Editor’s note: Folks, perhaps you know that the Daily Freeman-Journal has a sister newspaper in Maui, The Maui News. It’s newsroom team, led by Colleen Uechi, has been doing an incredible job in keeping the greater Maui community — and, frankly, the rest of the world — informed through solid, on-the-ground reporting. Here is some of that work.

By COLLEEN UECHI

LAHAINA — In the smoldering ruins of Lahaina town, a stream of water casts through the air onto the blackened branches of the 150-year-old banyan tree.

“We’re going to help it as much as we can. … Then it’ll tell us whether it’s going to come through,” Steve Nimz of Tree Solutions Hawaii, the consulting arborist, said Saturday. “As long as everybody has faith in it, then hopefully it will. I mean, it has the potential.”

Workers and a Goodfellow Bros. water truck are trying to save one of the few things still standing in the once-bustling town, decimated by a rapid fire just days ago that forced thousands of West Maui residents from their homes, burned down longtime local neighborhoods and reduced nearly all of Front Street to a hazardous mix of ash, hanging wires, broken glass and torched concrete.

The corner shop where lines of people poured out the door waiting for ice cream and Dole Whip is now filled with heaps of rubble and twisted metal.

The two small parks where thousands packed the lawn to watch community bands and fireworks shows on Fourth of July are quiet and strewn with debris.

The seawall where families sat watching the sunset is now lined with burned-out cars, eerie images of the frantic evacuations amid the fire.

Some structures like the Lahaina Public Library, the historic Baldwin Home and the building that once housed Fleetwood’s on Front Street are still standing but hollowed out.

Residents have called it “apocalyptic.” The governor has said it looks “like a bomb went off.”

Throughout the town, there are signs that search and rescue teams are combing the ruins for signs of life. Spray-painted Xs mark charred vehicles and buildings that have been searched, and drawn boxes indicate the level of structural safety for first responders.

“While it may look OK … sometimes metal inside, rebar and those kinds of things, has melted. It makes it no good. There’s no stability,” said Robert Fenton Jr., Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator for Region 9, pointing out that this was something officials saw during the deadly Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif.

FEMA has deployed search and rescue teams from Nevada, Arizona and other states to aid the efforts. In the parking lot of the Maui Theatre building, which survived the fire, dogs hopped out of a truck with their handlers and headed into the field.

“It’s always a challenge in a fire situation,” said Liaison Officer Jeff Peter, whose team is part of the national resource system that’s responding to the fire. “There are human remains canines looking through with handlers and also personnel on foot. So it’s a combined effort. If the dogs hit on the remains, we’ll verify that with a second dog and our personnel will engage.”

Maui Police Department Chief John Pelletier said during a news conference Saturday that about 3 percent of the fire-ravaged areas had been searched with dogs, and he urged family members to do a DNA test at the Family Assistance Center that’s been set up at the Kahului Community Center to help people find missing loved ones.

As of Sunday, the fire had claimed 96 lives. U.S. Fire Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell said the worst 10 fires in U.S. history have all happened since 2017. Until now, the 2018 Camp Fire had been the deadliest of those; now, the Lahaina fire has superseded it.

Moore-Merrell said the fire appeared to have spread so quickly because it was low to the ground and moved horizontally, as evidenced by the trees whose trunks are scarred by fire but tops remain unburned.

“There was enough fuel and the winds that moved it horizontally that it didn’t rise,” Moore-Merrell said Saturday afternoon following a visit to Lahaina. “It wasn’t seeking air above because of the winds that moved it. It’s a phenomenon of fire that you can see those patterns. And that’s what we saw.”

Once it picked up, Moore-Merrell said, the dry grass and the structures it consumed became embers that traveled with the wind and spread the fire.

“The wind-driven nature of this fire plus the fuel load, things that burned, the heavy amount of fuel that could burn, was what made this go, and so fast,” Moore-Merrell said.

Standing in front of the line of cars abandoned on Front Street by The Outlets of Maui, Gov. Josh Green said, “I hurt to imagine the fear that went through people when the fire, really a hurricane and a fire, came through all at once.”

“We’ll rebuild. Families will come together. But there’s a lot of loss here and I think we’re going to see significantly higher number in the coming days as our professionals from FEMA and Maui fire, police, do their job,” Green told reporters who were allowed to visit Front Street but not neighborhoods on Saturday.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said “it’s heartbreaking to see the tragedy.” Just days into the response efforts, she said, “we are still very much in life-saving, life-sustaining” mode.

“We have a number of people that have been displaced and we want to make sure that we’re getting them the support that they need, got to find out what their immediate lodging needs are going to be,” she said. “But we also know people are hurting, and so we want to get them the mental help as the governor mentioned that they need as they’re starting to process this.”

Criswell, who walked the streets of Lahaina town on Saturday, said, “as we continue to move on, we have to make sure this is safe.”

“As we see some of these structures that are still standing, our urban search and rescue teams are marking them, whether they’re structurally safe or not,” Criswell said. “We need to continue to protect people to make sure that they don’t go into a building and then it suddenly collapses even though there’s walls standing. So really important that we make sure that we’re assessing the safety of anything that is still standing that it is going to be safe for people to go near.”

Criswell said President Joe Biden’s disaster declaration for the Maui fires “allows me to bring in whatever federal resources are needed,” which she said will depend on what the governor requests. She said she will be here “till the governor tells me I don’t need to be.”

She said the response in the coming weeks and months will include moving people from shelters to better interim options — Green said 1,000 hotel rooms are being set aside for emergency responders and displaced residents — and long-term efforts will have to consider how the community wants to rebuild Lahaina town and what needs to be done to make it resilient to future weather events.

Green said that “as FEMA comes in to see what loss of life there is, we’re also searching for any sign of hope here in the environment.” He patted the trunks of the banyan tree, whose knarled limbs still stood by the burned-out former courthouse in the square by the harbor. Its singed branches tell a story of destruction and survival.

“Normally if you touch or cut into a banyan tree, you’re just going to see that sap oozing out really fast,” Nimz said. “There was sap where I cut in on the top and all these areas, but it wasn’t proliferous like it would be on a really healthy tree. But it’s there.”

He said that’s a contrast from other limbs that are totally burnt and completely dry when cut.

“What I am saying is that these trees are … resilient,” Nimz said. “With everybody’s love and everybody here, we want to see the tree make it. It’s up to the tree right now.”

Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.