Laguna Beach, Lahaina fire survivors promote community preparedness at film screening
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Laguna Beach residents often point to the October 1993 blaze, which consumed 16,684 acres and 366 homes, when advocating for the need to do more to prepare for and mitigate the risk of wildfire.
Sometimes, catastrophic events away from home rekindle those conversations.
The fire that leveled historic Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui represents one such occurrence, and community members and local officials joined a group of people involved in those recovery efforts to do just that.
A panel discussion followed a debut screening of “Lahaina: Voices of Change,” a documentary sharing personal stories of community leaders and residents navigating recovery following the blaze that broke out on Aug. 8, 2023.
Some scenes were difficult to watch, from newscasts reporting on the damage and the death toll to visuals of a town reduced to ash in its aftermath.
Jeremy Delos Reyes, founder of Kaiaulu Initiatives, a group dedicated to rebuilding Lahaina’s landscape, said he had to step outside during the first five minutes of the film because “it brought back a lot of pain.” He thanked those in attendance at Wednesday’s event at the Rivian South Coast Theater, adding that many felt forgotten.
“These past couple of weeks, Hawaii has suffered a horrible flood, horrible rain event, couple storms back to back, and all of our plants held strong, like our community,” Delos Reyes said to a round of applause. “All the plants survived, but more so, what we found out through our initiative was the mental health aspect.
“We always address our first responders, and we always address our victims, our survivors with mental health, but we forget about the public works, people that work for the county, city, and they go in and help. We often forget about the EMTs, because they got to wrap up, they got to process what they just saw, and move on to the next incident. … We often forget the public service, our county workers, because they seen a lot.”
Apu Kalama-Jacobson, a firefighter with the Hawaii Federal Fire Department, talked about the tug he and others felt to self-dispatch and respond to the fire. The initial response included 35 guys showing up to the airport in Honolulu.
As they arrived on site, he recalled hitting the median to get around a line of traffic, then telling the crew to prepare themselves for what they were about to see.
“You’ve all been to Maui,” Kalama-Jacobson said to the audience. “Its beautiful water, and it looks normal, and I knew once we cracked that corner, it was not what we knew Maui was … We hit that corner, we saw everything, just the smoke rising. It was humbling, emotional, and I remember bringing it up. ‘This is not an Instagram trip. Turn your phones off, and get your hearts ready, and let’s go.’”
The Laguna Beach contingent on the panel included Sue Kempf and Bob Whalen, the City Council representatives on the city’s wildfire mitigation and fire safety subcommittee, which was initially formed in 2019. It was revived following the Los Angeles-area wildfires of January 2025, and the city currently has 76 action items in place pertaining to those efforts.
“A couple years ago, with the Emerald fire up here at 4:30 in the morning, the winds were blowing, it was raging, it had the potential to take off,” Whalen said. “I opened my front door, and I looked out, and you just had that feeling in your gut, right, that you know this could be a major disaster.
“But you also know it’s too late to prepare then. You can’t do it. If you haven’t prepared before, you’re just running from the house, and you’re not going to have anything organized … Emergency preparedness is kind of like doing your taxes. Nobody wants to do it, but you have to do it, and you need to do it and get organized. It’s really the best thing we can do.”
Laguna Beach Fire Chief Niko King and Emergency Operations Coordinator Sarah Limones were also among the city representatives, both urging residents to be engaged in community preparedness and evacuation workshops.
“I don’t hesitate to put our firefighters in front of any encroaching flame,” King said. “Our firefighters are brave, they’re trained, they’re the best. We have a history of wildfires here, and they will stand to protect homes, lives and the environment, but the one thing that I still lose sleep over is we had the sirens go off [for a test] last week — so many people didn’t know what they were. So many people don’t know what [evacuation] zones they live in.”
King stressed the importance of the public having a plan in the event of an emergency, so that a connected community can take care of each other and allow first responders to do their job.
Limones also shared information about the community emergency response team (CERT) program, opportunities around fire mitigation like home hardening, and home wildfire consultation offered through the fire department.
“I want this concept of CERT to grow to a point that we have incident commanders in our community, that can start incident command, so that when the fire brigade and the fire department comes to take over, it’s a handoff,” said Archie Kalepa, founder and chief executive of Lele Aloha, a nonprofit created to support community regeneration in Hawaii.
“You know who has the best information in that community? You,” Kalepa added. “We have to take responsibility, that it’s up to us. We have been set by the way we’ve thought, and the way we think, that the fire department is going to take care of us, the emergency services are going to be there for us, the lifeguards are going to be there for us if it comes from the water.
“No. You are the responders’ first responders … That has to become second nature for us in our communities.”
