Maui teacher saves former student from wildfires

Ellis said of the photo above, “This is my least favorite sunset ever: the view of Lahaina from Launiupoko the night of the fires.”

Ellis’ escape story: ‘Guys, we gotta go. We gotta go now.’

Ellis lived in a Lahaina townhouse so close to her school, she could “see the L (the large symbol for the school) from my backyard on the mountain above the high school.”

On Tuesday evening, when the wildfires began rapidly spreading, one of her roommates came home from performing a storm watch on a boat in Lahaina Harbor and told her, “There’s a fire on the hill burning straight down. I think we should pack some bags.”

“We packed our things and loaded them into the car just to be ready,” Ellis said. “I thought, ‘OK, if we have to go somewhere else, I’m going to need clothes to teach in,’ so I grabbed my favorite teaching outfits.”

Ellis also threw her school keys into her bag. “In the midst of all of it, that’s where my brain went,” she recalled.

Ellis has two miniature Australian shepherd dogs, so she packed dog food, dog bowls, and put them in harnesses before leaving, worried that they’d get scared and run away in the fire.

As the smoke drew closer, she finally said, “Guys, we gotta go. We gotta go now.”

Ellis, her two roommates, and a visiting friend got into separate cars to drive to safety. They planned to meet at a friend’s house in Kahana, north of Lahaina.

“We started trying to go north, which would involve a right-hand turn out of my neighborhood. We are close to Front Street. Traffic wasn’t moving,” Ellis said.

“I’ll always remember that wind, the power in it,” she said. “There was more smoke and it got so dark from all the smoke. I couldn’t sit there. [I thought] what if they never open this road? What if we can’t get out?

“I started to see the embers flying by and that’s when I said, “OK, I’m done with Front Street,’” Ellis continued.

So she decided to go south instead, which had far less traffic, heading for safety at a friend’s place in Launiupoko.

Enable the video’s audio to hear Ellis’ two nervous dogs panting as fire engulfed Lahaina. The photos below show the damage, including blown roofs and downed power lines, that Ellis and Navarro drove through to escape.

Navarro’s car was very low on gas with no way to fill up his tank

Ellis’ former student, Joa Navarro, spent Tuesday doing boat prep work at his job at a sailboat charter company in Lahaina, a job Ellis had helped him get.

He and the other crew members had done some work on the boat that windy Tuesday, but found out the afternoon’s tourist boat rides were canceled because of high winds and rough conditions from Hurricane Dora passing south of the islands.

Navarro didn’t want to go back home to Kahana right away because he had barely any gas, and all the gas stations were closed because the power went out earlier in the day after high winds brought down power lines.

He went to a parking structure of an outlet shopping center in Lahaina and took a nap in his car, since traffic had snarled because of downed power lines.

“I got woken up around 4 o’clock-ish with smoke around me and all the (fire engine) sirens are going off, and I was like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ And I was like, ‘There’s a giant fire right there,’” Navarro said.

“So I drive out. I started to make a left to go north, and then I see Miss Ellis (in her car). She is flying past me the other way, and I was like, ‘Look at her, she has a plan.’ So I did a U-turn and started following her,” he added.

He caught up to her in stalled traffic at an intersection near the Lahaina McDonalds and, after waiting there for five minutes, pulled up next to her and “finally communicated to her that I had no gas, basically.”

They made a left onto Front Street and drove to King Kamehameha III Elementary School, where Navarro pulled over and parked his car.

“I told him ‘Get in, you’re part of this car now,’ and he grabbed a bag from his car and got in,” Ellis recalled.

“We decided ‘OK, let’s keep going south,’ because we didn’t want to go back into the fire,” Navarro said.

Navarro left his car right outside the school, which later was destroyed by fire.

“It was just a weird twist of fate that we ran into each other. It was crazy,“ Ellis said. “You could see all the smoke and all the blackness behind us, but it was weird because the sky was blue and sunny elsewhere.”

They eventually made it out of Lahaina, driving over downed power lines that had been covered so cars could drive over them slowly, but safely.

“It was like the biggest exhale of my life I’ve ever felt. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m moving at a normal car speed and I’m moving far away from this,’” Ellis recalled.

She dropped Navarro off at a friend’s house in Launiupoko and she went to her friend’s home in the same town to seek shelter.

From there, “I just watched my town burn,” she said.

“You couldn’t look away from it, but it broke your heart every second, just watching Lahaina burn, and being afraid for everyone,” Ellis recalled.

To this day, Ellis reflects on “all these little choices that I made” as the fire engulfed her town.

She said, “If I had kept trying to go north, would I have ended up having to flee to the water? If I hadn’t turned around, would I have found Joa because his car ran out of gas?”