Area couple were in Lahaina

Anyone who’s been to Hawaii knows the flight back home can be taxing.

But a local couple’s recent return home took the cake.

The former Jennifer Page, now Jennifer Cunningham and her husband, Andrew, were married in February but decided to wait to take their honeymoon trip in early August.

Their flight on United out to the tropical paradise was silky smooth with no delays, just a little bumpy on the landing due the high winds in Maui. Winds that would make matters much worse as the week went on.

They arrived at their Maui hotel in Lahaina August 7 and had a nice dinner with no fires burning.

But that was about to change.

They woke up Tuesday to no electricity and were told in the hotel lobby they weren’t sure how long it would be off.

They decided to drive south where electricity was on to have some breakfast and hang out.

When they headed back north toward their hotel they saw some fires up in the mountains on the east side of Lahaina.

The major fire started on August 8 just south of their hotel but with no cell service, no internet and no electricity they had no idea of the extent of the fires.

Jennifer said some people slept in their cars for the air conditioning but they elected to stay in their room and open the doors for the breeze to cool them.

By now the fires were getting bigger and bigger and still no power.

The hotel sent them a box dinner and with more and more smoke outside a box breakfast followed the next morning. That’s when the hotel staff informed them they would begin to ration food.

Jennifer noticed a group of people on their cell phones at a certain spot on the beach where they had service.

They quickly went to the spot and called relatives back in Oklahoma to say they were okay, still not knowing just how bad the situation was.

With the cell service they booked a flight from Maui to Honolulu for Thursday thinking they would stay in Lahaina one more night.

However, the latest sign in the hotel lobby read: We will provide a late lunch/early dinner around 3 p.m. and that will be the last food and water available.

They went back to their room and collected their belongings and packed up the small Kia Sedan to head north on a very narrow one-lane road that would take them north out of Lahaina and eventually to the airport. Although the shortest way to the airport was to head south.

But that road was closed.

“Just as we were about to pull out,” Jennifer said, “a woman was crying and beating on our window. ‘I’ve stopped three other cars and none of them will help us’,” she told the Cunninghams. “We knew we needed to help them. There was no other transportation.”

So they stuffed the woman, her husband and son and all their luggage in the little Kia and set off on a 37 mile trip that would take them three hours to maneuver on the one-lane road that had no guard rail.

“It was the most narrow road I’ve ever been on,” Jennifer said. “If you met a car coming from another direction you had to back up and pull over as far as you could to let them pass.”

While at the airport they found out Southwest Airlines was flying out of Maui to Honolulu every hour for $20.

They also started running into locals from Lahaina who had lost everything including one young man in his 20s who lost his fishing tour business.

“He saw people running for their lives,” Jennifer said.

But the Cunninghams still had no idea of the scope of the massive inferno until they took off from the airport and saw the scene from the air where the fire was just a quarter to a half mile from their hotel.

It turned out the woman of the family they helped worked for Marriott. She told the Cunninghams she would assure them of a room in Honolulu and sure enough they were on Wakiki Beach in the Honolulu Marriott for the next five nights.

Natives told the Cunninghams the normal wind direction comes off the water which would have blown the fire away from Lahaina but the hurricane force winds blowing a steady 50 to 60 m.p.h. from east to west is what fanned the flames to level most of the town.

With the downed power lines forcing the roads to be closed it caused firefighters to be unable to get between the town and the blaze.

“The only thing between the fire and the ocean was Lahaina,” Andrew said. “The fires started on the east side of Lahaina and were pushed west through the center of the city and all the way to the ocean.

“And it happened so fast. As dry as it was and with the high winds it was almost like a perfect storm,” Andrew said.

At last count 111 bodies have been found but there remains about 50 percent of the burn area yet to be gone over with cadaver dogs.

Getting back to Oklahoma City was a 21-hour marathon.

They had to fly back to Maui to catch the first leg of their booked flight home and then fly back to Honolulu, then to Las Vegas and then to Oklahoma City.

“They told us if we missed the first leg of our scheduled flight the entire flight would be cancelled,” Jennifer said.

So they took another $20 Southwest flight back to Maui to start their journey home.

“The resorts never really told us about the extent,” Andrew said. “They were just more worried about the lack of power.”

He said had they not gone to Honolulu they would have missed out on Oahu and Pearl Harbor but Honolulu was much more touristy.

Maui was a lot more laid back with very few cars, a much slower pace.

“In Honolulu we crossed a six lane highway,” he said. “It was not at all what we were expecting.”

“It was an interesting, crazy experience,” Jennifer concluded.