A Hawaii senior recounts his 'dumb luck' escape as Maui struggles to identify dead

KIHEI, Hawaii — Sanford Hill calls his escape from death “dumb luck.”

He sits in temporary housing on the other side of Maui from his senior living facility in Lahaina. It was destroyed in the wildfire, and Hill is struggling to process how he made it — and wondering how many of his neighbors, all 62 or older, also got out.

There are no answers.

“There is no way for us to find out who survived,” Hill, 72, told NBC News.

More than a week after wildfires tore through western Maui, authorities have publicly identified just two victims, and say they’ve recovered 106 human remains in the charred fire zone that have yet to be identified. That number could double, officials say.

Hill knows of just three former neighbors who escaped, and some of those neighbors have heard from a handful of others. But that’s it. He has called the company that owned the 34-unit reduced-rent building, Hale Mahaolu Eono, but staff told him they don’t have any information, he said.

Relatives of missing Hale Mahaolu Eono residents say they’ve also been unable to get help from the company, Hale Mahaolu.

Clifford Abihai told NBC News he was looking for his 98-year-old grandmother and had traveled from California to try to find her. But no one in Lahaina has been able to tell him anything.

"It’s frustrating, very frustrating," he said, adding that he's gone to missing person tents and shelters, spoken with the Red Cross and hung up flyers seeking information about his grandma. "All I want is just confirmation that she’s safe."

He described his grandmother as the "strongest out of everybody in our family," someone who walked a mile every day and always had a smile on her face. He said he wanted her to know he was still looking for her.

"I felt helpless in California, I feel helpless here," he said. "But all in all, I’m still going to try. I’m not going to stop."

A woman whose 90-year-old grandmother lived in the building and is now missing said she felt "stuck" as she awaited any news.

"We can’t get in. We can’t search. We can’t look," Danielle Yakut said. "We don’t know where she is, and I just try not to think about anything but finding her."

Company officials did not immediately return messages from NBC News seeking comment about residents who are still unaccounted for.

“That’s just hard to talk about, because I don’t really know who’s gone,” Hill said. “I haven’t wrapped my head around that yet.”

Like thousands of other residents of Lahaina, Hill and many of his neighbors at Hale Mahaolu Eono stayed home for the first half of Aug. 8, watching firefighters trying to extinguish a fire to the east of town. He said he received an alert about the fire on his phone but there was no urgency to it. A building manager went around telling tenants they may have to evacuate. But word went around later that the fire had been contained, and the firefighters left.

Hill went to a dentist appointment.

“I wasn’t worried about it, nobody else was,” Hill recalled. ”Everybody else was home. Nobody evacuated. Nobody left.”

Then the fire outside town reignited and was moving fast, fed by whipping winds. Driving back from his appointment, Hill said he saw black smoke billowing toward Lahaina from the east, where police had blocked off Lahaina Bypass.

Near home, Hill encountered a woman trying to flee on foot. The town was burning, she told him. Officials have said that the area’s emergency sirens never sounded.

The woman got into Hill’s car and they drove away.

They stayed with one of her friends that night. The next morning, Hill, who said he suffers from a neurological condition that requires daily medication, went to a hospital for a new supply. He spent the next night in a shelter, then moved to a hotel, and then to the temporary home in Kihei.

Hill said that he moved into Hale Mahaolu Eono in 2016 after a period of homelessness. The cheap rent — $144 a month — made it easy to live comfortably in one of Hawaii’s most popular areas on his $914 monthly social security check.

Now, like hundreds of others, he has no idea how he is going to find a permanent home. He also lost a computer that held decades of photographs he’d taken of Maui over decades — pictures that told the story of his community.

He is angry at authorities — for seeming to get caught unprepared by the fire, and for not issuing more dire warnings.

He says he feels lucky to be alive, guilty for surviving and unable to comprehend it.

“I haven’t wrapped my head around the whole thing yet. It’s survival right now.”