Maui resident Dustin Kaleiopu recalled how his father returned to their family home Wednesday to find it burned to the ground.
He assumed "everybody had died in the fire," Kaleiopu told CNN's Erin Burnett.
"I wasn't home when the fire started. I was staying at my brother's house like a mile or two away from home, and I live with my dad and my grandpa," he said. "My dad called me and said, 'Hey, I heard there is a fire, I can't get in touch with your grandpa. Go and check on him.'"
When Kaleiopu arrived at his home, he said, it was windy at the time with a "little bit of smoke but nothing major going on."
"My brother ends up joining us, and we fall asleep because there was nothing else to do. Everything was closed — no electricity," he continued. "We woke up at about 3:30, 4:00 o'clock, and the wind started howling, and the smoke started getting closer."
At this time, Kaleiopu's brother drove two blocks from the home and saw that his office was on fire.
"Then the smoke started getting thicker and blacker, and the condominium across the street from my house looked like it had started to catch fire as well," he said. "I told my grandpa that we needed to go."
He compared the wildfire to a fire from five years ago – when the fire department was at their door asking them to evacuate. This time there was "no warning at all."
"We had to wait until everything was on fire because we had no ability to know really how much of it was really going on," he said.
The street was "burned to the ground" when Kaleiopu's father drove by an hour later,
"Driving his truck through the street, which is on fire, there are downed power lines. he is driving over rubble, trying to look for us."
Kaleiopu's brother reunited with their dad after catching sight of his father in the traffic evacuating town.
"When my dad realized that it was my brother, he completely lost it," Kaleiopu said. "Because he had assumed that everybody had died in the fire just by how drastic things had been when he got there after being at work all day."
