Many animals lost, few found as yet, but rescue teams are searching
WAILUKU, Maui, Hawaii––The first flames reached Lahaina at around 6:30 a.m. on August 7, 2023. Hit by the worst of wildfires driven by winds from Hurricane Dora, the small city was obliterated two days later, just hours after the Lahaina fire was reported contained.
Most of the questions about the disaster asked days earlier remained questions as the sun set on Friday, August 11, 2023.
Cadaver dogs arrive
The most urgent of those questions, for most survivors, may soon be answered by cadaver-sniffing dogs flown in, landing on August 11, 2023, to help search burned out buildings for human remains.
Identifying remains found, however, may take weeks of DNA work.
Sixty-seven people were found dead in the Lahaina streets, most of them trapped in their vehicles in what Associated Press called “an eerie traffic jam of the charred remains of dozens of cars that didn’t make it out of the inferno.”
Some victims were believed to have been trying to evacuate pets as well as themselves.
Save Maui Cats founder Mike Willinsky alive & well
Anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 residents of Lahaina, formerly a community of more than 13,000, are missing and unaccounted for, according to various unofficial lists posted to social media.
No longer among the missing, though, is Save Maui Cats founder and president Mike Will, an account executive for Paradise Television according to his LinkedIn page.
Will’s office was in downtown Lahaina, where only some walls remained standing amid heaps of ashes.
But Kitty Charm Farm president Sarah Haines, of Haiku, told ANIMALS 24-7 late on August 11, 2023 that she had spoken to Will.
“Everybody’s running around trying to clean up this mess”
Earlier, ANIMALS 24-7 picked up a third-hand report that Will was live-trapping cats in the Lahaina area, hoping to relay those who were injured to Kitty Charm Farm, the Maui Humane Society in Pu‘unēnē, and/or the Hawaii Animal Rescue Fund shelter in Wailuku.
“Mike is doing great. No worries! They are starting to get service in the area,” Haynes said, after an almost four-day loss of telephone and internet communications with West Maui.
“Everybody’s running around trying to clean up this mess,” Haynes added.
Haynes late on August 11, 2023 posted a short video of a kitten captioned, “First sign of hope from the ashes of Lahaina! Quite literally in the middle of complete decimation, screaming out for help!”
Two more finds of cats amid the rubble were posted to the “Missing Pets of Maui” page on Facebook just minutes later.
Oprah Winfrey
An August 10, 2023 visit to the Hawaii Animal Rescue Fund shelter in Wailuku by television talk show host and part-time Maui resident Oprah Winfrey stirred brief excitement, especially when Winfrey asked what the shelter needed and promised to supply it.
Reported USA Today, “Heidi Denecke, owner of the Maui Animal Farm,” a petting zoo near Lahaina, “spent Tuesday night awake in her truck watching the fires with friends before being evacuated early Wednesday.
“Denecke and her neighbors spent Tuesday evening attaching phone numbers on their horses’ backs in case they had to be let loose. Once she was evacuated, Denecke drove six cages of bunnies and guinea pigs to the Hawaii Animal Foundation,” USA Today continued.
“The Maui Animal Farm survived the fire,” USA Today said, “but the roofing was torn up, Denecke said,” apparently by the high winds that drove the fire.
Roosters survived
In downtown Lahaina, “The roosters known to roam Hawaii streets meandered through the ashes,” Associated Press noted. How roosters probably kept or descended from gamecocks kept by local cockfighters managed to survive the firestorm was anyone’s guess.
Amid the ashes, NBC correspondent Miguel Almaguer reported, Kimo and Steffani Kirkman of Lahaina found the remains of their cat and two dogs.
“We knew nothing was there,” Kimo Kirkman told Almaguer, “but me and my wife, there was no way we were going to leave our animals’ bodies to just be thrown into the rubble.”
Added Almaguer, “Kirkman knew his animals were likely dead because a tracking collar stopped tracking Tuesday afternoon, when the wind-whipped fire was hitting Lahaina.”
(Beth Clifton collage from Facebook photos.)
Hope springs eternal for Optimus
Many other Lahaina residents shared the plight of Kristina Rau and Sterling Seaton, who were in Alaska on a work assignment, but flew back to Maui just “before the fires got out of hand,” preventing them from reaching Lahaina to rescue their cat Optimus.
“Please message me if our house can be reached and he can be saved,” Kristina Rau posted to Facebook at 2:39 a.m on August 9, 2023.
“I’m beside myself trying not to fear the worst,” Rau said, “but I just heard the civic center just got evacuated,” after having earlier been designated an emergency shelter.
Updated Rau at 5:22 p.m. the same day, “Sterling and mine’s world was destroyed as the Lahaina wildfires took everything from us including my Optimus.
“There was nothing we could do,” Rau said, “as officials kept anyone from entering Lahaina and since yesterday morning, there has been no cell or internet service due to Hurricane Dora’s trailing winds knocking down power and phone lines, and towers all over so we couldn’t get hold of anyone to bust down our door to get him.”
Looking for a miracle
But Rau did not give up.
“I know this is near impossible,” Rau posted on August 10, 2023, “but if anyone is able to get to 1350 Kahoma Street in Lahaina and see if by some miracle my Optimus is crying like he usually does for anyone to help him, I’d be forever in your debt.”
Later Rau mentioned on a “Lost & Found Animals of Maui” Facebook page that, “An officer messaged me that there was a cat in a storm drain meowing for help” nearby her former home.
“My boy was inside,” Rau said, “and he’s never tried to escape and there were several strays on our block, but now there is a glimmer of hope, more so than ever. If you can at least leave water, please please!”
As ANIMALS 24-7 posted this update, there was still no definitive word as to the fate of Optimus.
“Rocket is safe & sound!”
But another Lahaina resident, Julie Harness, recovered her cat Rocket.
“Rocket is safe and sound!” Harness posted. “The house miraculously didn’t burn and his water lasted the last couple days, even with the intense heat from the fence and surrounding structures burning. We are so thankful and I wish for equally good outcomes for those still searching for their family.”
Recommended the Maui Humane Society to others searching for lost animals, “The best thing you can do is file a lost report on our web site. As soon as Maui Humane Society is allowed into Lahaina, we will be there. We’ll know who to look for and where to look.”
By late afternoon on August 11, 2023 the Maui Humane Society team, including a veterinarian, had set up a temporary base of operations on the steps of the Lahaina courthouse.
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Thank you so much for this update. It is comforting to know that some people care so deeply for their animal companions, and that there have been some miraculous survival stories.
My heartfelt prayers for everyone affected; sharing your article with message urging all who are able to help in the effort to save lives and help survivors of all species to rise from this terrible disaster and persevere. Urging everyone to do likewise on their social accounts.
With gratitude.
Thanks for the updates on the situation in Maui.
As usual seems to be the usual orgs jumping on the bandwagon asking for donations with no explanation of what they will do with them. As from Network for Animals.
Another very similar received this morning from Animal Survival Network with stock photos and stories that are in newspapers.
I do hope the no doubt large sums donated will go where people think they will be going.
Be good if you could recommend people where to donate.
Soi Dog Foundation president John Dalley and his late wife Gillian, of Phuket, Thailand, had considerable experience with big international animal charities poaching donors while doing little after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004. (See Soi Dog Foundation & Indian Ocean tsunami heroine Gill Dalley, 58.)
While the Soi Dog Foundation and other local animal charities in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia mobilized immediately and within hours if not minutes had emergency personnel rescuing and treating humans as well as animals, none of the big international animal charities that blasted out urgent appeals had either money or personnel in the field for a week, and ANIMALS 24-7 caught at least one of the biggest, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, fabricating appeals as if it did have people in the field.
Because other organizations thought those appeals were telling the truth, and had evacuated the Aceh zoo in Indonesia, the entire zoo full of animals died of thirst and starvation while other rescue groups passed it by.
ANIMALS 24-7 confronted the forger, Amand Ramanathan, with a stack of grim evidence when he had the gall to present a seminar on disaster relief at the 2007 Asia for Animals conference in Chennai, India. Unknown to Ramanathan, about half the audience had been first responders to the tsunami and knew first hand that neither IFAW nor any other international animal charity had any cause to pat itself on the back or pass the hat for donations after the crisis passed.
Under Dalley, the Soi Dog Foundation, more than any of the other first responding local animal charities, successfully competed with the big international charities for funding, then used that funding to extend spay/neuter services from Phuket to Bangkok; stop the export of dogs to Laos, Vietnam, and China for human consumption; respond to subsequent severe flooding in Bangkok; broker a moratorium, still holding, on any export of dogs for consumption among Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia; and support public education and anti-rabies vaccination work throughout Southeast Asia.
ANIMALS 24-7 strongly recommends that donors responding to disasters should ALWAYS donate to local animal charities on the scene, NEVER to the big international animal charities saturating the web, internet, and mailboxes with frantic mass-produced appeals. At best, only about 60¢ of each dollar donated flows from the big international animal charities to the crisis locations; often, none does, while some, like the American SPCA [ASPCA], pay their top executives close to a million dollars a year, chiefly, we suspect, for their ability to sucker the public.
ANIMALS 24-7 does not endorse organizations whose work on the ground we have not personally observed and whose financial filings we have not inspected, but practically any nonprofit organization with a history of working in a disaster area will make better use of donations than any of the biggies, and in the online era it is not difficult to find animal charities local to any given disaster.
Thank you all for rescuing all the animals, but so sad that some has lost their lives due to these awful fires.
That thank-you is for the people & organizations on the scene in Maui. ANIMALS 24-7 is doing our best to report on the situation from nearly 2,700 miles away, with the help of many sources who are there, but we are not ourselves present or a rescue organization.