It's impossible to understand what it's like for Maui's residents who survived one of the deadliest fires in history. But in California, the community of Paradise may come close. There's an unspoken connection between Maui and Paradise, California, sites of the deadliest wildfires in history.
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00:00 It is impossible for any of us to understand the trauma that these Maui
00:05 residents who have survived these wildfires are going through. But here the
00:08 community of Paradise, California may come close. There's an unspoken
00:13 connection between Maui and Paradise, California, two sites of the deadliest
00:18 wildfires in history. But April Miller is among those who might be best to explain
00:24 it. She lived in Maui for 16 years and moved back to Butte County, California
00:28 just outside Paradise, the town she grew up in. The next year, Paradise was
00:32 decimated by the 2018 campfire, the most deadly and destructive fire in
00:37 California history. I got a phone call from my son's dad and he called me, was
00:47 facetiming me and he was just saying, you know, I am trapped, I'm surrounded
00:52 by fire. I want to call and I just want to say goodbye and I want to see my son
00:57 and you know, he just said, I just love you and I'm probably not gonna make it
01:01 home. And then we got cut off. He made it home late that day, as did others in
01:07 her family. Miller says support from her Maui friends helped her get through.
01:12 Okay. And then Tina, I'm throwing in an extra $500 for your family. She began
01:18 raising money for them as soon as she heard about their fire. Now Miller is
01:22 the link between the two communities, raising money for families and
01:25 grassroots efforts run by locals in Maui and running a facebook group for
01:29 peer support. The questions and advice between the two communities, they're
01:33 raw, they're real things like how to navigate fema, what you need to do to
01:38 emotionally prepare yourself for logging lost items for insurance, how
01:42 to get a new birth certificate, what to tell your Children just play your
01:47 little kiki is over there, right? Kiki in Maui, go play with them. They don't
01:51 care what it is. They just need to see that you're okay. Trauma specialist
01:55 Jess Mercer works with Children in paradise. We created a playbook up here
01:59 with multiple collaborative efforts and we threw that right at him so they can
02:02 flip it open, say I need this in the 1st 72 hours. The two wildfires shared
02:06 tragic similarities for both communities, large loss of life,
02:10 harrowing survival, immense grief. But both women emphasize the people of
02:15 paradise and Maui are not parallel. Maui has a history of colonization.
02:20 Paradise doesn't. Many Maui families are multi generational under one roof.
02:25 Paradise was not. Now he's victims include young Children. Paradise
02:30 victims did not that list coming out. Um, you know, funerals, that part is
02:36 going to be what's coming up next and the hardest part of this whole
02:41 experience. Authorities are now asking Maui residents to give DNA samples to
02:46 help identify remains another piece of the trauma. Both places unfortunately
02:51 have in common. Lindsay, the scripts News Paradise California