Fellows mentioned in this story: Mark Noguchi
Projects mentioned in this story: Chef Hui

From Eater:

On the morning of August 8, chef Isaac Bancaco rode his bike to Pacific’o on the Beach, the upscale Pacific Rim restaurant he helmed on Front Street, on Lahaina’s historic waterfront. The wind was up, and the power was out. Bancaco taped “do not open” notes to the fridge and freezer doors, then zigzagged around the neighborhood to see how far the outage went. Up the hill, he saw smoke from a distant fire, but county officials declared it “100 percent contained.”

That afternoon, his dad called: The fire was not contained. Bancaco drove to a vantage point and watched the fire devour the town where he had once spent weekends with his grandpa learning to holoholo: to fish for enenue, or sea chub, in the early morning. “It looked like a tornado came out of Kaua‘ula Valley and picked up the flames and threw them over the highway,” he says. “I just thought, The power is out, everybody is home and these houses are like matchboxes, just going up in flames.”

The fire became one of the most devastating in U.S. history, the deadliest in the past century. At least 115 people were killed, hundreds are missing, and more than 2,200 buildings — most of them residential — were destroyed. Bancaco made it safely out of Lahaina that night, but Pacific’o and his rental home were incinerated. In the days that followed, smaller fires continued to burn in Lahaina and elsewhere on the island, including in Kīhei and Kula — in Kula, volunteers and firefighters fought flare-ups for weeks.

Continue reading at eater.com.