SCOOP: Escaping One of the Deadliest Fires in U.S. History
SmartHERNews
Jenna Lee
4.9 • 660 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2023
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"This is really happening ... (and) we just watched Lahaina burn." Maui resident and mother Pamela Reader recalls the moments before and after one of the deadliest wildfires in American history – a fire she describes moving at an almost incomprehensible pace, leaving only minutes to evacuate her family, including her husband, Keenan and their two daughters, 14-year-old Kaia and 12-year-old Ellie. While the Readers lost their home and most of their belongings to the blaze, the family remains resilient in the face of uncertainty: "The Reader Family is built on love," said Keenan. "We feel we are the fortunate ones. We got out alive."
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Maui Resources mentioned by the Reader Family:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. It is 10 o'clock central time in Texas, right around 5 o'clock in Hawaii. |
| 0:12.6 | And we are having a conversation today about an unexpected news story for so many. It's a story that |
| 0:20.5 | has quickly developed over the last |
| 0:21.9 | several days, and we now know it as one of the deadliest wildfires in American history, |
| 0:29.0 | the fire that took place in Maui. Pamela Reeder is with us. She's a mom, and she's a resident |
| 0:36.4 | of Maui, and she experienced this entire event with her family. |
| 0:43.1 | And we're lucky enough to talk to her today to get some actual on the ground perspective as to what |
| 0:48.4 | transpired. And Pamela, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. How did you first come to |
| 0:55.6 | live in Maui? So I moved here 22 years ago. I moved here with my then-boyfriend, who's now |
| 1:02.9 | my husband, Keenan, and his sister, Carla. And we were all educators at the time. And his mom found an ad in the New York Times calling for our specific areas. |
| 1:16.0 | So we were young. |
| 1:17.5 | We thought, well, let's just go for a year. |
| 1:19.6 | And we moved actually right into Lahaina Town. |
| 1:23.1 | The three of us shared a house together and right on wayne a street which is the road parallel front |
| 1:31.3 | street the main hub of the town and we lived there and we would go back to new york every summer |
| 1:38.2 | and we just kind of would start saying we'll stay one more year one more year and, and one year turned into 22. And so now we |
| 1:47.0 | have two kids and we have grown a lot of roots here and this is home. What was it about Maui |
| 1:55.7 | that made you stay and raise a family there? You know, it really is like a small town. A lot of people from all |
| 2:05.7 | over the world bring a lot of just unique perspectives. It's a real tight-knit community, which I think |
| 2:15.6 | you're going to really see in the coming months and years here. |
| 2:19.7 | And just really a quiet way of life. We've been very blessed on Maui, honestly, |
| 2:27.7 | but we are able to enjoy our life, I think. Spend quality time with our kids, |
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