal, as most have a Class A fire resistance rating, she added.
"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said. And they removed foliage that was up against the house — not because they were trying to reduce the risk of ignition, but because they were concerned about termites spreading to the wooden frame, she said. Their only nod toward disaster preparedness was to install hurricane ties, she added. The historic Front Street home was not the only property to survive the fire. But the indelible image of the improbably unscathed house amid a backdrop of devastation is so extreme that some have questioned whether the image was digitally altered. Saribay, who livestreamed his actions for hours on Instagram, focused on flames taking down a house just outside Leiali’i.
See the nearly 100-year-old "miracle house" that survived the Lahaina wildfire and now sits on a block of ash
But there, in the midst of the destruction, was the seemingly untouched red roof of Millikin’s home. This home, overseen by a Native Hawaiian carpenter who headed most construction projects for the Pioneer Mill Co., was built from California redwood, Millikin said, which has some natural fire-resistant properties. But so was the historic house next door, which burned completely in the Aug. 8 fire. Mr Millikin and his wife said they are unsure exactly what saved their home.
Regulations in California have typically focused on a 30-foot perimeter around homes known as “Zone A” in firefighting. But Wara said that research on the thousands of homes that have burned in California in recent years has shown that it’s really what’s installed in the immediate few feet of a home that makes the biggest difference. The house is what’s known as a craftsman-inspired “plantation vernacular” dwelling, a style of homes constructed mostly by sugar and pineapple plantation companies in the early 20th century. The Millikins, who started living in Lahaina more than a decade ago, used to bicycle by the house and talk about what it would take to fix the sagging roof, the rotting lanai, the peeling paint.
When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it. By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service, which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite. "A 'noncombustible zone' near the home and under the deck is an excellent strategy to reduce the vulnerability of the home to a wind-blown ember exposure," Quarles wrote in an email. The county informed the couple that their house had survived in a phone call the following day, she said.
"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone." "As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said. That risk is highest when the other building that burns is 30 feet away or less, said Stephen Quarles, UC Cooperative Extension advisor emeritus. Vulnerable components would be the siding, windows or under-eave area, as well as any foundation or attic vents, he added.
She hopes to return as soon as she can and open the place up for neighbors who have lost their homes. Atwater Millikin is an artist who makes paintings of New England coastal scenery, and her husband is a recently retired portfolio manager. They have owned the home for about three years but lived elsewhere on Maui for about a decade, she said. Some have also speculated the home was saved by sprinklers, Atwater Millikin said. It did have a sprinkler system, but so did many of the other homes in the area that burned, she said. In any event, by the time the fire reached the home, the electricity was out and the system wasn’t working, she said.
Aerial footage of Lahaina recorded by KITV, showed the house which got spared in the wildfires. In the immediate home ignition zone – the area up to 5 feet around your home – using crushed stone or gravel is a vital part of reducing the risk of the structure being set ablaze. According to the National Fire Protection Association, reducing flammable vegetation in this area is crucial. The group also says metal roofing, removing dead debris or flammable materials from porch areas and using fire-resistant house siding can help homes withstand fires.
“What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said. Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes. “It looks like it was photoshopped in,” homeowner Trip Millikin said of the house, which stands in such contrast to the surrounding ruins that images of the home have gone viral in recent days. The couple say they hope to return to Lahaina when it's safe, and when they do, they plan to offer up their home for the many who have lost theirs. Instead, he and his wife are using it as a symbol of hope amid the destruction that has killed more than 100 and left more than 800 missing. Kocher said the house had many of the qualities that would help it survive such disasters.
“We lost neighbors in this, and neighbors lost everything,” Atwater Millikin told the California paper. The red-roofed house may also have benefited from not being too close to neighboring properties — often the main fuel for fires — instead being bordered on three sides by the ocean, a road, and an empty lot. A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks. Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment