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Mario Siatris took off of work Wednesday and rallied his two adult children to drive into the Lahaina burn zone to watch workers in white protective suits clear his fire-scorched property of debris and hazards.  

The Siatris family showed up at the Mela Street lot before the Lahaina sun was strong enough to draw sweat. The house is crumbled and the property’s prized mango tree is dead. But this place where Mario raised his kids still feels like home to him.

Huddled on the side of a deserted road that once reverberated with life — barking dogs, reggae music, the engines of street bikes — Mario waited for workers to arrive with their hard hats and bulldozer. 

But no one ever showed up.

For more than three weeks Mario had been told that his property was next in line for government-sponsored debris removal. He’d driven by every few days to scope out the progress, but weeks passed and the lot remained untouched. 

On Monday, he was notified that, after a series of false starts, Wednesday would mark the first day of the work, and he could come out and watch. But on that day the Siatris family waited at the edge of the wreckage of their home for a clean-up crew that never arrived.

“Once in a while I worry about him,” says U‘i Kahue-Cabanting, Mario’s friend and business partner. “Right now I’m worried about him because he’s not feeling well, he took off from work, he got his kids involved, he went down there and frickin’ nothing.”

Mario signed up in early January to have the Army Corps of Engineers clear his burned-out property on Mela Street of toxic debris. Since the work began with the first Lahaina property on Jan. 16, the federal agency has removed debris from 890 of a total of roughly 1,600 residential properties that the agency has been tasked with clearing to date. 

Of the 890 lots that have been cleared so far, 325 properties have been deemed safe following soil sample testing, according to Corps spokeswoman Shannon Bauer. Those properties have been covered with gravel to prevent erosion and turned back over to the jurisdiction of the county.

Even after the Corps completes the clearing of his property, Mario won’t be permitted to live on his land until Lahaina’s fire-damaged water and sewer systems have been rehabilitated.

Government leaders haven’t announced a timeline for this work — a point of discouragement for Mario and others like him who want to move back onto their property as soon as possible.

Mario has money sitting in the bank to at least begin to pay for the reconstruction of his century-old plantation home. But he doesn’t know how he’ll come up with the funds he’ll need to complete it.

Like many homeowners affected by the wildfire, Mario says his insurance policy is inadequate to cover new construction, especially with the toll of inflation on the price of building materials.

All of this has led Mario and U’i to move ahead with a plan to live in a trailer that they’ve ordered from a camping outfitter in Oregon. The business partners plan to park the rig at public beach parks or wherever they can until the government gives them the green light to move onto Mario’s lot on Mele Street.

After a series of assembly delays, the trailer is ready to be shipped to Maui. But the business partners’ shipping plans fell through, leaving Mario and U’i scrambling.

They had planned to ship the trailer on a Matson barge. But U’i recently learned that the ocean transit giant doesn’t service cargo out of the Port of Portland.

Now she’s trying to find another shipping company that will service her desired Portland-to-Maui route. If she can’t, she may have to find a way to transport the trailer to a larger port in California.

It’s a logistical hurdle she hopes to clear before she, her husband Ron and Mario fly to the greater Portland area for five days later this month to teach a series of coconut-weaving workshops to college students and members of a Hawaiian Civic Club.

While in Portland, they also plan to retrieve their trailer from the dealership. But now they don’t know what they’ll do with it.

“I’m a little worried about it, but not super worried about it,” U’i says. “I know it’ll work out one way or another.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.