(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – The catastrophic wildfires raging on Hawaii’s island of Maui have created a “hell on earth,” killing at least 53 people and wiping entire neighborhoods off the map, local officials have announced.
You can see a video of what some had to go through further down this post.
What is worse, the death toll on the second biggest island in the state of Hawaii is expected to rise further as the authorities continue surveying the massive damage.
The 2023 blazes have already become Hawaii’s deadliest natural calamity since 1961 when a tsunami claimed 61 lives on the Big Island, The New York Post reports.
Besides the vast swaths of land, the wildfires also obliterated over 1,000 structures in the historic sector of Lahaina, a popular shopping and dining destination for tourists.
“Lahaina, with a few rare exceptions, has been burned down,” Hawaii’s Governor Josh Green announced Thursday.
According to survivors, the heat generated by the flames was so severe that they had to jump into the ocean to avoid skin burns.
“We just had the worst disaster I’ve ever seen. All of Lahaina is burnt to a crisp. It’s like an apocalypse,” local resident Mason Jarvi told Reuters.
Two local men who asked not to be named described the blaze in Lahaina as a literal “hell” as explosions and screams added to the utter chaos.
“I saw a couple people just running, I heard screams out of hell … explosions. It felt like we were in hell, it really was. It was just indescribable,” one of the men told KHON2.
“You couldn’t really see anything, sometimes it was just blacked out by the smoke, but you could still see the flames,” said the other survivor.
They said the police advised them over the phone to jump into the ocean once heat winds started blowing the fire closer to whether they were taking shelter, thus burning their skin.
The two men were eventually saved, alongside dozens of others, by the US Coast Guard as they hung onto a nearby jetty. Yet, the cold water couldn’t shield them entirely from the burning heat.
“I was like, after everything I’ve done, I don’t want to go out this way. Hell or high water, we’re getting out,” one of the men said.
Here is the video:
VIDEO FROM THE CAR PEOPLE ARE PASSING RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MAUI THE FLAMES AND IT LOOKS LIKE HELL🔥#mauifire #Hawaii #Lahaina pic.twitter.com/McoZLDVYFB
— N3RO (@N3RONEWS) August 9, 2023
