The Anderson Family - 80823 Lahaina Fire Support

My wife for her birthday last week and our anniversary on August 5th.

This is our newer kitty Chichi (rescued her 2 months ago)

My Fur son Mr. PoPo. We rescued him a year ago as a 4 month old.

Aloha everyone, my name is Christopher Anderson. My wife Melanie Gay Anderson and I on August 8th 2023, helped evacuate our friends, who were at Safeway as we fled our house at 1582 Malo Street. We left with our cats and friends and went to our coworkers house down in Ka'anapali hoping the fire would stop in Lahaina town.

When we reached our coworkers house, Alan (80) & Charlene Walker (82). We stayed at their house as we made food for our friends waiting for word for possible evacuation. At 3:30 am a police officer started telling people in our neighborhood to evacuate, with people from Kaanapali Golf Estates up the road evacuating first.

We took this opportunity to flee to Napili getting there in time for sunrise. After a couple hours of sleep, we made our way out to find our immediate friends and family to make sure they made it out. Napili Market, opened for the first day, to allow us to pay cash for groceries. We were able to secure some water and juice for our small group after 3 hours.

We wanted to check and see if our house and business was still salvageable. After driving to Hyatt Regency, we walked through the beach access path to see what was left. I have lived in Maui for my entire Adult life (coming up on 15 years) . I would have never expected to see what we did.

This sign seemed to change every other week to promote a restaurant or inform tourists. Drove by it every day going to work.

This is what's left of our house. Unfortunately we were not able to fit anything to bring with us since the car was full of people and kitties. The fire seems to have finally been stopped right after our house at the Church next door.

It did not feel real seeing something I have seen every day for years just be gone in 24 hours.

After seeing that The Cannery Mall was still there we had hope that our office was still intact. We were not as fortunate.. once we confirmed that everything was gone we walked back.

After meeting up with our coworkers from our previous Job at Lahaina Printsellers, Melanie and I went to check up on Char and Alan. They were ok, but with the water being cut off and not having much food left, we decided to use what gas we still had to make the drive through Kahakaloa (backside of the island) drive to Kahului so we could get supplies to bring back to everyone. We have secured essentials and are heading back today with a convoy bringing food to people.

We will be dedicating ourselves to helping out those in our community and help our friends who have lost everything also. Any help is deeply and greatly appreciated. We will use any assistance to help our friends who lost everything as well as trying to rebuild our lives.. We are going to be forced to move off island in the coming months and will be starting over rebuilding our lives, as we bring our son back to his new home from The Philippines and our baby we have been trying to get pregnant with the last 3 months.

Here are videos that we were able to take as we wanted to conserve as much battery as possible.