LAHAINA, Hawaii — Sharlene Rabang and her calico cat fled the wildfire that destroyed her town on Maui, arriving at a family home on another island in Hawaii after a 24-hour odyssey that also included sleeping in a car.
Dazed, coughing and weak, the frail but feisty 78-year-old walked straight to the bedroom. Her daughter went to a drugstore and thought the cough might be asthma or the flu.
It wasn't.
Rabang died almost a month later with her daughter holding her hand. She had a history of cancer, COVID and high blood pressure, and the doctor initially failed to attribute her death to the wildfire. It wasn't until November that the Honolulu medical examiner said, at her family's insistence, that one of the leading causes of death was the thick, black smoke Rabang inhaled as she fled.
The report made Rabang the 100th victim of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. The August 8 fire destroyed the former capital of the former Kingdom of Hawaii. It destroyed an estimated 3,000 homes and apartments in Lahaina as it tore through dry, invasive grass, driven by the winds of a hurricane that raged far to the south.
The number of people exposed to natural hazards has increased as climate change has intensified disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. Research shows that wildfires disproportionately affect vulnerable people, such as the elderly, people who are less able to respond to danger or people with a low income.
Of those killed in the Maui fire, 60 were 65 years or older.
Many family members face grief and anger and feel robbed of their final years with their parents. The pain is especially acute around the holidays.
“I don't care how many surgeries she had in her life, I don't care that she was fragile,” said Rabang's daughter, Lorine Lopes. “She wouldn't be dead if it hadn't been for the fire.”
In September, a team of wildfire researchers in the US West found that the number of highly vulnerable people living within the perimeter of wildfires in Washington, Oregon and California has more than tripled in the past decade compared to the decade before, to more than 43,000. When a wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise, California, in 2018, 68 of the 85 victims were 65 or older, and more than a dozen had physical or mental disabilities that hindered their ability to evacuate.
Recordings of 911 calls from the Maui wildfire underscored how susceptible older residents were.
A woman called about an 88-year-old man left in a house: “He literally should be executed,” she told the dispatcher. One man said his elderly parents called him after their house caught fire: “They just called to say, 'I love you, we're not going to make it.'”
Several victims were residents of a burned down apartment complex with 35 apartments for low-income seniors. The nonprofit that ran it, Hale Mahaolu, emphasized that the tenants were living independently, but some family members said more should have been done to evacuate them.
Louise Abihai, 97, was among the tenants who died. Strong and sharp, she walked a mile every day and enjoyed the friends she had there.
Her great-granddaughter Kailani Amine wondered if the values of caring for and respecting “kupuna,” the Hawaiian term for the elderly, were lost in the chaos.
“It's just sad that they really didn't have any chance,” Amine said.
Much can be done to reduce risks, such as asking communities what help they need, planning the transportation that may be needed in an evacuation and determining how to communicate with vulnerable people.
“By dedicating the resources, the political will and the social will to help these populations – there is the capacity to do that,” said Erica Fleishman, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and co-author of the study about the risk of wildfires in the United States. West. “We know this will continue to happen.”
Rabang, who was just 1.5 meters tall and weighed less than 45kg, was home alone when the fire struck. Her husband, Weslee Chinen, was with family on Oahu, a short flight away. The couple tended to ignore evacuation warnings for fires and tsunamis — a disaster had spared their home before and they expected it to happen again, Chinen said.
But this time, Rabang's son, Brandon, showed up after driving past a police barricade and insisted she leave. They felt the heat of the fire on their faces and inhaled intense smoke that turned the sky into darkness.
They reached a relative's house. There were dogs inside, so Rabang slept in the car with Poke — the little cat she adopted after deciding she wanted the oldest, ugliest cat in the shelter, her daughter said.
“She felt old and decrepit, and she wanted a cat that was the same,” Lopes said. “She wanted to give an animal a home that no one else would.”
The next morning, Rabang was gagging and having trouble breathing. She seemed exhausted and heartbroken, and worried about what her grandchildren would do if the city was demolished. It took Lopes and her sister all morning to convince her to fly to Oahu where she could be with her husband and daughters.
At 8 p.m. her husband called an ambulance.
Rabang spent nine days in intensive care and was treated for respiratory problems, anemia caused by bleeding ulcers and other conditions. She often forgot why she was in the hospital. Her hands were tied to the bed to prevent her from trying to pull off her oxygen mask.
When she recovered enough to leave the intensive care unit, her family struggled to get her to eat, even when they made her her favorite dumpling soup or brought her fresh sashimi.
So after five days at home, an ambulance took her to the hospital again. Her eyes were glassy. Her weight dropped to below 31.8 kg. Her son and his family flew from Maui. Lopes and her sister took turns keeping the vigil. Rabang's husband came by, but found it too disturbing to stay long.
When doctors increased her dose of adrenaline, she went into cardiac arrest. The family ended her life support and she died on September 4. Her cat now lives at her husband's family home.
Rabang, who had worked in the restaurant industry and helped turn around failing establishments, had several health problems that left her vulnerable. She had rheumatoid arthritis, survived pancreatic cancer over a decade earlier, had a kidney removed in July due to carcinoma and lungs weakened by COVID.
She was also tough and more than a little stubborn. She refused to use a wheelchair during her cancer recovery, crawling to the bathroom when her joint pain was too severe to walk.
The doctor who signed her death certificate failed to mention the fire as the cause – an omission that had both financial and emotional consequences for the family. If Rabang's husband wanted to receive government assistance for funeral or other expenses, Lopes said they had to prove she was the victim of a fire.
After phone calls and emails with several agencies, the family convinced the medical examiner's office to review her death.
Rabang had already been cremated, but the medical examiner, Dr. Masahiko Kobayashi, reviewed her records and the family's report and confirmed in mid-November that while the main causes were pneumonia and anemia, smoke inhalation was a contributing factor, according to the report. , obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request.
Lopes said that when Rabang was added to the victims list, she simply started crying. After months of stress, she was finally able to grieve.
“It was a fight to get her on that list, and now that it's done, I'm just letting it go,” Lopes said, sobbing. “I saw her through every torturous moment she went through, fighting for her life. She had to be on that list because she was part of that event.”
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Johnson reported from Seattle, Kelleher from Honolulu and Thiessen from Anchorage, Alaska. Audrey McAvoy of Honolulu contributed.