On the 8th of August of 2023, Nairi Terria woke up in his home in Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

He got up, got dressed, and went to work as a chef at a popular seafood restaurant that was visited by tourists from all over the world.

The day of August 8th, power was on and off as I recall. Like I remember the night before power

going out so I'm already thinking my head I got to go to the restaurant as early as I can in the morning.

His restaurant sat on Front Street, a main strip of restaurants, galleries, and shops that runs

along the oceanfront in the PM to open to customers.

And that never happened.

Um, but at the same time we never knew what's going on. And at the time when you left the restaurant, how windy was it?

Oh, it was extremely windy. My truck was moving from the wind. We were watching all these

buildings around us like just start kind of falling apart you know the shingles were coming off the roofs.

On that day, wind speeds of up to 80 miles per hour were recorded and the temperature peaked

at 33 degrees Celsius, about 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

As Niavy battled the wind on his short drive home,

his sense that something wasn't right started to grow.

He noticed there weren't any other cars on the road. These roads were

usually packed with locals and tourists and rental vehicles.

It was weird just not seeing cars and it was weird seeing just rubbish everywhere and debris

just flying and when I got home around 3-30 I noticed there was smoke coming from the mountainside and the smoke was white colored.

So in my head I'm thinking okay this is a very fresh fire.

What he saw were the first signs of a fire that it started at approximately 255 p.m. that day.

But this fire didn't seem too close. It was up on the hillside above the town.

And the Heina residents aren't strangers to fire.

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