It’s progress toward normalcy for Liu, who says he lost 20 pounds in the past year due to the trauma and stress that began when Maui police officers pounded on his door, ordering him to evacuate immediately. As his daughter honked the horn frantically for him to get in her car, he had time to grab only his wallet and cellphone before fleeing for his life wearing shorts, a T-shirt and slippers.

The fast-moving fire spreading down a gulch full of vegetative fuel would soon incinerate Liu’s three-bedroom home, the cottage his daughter was living in and his two cars, including the convertible that had belonged to his late wife. When it was over, 26 properties had been destroyed along the steep slopes of Haleakala, and others were left uninhabitable due to smoke and ash damage.

“People think I’m crazy, rebuilding at my age,” said Liu, 83. “Some said I should take the insurance money and go buy something. But I say, ‘Tom, go ahead and rebuild because you’re not going to find a more beautiful place or better weather, and now, this kind of caring community.’”

Before the fire, despite living on Kulalani Drive in Kula for 18 years, the retired Liu said he barely knew his neighbors, with tall trees blocking the visibility from roads and people respecting each other’s privacy.

But the fire changed that. With most of the county, state, federal and philanthropic attention and resources focused on Lahaina — the Maui seaside town that on the same August day experienced the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century — Kula resident Kyle Ellison said the local community had to be its own cavalry.

“We’re not waiting around for any help. We’re not asking. We’re just doing,” Ellison said.

Despite his own home being uninhabitable, resulting in his family with three little kids moving 14 times in five months, Ellison was a leader in the grassroots effort that created a hub for emergency necessities and water at Kula Lodge’s parking lot.

The effort transitioned into Malama Kula, a nonprofit that has been leading a cleanup effort of much of the burned 202 acres, providing green waste services and metal removal, clearing downed trees and creating wood chips for erosion mitigation.

Alexis Huggins, a resident of nearby Pukalani, was one of the many volunteers who helped run the hub for about two months. With her work as an event planner on hold with the mass cancellation of Maui visitors, she said she used her skills to help with the hub’s administration and organization.

“I think we were all running off of adrenaline,” she said. “There was so much sadness at that time. You could feel it in the air. So I think for us, it was being able to help and use the work almost as a distraction to that sadness.”

For Liu, the hub was the first sign of hope. It provided him with “socks, shoes, everything down to my underwear. They said, ‘Tom, take whatever you want.’ And I needed everything.”

The Kula Lodge provided him with a place to stay and a neighbor let him borrow their extra car.

Ellison said from the beginning of the response and recovery the community has been “hyper action oriented. We don’t need any more studies. We don’t need meetings. We don’t need focus groups or surveys. We need boots on the ground action, making things happen and moving forward every single day.”

Ellison said he told people who wanted to help to show up at 9 a.m. the morning after the fire and either bring a chainsaw or their checkbook. Malama Kula is completely funded by private donations.

The cleanup became more important when the community learned the Army Corps would only clear the ash footprint of the properties with burned homes, leaving behind a lot of toxic debris on the rest of the burn zone that mostly was on private land.

With a continuous stream of volunteers, coming from church groups locally and from across the country, as well as school groups and the community, the nonprofit is still averaging about 12 to 15 workdays a month, Ellison said.

So far, Malama Kula has removed more than 10 tons of burned scrap metal using personal pickup trucks, and there is more to get.

“We still have portions of Kula that look like Aug. 9,” Ellison said. “We have wood ash so deep that you sink down to your ankles. … We have a major erosion problem. We have lost a lot of land.”

Another problem is some of the vegetation that is growing back is fire-hardened invasive species like South Australian black wattle, castor bean and fire weed, which all thrive in a post-fire landscape.

“We’re trying to learn from some of the mistakes that we’ve made in the past, and one is letting Kula become way too overgrown,” Ellison said. “Our gulches are bonfire pits.”

Malama Kula has helped more than 60 property owners in Kula with cleanup and rehabilitation of their land, with the assistance of the army of volunteers, Ellison said.

School groups, including from local Carden Academy, have participated in planting native plants.

And with the nearest landfill and green waste disposal site a 30-minute drive to Central Maui, the organization also has been funding a program to bring 40-yard dumpsters to be staged in Kula neighborhoods.

Also sprouting up from the disaster is the Kula Community Watershed Alliance, a land restoration initiative led by many of the fire survivors. The group is working on stabilizing and regenerating the soil disturbed by the blaze and restoring native flora and fauna.

An Emergency Watershed Protection Program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is in the works for Kula.

“That does look like it might actually, finally, be maybe one day closer to actually starting,” Ellison said. “They’re still working on landowner agreements.”

Government moves slowly, and the local groups have done what they could to stabilize the land.

“We miraculously survived the (rainy) winter without any major landslides or mudslides,” Ellison said.

Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said Wednesday that the county held regular community meetings in Kula for at least the first three months after the fire, during which critical recovery information was provided. He noted how Kula’s debris was largely cleaned up before the Army Corps of Engineers even started in Lahaina.

“We have never forgotten Kula,” Bissen said, adding that the Upcountry town will be honored during several days of remembrance events this week as part of the Kuhinia program.

Malama Kula has begun trying to hold the utility companies accountable for cleaning up their burned property. Ellison said he posts Instagram videos of burned power poles and lines that are still running across people’s yards or zip-tied to guard rails and asking the companies when they are going to remove them. One such posting got a prompt response from Spectrum, Ellison said.

And last week, Malama Kula installed the town’s first artificial intelligence-enabled fire and smoke detection cameras. They are run through ALERTWest and can pick up fire or smoke up to 20 miles away, including parts of Central Maui.

Ellison, president of Malama Kula, said many people around the island didn’t realize that the Kula fire lasted five months due to the root system burning underground.

“We still had a major flare-up in our yard on Jan. 7,” he said. “Four fire engines had to respond. … It was this incredibly psychologically long, drawn-out process of flare-ups and people smelling smoke and people being on edge with helicopters flying for like 23 days or so doing water drops.”

Bissen said the county is working on ways to increase the water supply to Kula and is supporting clearing out certain gulches.

But it is the community groups that have been leading the way on removing overgrown and invasive vegetation that can be fuel for future fires and educating students and people on disaster preparedness.

Liu conceded that he had been part of the problem. When black wattle trees were cut down on his property, which included part of the gulch, he discarded the trees at the bottom of the gulch, as others did for years before him, because “I didn’t know.”

Ellison said the Lahaina fire of 2018, which also burned down about 20 homes, was “eerily similar” to the 2023 Kula fire.

“It was a warning shot of like, ‘Whoa, the whole town almost just burned down,'” he said.

After the 2018 Lahaina fire, Ellison said there were a lot of studies and a lot of talk, but “nothing really changed.”

Liu said he feels safer due to the work being done in the gulches and by other property owners. It’s one of the reasons he has been willing to navigate the often confusing, frustrating and never-ending rebuilding that forced him to buy a computer and replace his two cesspools with one septic tank.

While it took nearly a year, his persistence led to him getting two of the first three building permits issued in Kula for rebuilding fire-destroyed properties.

“When I got it, I could finally breathe again,” Liu said.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Cooke Foundation, Atherton Family Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.