'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina NCPR News

Table Of Content

• Billionaire's Child Missing Zoom Call Slaying Cat Survival Mystery
• At least 4 people are dead after tornadoes slam Oklahoma, Iowa and Nebraska
• Shonda Rhimes Says People Expected Too Much From ‘Barbie’
• 'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina
• Military families in Hawaii spark trial over 2021 jet fuel leak that tainted water

The current homeowner told Civil Beat that he and his wife bought the property in 2021 and worked with the county on a historic preservation plan before starting a renovation project. Kocher worries that surreal images such as the one of the Lahaina house can lend themselves to conspiracy theories if people don’t understand the science behind how fires spread. She recalled when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speculated that the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people when it destroyed the California town of Paradise, might have been started by a laser beam in space. “If shrubs and bushes, especially flammable ones, are right up next to the house and embers catch them on fire, the heat can burst the window and it goes right into the home from there,” she said. Its past installments have found attendees stealthing their way through a Victorian home and embarking on a Blade Runner-esque bounty hunt. You can also float between rooms of the mansion, and even get a peek behind the scenes with a VIP ticket.

Billionaire's Child Missing Zoom Call Slaying Cat Survival Mystery

When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites. Just two of the neighborhood's 104 homes were lost to the fire, an immense relief amid a disaster that destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and killed at least 97 people. Many of the homesteaders have taken in friends and relatives who lost homes nearby.

At least 4 people are dead after tornadoes slam Oklahoma, Iowa and Nebraska

‘It's like a miracle': Historic Catholic church unscathed by Maui fire that burned Lahaina - NBC Los Angeles

‘It's like a miracle': Historic Catholic church unscathed by Maui fire that burned Lahaina.

Posted: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted. Even the most well-prepared homes can still catch fire from neighboring structures, experts say. They first heard about the fire from a man who lives in Lahainaluna, a neighborhood about three and a half miles away, and uses two rooms beneath the house as a workshop. Some have also speculated the home was saved by sprinklers, Atwater Millikin said.

Shonda Rhimes Says People Expected Too Much From ‘Barbie’

Far from those kid-friendly rides through a pumpkin patch, this hayride unleashes all sorts of demons and bogeys on Griffith Park. Like so many pop culture horror experiences recently, this year’s Haunted Hayride once again rewinds the action to the mid-’80s in the ficticious town of Midnight Falls. Beyond shoreline setbacks, there are other issues likely to hinder rebuilding Lahaina’s commercial area along Front Street, Abbott said. Portions are designated as flood hazard areas by FEMA, which means getting insurance for anything built there would be costly even if the county allowed it, Abbott said.

'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina

Records show he and his wife Dora Millikin bought the house in May 2021 after what he told the Civil Beat was a long time of bicycling by. Maui county records show the house at its current location at 271 Front Street is 81 years old, and sits on more than 11,000 square feet of property at 271 Front Street in the city that was once the long-standing capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the morning, a friend called and sent them a picture from a helicopter flyover of Lahaina.

Communications breakdown left authorities in the dark and residents without alerts amid Maui fire, report says

In the immediate home ignition zone – the area up to 5 feet around your home – using crushed stone or gravel is a vital part of reducing the risk of the structure being set ablaze. According to the National Fire Protection Association, reducing flammable vegetation in this area is crucial. The group also says metal roofing, removing dead debris or flammable materials from porch areas and using fire-resistant house siding can help homes withstand fires.

Single home surrounded by burned-out destruction somehow survives Maui wildfires

That all helps ensure there's no fuel for any embers to ignite if they drift to your house. Experts say this red-roofed home offers a crucial lesson in wildfire safety. Keola Beamer, a famous slack key guitarist who lives in Leiali’i, found significance in the neighborhood’s name. Most residents had evacuated as wind-whipped fire spread from the hillsides and surrounded the neighborhood, which is one of the newer subdivisions developed by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. So when they finally got the chance to buy it, they did, and completely revamped the property. And doing that may have just been the thing that ensured its survival in the fire.

Hawaii lawmakers take aim at vacation rentals after Lahaina wildfire worsens Maui housing crisis

But there, in the midst of the destruction, was the seemingly untouched red roof of Millikin’s home. This home, overseen by a Native Hawaiian carpenter who headed most construction projects for the Pioneer Mill Co., was built from California redwood, Millikin said, which has some natural fire-resistant properties. But so was the historic house next door, which burned completely in the Aug. 8 fire. Millikin and his wife bought the property in 2021, working with the county on a historic preservation plan before embarking on a nearly two-year renovation project. They did much of the work themselves, along with a local carpenter and the help of neighbors. After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places.

Military families in Hawaii spark trial over 2021 jet fuel leak that tainted water

Atwater Millikin also said she and her husband replaced the asphalt roof with a metal one. "It's a 100% wood house, so it's not like we fireproofed it or anything," Atwater Millikin told the outlet. They hadn't made any efforts to fireproof their home, they told local news outlets. The 100-year-old wood house on Front Street is still standing as most of the town of Lahaina has been destroyed. Unable to get into Lahaina, Alicia Kalepa sent her 17-year-old twin daughters by boat to check on the family’s property.

While the exact reason these buildings survived remains unknown, the way they were constructed likely played a key role. For one, Atwater Millikin said they laid stones in place of foliage surrounding the house. The house was pretty rundown when the Millikins bought it, so they decided to renovate it and preserve a piece of Lahaina history, the Civil Beat reported.

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks. The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen. "Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR.

Workers with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands erected a temporary black screen to protect Kalepa's house from any potentially toxic dust that might blow over from a house that burned just outside the homestead’s boundary. While Tamura admitted that her family’s home always appeared out of place given that houses in the city were primarily made of wood, she says her family is now thankful for her grandfather’s foresight. Along with the red house and church, aerial footage from local KITV shows that a few more buildings were spared, with the houses standing amid the eerie hellscape. A single home on a block bordering the ocean in West Maui miraculously survived the wildfires that destroyed the resort city of Lahaina.

He, his wife, their four children and their French bulldog piled into his Honda Civic to escape the flames. As they drove off, he said, he imagined the temple as protecting their home. Hironaka reflected on how his feelings toward reentry have changed as the weeks have passed — and as the magnitude of losing the temple, along with his home on the temple grounds, has set in. Melody Lukela-Singh plans to take a hazardous-materials course before visiting the Front Street property where the house she lived in with about a dozen relatives once stood. However, Tamura is not very eager to visit her cousin's family in Lahaina to see the house. It's not clear how much the efforts of Saribay and others contributed to the neighborhood's survival.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said. In this case, a regular asphalt composition roof would likely have done just as good a job as metal, as most have a Class A fire resistance rating, she added. The couple, who was visiting family in Massachusetts when the fire started, had recently renovated the home, but not with the express goal of hardening it against flames. Some people might want to sift through the ashes for any belongings or mementos that survived, but officials are urging them not to for fear of stirring up toxic dust that could endanger them or their neighbors downwind. Other residents said they didn’t have immediate plans to return to the properties because jobs or the hassle of obtaining a pass to reenter the burn zone would keep them away. Although Native Hawaiians including Saribay live throughout Lahaina, the Villages of Leiali’i is the only community in West Maui exclusively for Hawaiians.