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“I think I’m depressed,” she said to a friend after a particularly grueling day of phone calls with federal workers trying to sort out the latest snafu with her rental relief application. 

The self-described optimist had spent months living in a hotel before scoring a one-year lease on a rare open ohana unit in Maui Meadows. And she’d had the mistaken belief that once she moved into the sun-drenched unit — once she was out of the hotel and had new plants and new furniture, a new cat and a to-do list of activities to look forward to — everything would go back to normal. She would be OK. 

“What was I thinking?” St. Clair said. “I can barely go into the grocery store and shop.” 

Seniors are particularly vulnerable in mass disasters, a reality reflected in this grim statistic: More than two-thirds of the 102 confirmed victims of the 2023 Maui fires were over the age of 60. 

But kupuna also face additional struggles in the aftermath of a catastrophe. At an age when many people are set in their routines, a disaster like Lahaina’s upends every facet of life. Fixed incomes can make it harder to get by when disaster relief is delayed or unexpected expenses arise. Technology can be a barrier to getting assistance. Transportation is often an added challenge. Finding new health care providers and maintaining access to medication is also a struggle for displaced seniors.

And there’s a different perspective on rebuilding that comes from knowing you may not live to see your home rise from the ashes. 

“When you’re older, you’re just experiencing life in a different way because you’re on your Act Three,” St. Clair said. “This is it. Most of your time on planet Earth is behind you, not in front of you.” 

Few places exemplify the struggles of Lahaina’s seniors more than St. Clair’s former home, Hale Mahaolu Eono, a 34-unit low-income senior housing complex where nearly a fifth of residents were unable to escape the fire. 

Like much of Lahaina, survivors of the once tight-knit residence are scattered. A few have been able to move into affordable housing units in other parts of the island and are trying to adjust to an entirely new community. Four moved to the Big Island. Several left for the mainland. At least one person relocated to Kauai. One woman has been able to stay in Lahaina but recently returned to work in her mid-70s to try and make ends meet. Another resident died just a few months after the fire. 

A year after the fire, the half-dozen Hale Mahaolu survivors Civil Beat talked to say they are trying to move forward in different ways: Some message their former neighbors several times a day. Others are finding comfort in solitude. Some are focusing on gratitude or religion, others are angrily waiting for someone — anyone — to be held accountable for the deaths of their friends. 

Nearly all are struggling to imagine a future for themselves. 

“It’s day to day, minute to minute,” said 73-year-old Tina Bass. 

Stuck In That Day

As much as the survivors of Hale Mahaolu Eono want to move on with their lives, it takes a constant and concerted effort not to think about Aug. 8, 2023. Not to revisit the roar of the fire approaching. The black smoke filling St. Clair’s apartment. The cat that Bass lost while she pounded on doors and tried to persuade neighbors to leave. The people Nadine Ramelb didn’t realize were still inside as she fled the complex wearing only a bra, a smock and her shoes. 

The effort it takes to not constantly be reminded of the fire makes Ramelb feel like someone struggling with an addiction, spending every minute of the day trying to stay sober.

“It’s like being addicted to the anxiety and horror of that day,” she said.

Before the fire, Hale Mahaolu Eono was a modest apartment complex in central Lahaina, halfway between the old Pioneer Mill site and Lahaina Bypass. It was hot during the day, unbearably hot sometimes, but it was also a haven of affordability and community in a town that was rapidly losing both. 

Residents celebrated each other’s birthdays. Held holiday celebrations. Would bring each other food. St. Clair was particularly fond of the sound of her neighbor, a former opera singer, softly crooning in the apartment next door. 

“We’d laugh and tell each other jokes,” Ramelb said. “We were ohana.” 

It was not an assisted living facility, something the nonprofit organization that managed the complex has repeatedly pointed out in the aftermath of the fire, as it fielded questions from distraught families over why there was no formal effort to evacuate their loved ones. 

But the Aug. 8 fire was also totally unlike any previous disaster at the complex — including a 2018 fire that came alarmingly close to the building, Ramelb said.

“It was like the breath of death,” Ramelb said. “It was a dragon breath of death coming down that mountain.”

St. Clair, who got stuck in her car for hours trying to get out of Lahaina and had to drive through fire during her escape, didn’t know for several weeks that multiple residents in her building had died and several others were still missing.

Bass had an inkling a few days later when she went looking for her neighbor Joe Schilling at the home of his hanai family.

“There was still a sign on their door that said, ‘Joe, we’re worried about you,'” Bass recounted. “So then we knew something was up.”

Much of Lahaina has been touched by loss. But the concentration of death at Hale Mahaolu is staggering. How do you grieve so many of your neighbors?

Bass says she doesn’t know how to begin mourning all the loss. Someday, if she gets her own place again, she’d like to plant seven trees, she said. One for each of her neighbors. Ramelb finds comfort in saying a Bahai prayer for the departed. Sanford Hill speaks to news organizations and tries to drum up more attention about what happened at the senior complex. Someone, he said, needs to be held accountable for the fire and the fire response.

“That’s how I’m memorializing them,” he said. “Getting people to remember, getting them to realize what happened.”

None of the survivors Civil Beat spoke to were planning to attend memorial events planned for the one-year anniversary.

An Unbearable Amount Of Red Tape

St. Clair says she gets through most days without losing her temper or giving way to despair. If there’s anything that threatens to push her over the edge, it’s dealing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

She was able to secure housing on her own, but she cannot afford her new rental without federal assistance. Her current rental is $2,800 a month — more than quadruple what she was paying at Hale Mahaolu.

St. Clair said FEMA denied the first request she made for rental assistance because an inspector said her dwelling — which had been reduced to nothing but rubble — was still inhabitable. She challenged the decision and was approved, but she is supposed to send rental receipts every few months for reimbursement and has run into problems several times already. Her assistance has been delayed, she was told at one point that she had been overpaid, then told by someone else that she’d been underpaid.

St. Clair says she doesn’t have an assigned caseworker with FEMA, so every time she calls she talks to a new person. She’s had to pay her rent out of pocket for the last two months while her case goes through another round of reviews.

Ramelb said her application for housing assistance from FEMA was denied because she didn’t have a lease from Hale Mahaolu Eono — even though she’d lived there for years and it was listed as the address on her driver’s license. She ended up getting about $11,000 in assistance from FEMA but is living on a friend’s property in Haiku.

“You’re talking to a different person every day,” Ramelb said.

Bass says she was denied housing assistance because she had a modest amount of renter’s insurance. She says someone from FEMA offered to buy her a ticket to the mainland, but that was about it.

Paperwork applying for nonprofit housing has also been challenging. Bass said she had to undergo a background check to apply for a new apartment through Hale Mahaolu — despite already being a tenant. St. Clair says she was asked to furnish her divorce papers from decades ago, even though she did not have to provide them when she applied for her apartment in 2019.

Bass is one of several former Hale Mahaolu Eono residents who moved to the Big Island. She was able to secure a spot in an affordable housing complex in Kailua-Kona, but as much as she’s grateful for a place to live, she’s starting to think she made a mistake.

She’s taken up jewelry-making since moving to the island and she enjoys taking long meandering drives. But her apartment complex doesn’t have the same sense of community that she had in Lahaina.

“I love the Big Island,” she said. “It’s great here. But you don’t have a community.”

Surrounding yourself with the right kind of community is also hard. St. Clair says she’s done well with solitude, and while she was constantly refreshing the news in the months after the fire, she’s had to try and remove herself from community forums that are rife with conspiracy theories.

There’s a lot of antagonism and resentment, Remelb said, among some on Maui who feel fire survivors are getting too much help and resources or are somehow scamming the system. There’s a lack of understanding about what people are really dealing with.

It’s one thing to lose your friends and your house, she said. But then to lose your town and your livelihood and your way of life in a matter of hours — it’s an unfathomable loss.

“This is something you take till the next world,” she said.

Finding Glimmers Of Hope

Ramelb is one of the few Hale Mahaolu residents who loves where they are living today. She’s been staying with friends in Haiku since the fire and hopes to build a tiny home on their property eventually.

In the meantime, she’s been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from friends and has focused as much of her energy as she can on her art. She doesn’t know what comes next.

“It’s like a huge boulder is in your heart and that hasn’t lifted yet,” Ramelb said. “It’s been hard to make decisions and move forward.”

What happens next for the town’s seniors is a source of immense concern for Maui residents. In a recent study, more than half of county residents and two-thirds of fire survivors listed the struggles of kupuna to cope after the fire as something they worried about — a higher percentage than those worried about the impact of the fire on the community’s children.

St. Clair found a therapist from Lahaina who is also a fire survivor. Being able to talk about her feelings with someone who understands what she’s going through on a fundamental level has helped immensely.

“He’s seen the ashes of friends who have died,” she said. “I don’t have to explain any of that to him. We’re starting on a different level.”

She does not have a clear vision yet for her future. She’s on some waitlists for other affordable housing units. She doesn’t think she could ever move back to Lahaina — just driving past the town on her way to visit her daughter in Kaanapali can make her feel shaky and anxious. She also doesn’t want to leave Maui. She raised her daughter there and can’t imagine being far away from her only child.

For now, she’s trying to focus on all she has to be grateful for. All the help she’s received, even from FEMA with all its inefficiencies. Her sunny home — however temporary it might be. Gratitude for the activists who camped out for months on the beach to raise awareness about the island’s housing shortage. For the ability to have the silence and solitude she needs right now.

“That has been part of my healing,’ she said. “Just really leaning in on the gratitude as a way to heal.”

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

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .