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'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina

Bill Chappell

The fire that devastated historic Lahaina in western Maui left a red-roofed house relatively unscathed. Its owner says he wants to open the house to the neighborhood to help the rebuilding process. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

The fire that devastated historic Lahaina in western Maui left a red-roofed house relatively unscathed. Its owner says he wants to open the house to the neighborhood to help the rebuilding process.

MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Massive mental health toll in Maui wildfires: 'They've lost everything'

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house at 271 Front St. in Lahaina survived a wildfire because of its metal roof, a lack of vegetation along its dripline, "and a lot of divine intervention," its owner says. National Register of Historic Places nomination hide caption

The house at 271 Front St. in Lahaina survived a wildfire because of its metal roof, a lack of vegetation along its dripline, "and a lot of divine intervention," its owner says.

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

Priceless connections to Hawaii's ancient past were lost when cultural center burned

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A "before" picture shows Trip and Dora Millikin's house in Lahaina before renovations began in 2021. Nomination to the National Registry of Historical Places hide caption

A "before" picture shows Trip and Dora Millikin's house in Lahaina before renovations began in 2021.

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

A mother raced to save her son from the Maui fires. She couldn't reach him

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

NPR digital archivist and researcher Will Chase contributed to this story.

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What Saved The ‘Miracle House’ In Lahaina?

The historic structure on Front Street is the last house standing in a neighborhood reduced to rubble.

Before fires ripped through Lahaina, the craftsman-inspired home at 271 Front St. didn’t stand out much in the neighborhood. The nearly 100-year-old structure had been lovingly restored in recent years, but it was one of many charming homes lining the waterfront of one of Hawaii’s most historically important towns. 

Today, the house is unmissable: A red-roofed structure in seemingly pristine condition, surrounded by piles of ash and rubble for blocks in every direction.

“It looks like it was photoshopped in,” homeowner Trip Millikin said of the house, which stands in such contrast to the surrounding ruins that images of the home have gone viral in recent days.

Millikin has spent much of the last week — in between anxious calls to check up on friends and neighbors — puzzling over why his house was somehow spared.

Maybe it was just luck. Maybe the wind shifted at just the right moment. Or maybe it was a series of serendipitous choices made during a recent home renovation that helped prevent flying pieces of burning wood and debris from doing little more than scorching small patches of his yard and bubbling the paint on one wall. 

Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes.

A Painstaking Renovation

Millikin and his wife, Dora Millikin, fell in love with the Front Street house several years ago, although it was vacant and had fallen into a state of disrepair.

The home, known as the Pioneer Mill Co./Lahaina Ice Co. Bookkeeper’s House, is believed to have been moved to Front Street in 1925 from a nearby plantation. For decades, it was used to house management-level employees.

The Millikins, who started living in Lahaina more than a decade ago, used to bicycle by the house and talk about what it would take to fix the sagging roof, the rotting lanai, the peeling paint.

“The house was an absolute nightmare, but you could see the bones of it,” Millikin said.

Millikin and his wife bought the property in 2021, working with the county on a historic preservation plan before embarking on a nearly two-year renovation project. They did much of the work themselves, along with a local carpenter and the help of neighbors.

The effort was a source of neighborhood pride, Millikin said, with people walking by and frequently talking to the couple as they hand glazed the 500 window panes in the structure, painstakingly repaired the termite damage, dug out the mushrooms growing in the downstairs ohana unit.

The house is what’s known as a craftsman-inspired “plantation vernacular” dwelling, a style of homes constructed mostly by sugar and pineapple plantation companies in the early 20th century.

This home, overseen by a Native Hawaiian carpenter who headed most construction projects for the Pioneer Mill Co., was built from California redwood, Millikin said, which has some natural fire-resistant properties. But so was the historic house next door, which burned completely in the Aug. 8 fire.

During renovations, Millikin installed a commercial-grade steel roof, something that definitely would have provided better protection from flying embers than shingles. At first, Millikin thought this might have made the biggest difference in why his home was spared.

But Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Wood Institute for the Environment, said it was likely the Millikins’ decision to dig out the existing landscaping directly surrounding the house and replace it with river stones that made the biggest difference.

“What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said.

Having nothing combustible in the 5 feet directly around a house is enormously important.

Millikin said the decision to install river stones for about a meter around the house was not actually aimed at fire prevention. He wanted to prevent runoff from landscaping from creating water and termite damage. But it may have saved his home.

Regulations in California have typically focused on a 30-foot perimeter around homes known as “Zone A” in firefighting. But Wara said that research on the thousands of homes that have burned in California in recent years has shown that it’s really what’s installed in the immediate few feet of a home that makes the biggest difference.

In fires like the one in Lahaina, there are enormous amounts of flaming embers that are flying through the air. And if there’s something next to the house that is combustible — a wood fence, a bush, dry grass — that’s often what will ignite the structure, Wara said.

In the instance of the Front Street house, there was also a considerable amount of luck involved, he said. Because even the most well-prepared house can catch fire when the homes next to it are burning.

“Basically, the houses start catching each other on fire,” Wara said, which is why encouraging homeowners to remove landscaping and install rocks or granite walkways around homes is so important. “If enough of the homes have that kind of preparation then that chain reaction doesn’t get started.”

A Struggle To Make Use Of Luck

Millikin, who was on a trip to Massachusetts during the Lahaina fire, said the last he heard from his immediate neighbor on Aug. 8 was that the whole neighborhood was burning and his home was unlikely to make it.

He went to bed feeling physically ill out of fear for the fate of his friends, his neighborhood, and his home.

In the morning, a friend called and sent them a picture from a helicopter flyover of Lahaina. Every structure had been destroyed in the area. But there, in the midst of the destruction, was the seemingly untouched red roof of Millikin’s home.

Millikin said he and his wife were overcome with emotion.

“We started crying,” he said. “I felt guilty. We still feel guilty.”

Millikin said he has friends who have lost homes in California in recent years, and when he’s seen stories about other “miracle houses” left standing in the aftermath of destructive fires, he’s always thought: “Boy, I’m glad I don’t own that one. I wouldn’t want that. I would feel guilty.”

Now, Millikin said, “that’s our house.”

Millikin is hoping to channel his luck — and his feelings of guilt — into community action. He’s been told by neighbors that it’s best to stay put outside of Lahaina while he can so as not to take up much-needed resources for other survivors.

But when he and his wife are able to go back, he’s hoping to set up his home as some sort of a community hub for people trying to rebuild theirs.

“Let’s rebuild this together,” he said. “This house will become a base for all of us. Let’s use it.”

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

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'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina

MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

NPR digital archivist and researcher Will Chase contributed to this story.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Watch CBS News

See the nearly 100-year-old "miracle house" that survived the Lahaina wildfire and now sits on a block of ash

By Li Cohen

Updated on: August 23, 2023 / 11:14 AM EDT / CBS News

On a section of Front Street in the town of Lahaina , every structure has been charred and replaced with squares of ash – except one. Right along the sea wall lies a single house with a red roof, green porch and a seemingly unharmed vehicle in a largely unscathed driveway. 

And the building has been around for nearly a century.  

Maui county records show the house at its current location at 271 Front Street is 81 years old, and sits on more than 11,000 square feet of property at 271 Front Street in the city that was once the long-standing capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. But the building has been in the community for even longer. 

According to the Historic Hawaii Foundation, the house has been nominated to be designated a historic site, as it was formerly the home of the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookeeper's House. The nomination form for the historic places registry says that it was built in 1925, is distinctive to the times it was built and is "associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns" of Hawaiian history. 

The house was home to bookkeepers or accountants "who played important roles in the development of the Pioneer Mill Co. and Lahaina Ice Co.," the form says, "and its delivery of ice and aerated (soda) water along with electrical service and related products to Lahaina customers during the early-mid-twentieth century." One of its longtime residents, Frank A. Alameda, was a Lahaina Ice Co. employee turned Hawaii National Guardsman who became the namesake of the Hawai'i National Guard Armory in Wailuku. 

It was eventually moved to its current Front Street location in 1942, and earlier this year, the three-bedroom, three-bathroom house was valued at more than $3.5 million.

Now, in a land of rubble, its worth is so much more. 

"It looks like it was photoshopped in," Trip Millikin, who owns the house, told local outlet Honolulu Civil Beat . Records show he and his wife Dora Millikin bought the house in May 2021 after what he told the Civil Beat was a long time of bicycling by. 

"The house was an absolute nightmare, but you could see the bones of it," he said, saying that the local historic building suffered from a rotting exterior. 

So when they finally got the chance to buy it, they did, and completely revamped the property. And doing that may have just been the thing that ensured its survival in the fire . 

Millikin told Civil Beat that the house was built of California redwood, a tree known for its "superpower" of being fire resistant, according to the National Park Service . The bark of these trees contains tannic acid, which helps their bark stay safe from flames. 

But according to Civil Beat, the house next door was also made of the same wood – and burned down. So what exactly set this one apart? 

Millikin told the outlet that when they were doing renovations, they also put it in a commercial-grade steel roof and dug out old landscaping to replace it with river stones about a meter around the house. The latter is what likely made the biggest difference in the house's ability to withstand the flames, Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Wood Institute for the Environment, told Civil Beat.

That's because of embers. 

In the immediate home ignition zone – the area up to 5 feet around your home – using crushed stone or gravel is a vital part of reducing the risk of the structure being set ablaze. According to the National Fire Protection Association , reducing flammable vegetation in this area is crucial. The group also says metal roofing, removing dead debris or flammable materials from porch areas and using fire-resistant house siding can help homes withstand fires. 

Without the proper precautions, houses can "start catching each other on fire," Wara told Civil Beat. "If enough of the homes have that kind of preparation then that chain reaction doesn't get started." 

Millikin was in Massachusetts when the Aug. 8 fire broke out in Lahaina . He had been told that his home would likely not make it. But the next day, he received a picture – in the middle of dozens of piles of ash stood his home, largely untouched. Suddenly, he had what some are dubbing on social media as a "miracle house," often seen in the aftermath of fires in places like California.

"That's our house," he told Civil Beat. "... We started crying. I felt guilty. We still feel guilty." 

But that guilt isn't going to be harped over. Instead, he and his wife are using it as a symbol of hope amid the destruction that has killed more than 100 and left more than 800 missing. 

"Let's rebuild this together," Millikin said. "This house will become a base for all of us. Let's use it."

• Hawaii Wildfires

Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.

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The real story behind that photo of a weirdly unscathed house in the rubble of Lahaina

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The image has gone viral: The house, with its crisp white facade and cheerful red roof, appears untouched . Surrounding it are piles of scorched rubble left behind by the fast-moving fire that decimated Lahaina last week.

The historic Front Street home was not the only property to survive the fire. Entire subdivisions were spared as flames leapfrogged across the island. But the indelible image of the improbably unscathed house amid a backdrop of devastation is so extreme that some have questioned whether the image was digitally altered.

The situation is all too real, said Dora Atwater Millikin, who owns the house with her husband.

“We lost neighbors in this, and neighbors lost everything,” Atwater Millikin told The Times.

But their home remains, she confirmed. She’s still mulling over why.

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Aug. 17, 2023

The couple, who was visiting family in Massachusetts when the fire started, had recently renovated the home, but not with the express goal of hardening it against flames. The 100-year-old property was once a bookkeeper’s house for employees of the Pioneer Mill Co., a sugar plantation that operated in Lahaina beginning in the mid-1800s, and the homeowners were seeking to restore some of the structure’s original features, she said.

“It’s a 100% wood house so it’s not like we fireproofed it or anything,” Atwater Millikin said.

Working closely with the county and the local historic commission, they replaced the asphalt roof with heavy-gauge metal — the home would have originally had a roof of either wooden shake or thinner-grade corrugated tin, she said. They lined the ground with stones up to the drip line of the roof, which overhangs by 36 to 40 inches.

And they removed foliage that was up against the house — not because they were trying to reduce the risk of ignition, but because they were concerned about termites spreading to the wooden frame, she said. Their only nod toward disaster preparedness was to install hurricane ties, she added.

“We love old buildings, so we just wanted to honor the building,” she said. “And we didn’t change the building in any way — we just restored it.”

It appears these modifications had the effect, however unintended, of making the home more resilient to flames.

“When this was all happening, there were pieces of wood — 6, 12 inches long — that were on fire and just almost floating through the air with the wind and everything,” Atwater Millikin said. “They would hit people’s roofs, and if it was an asphalt roof, it would catch on fire. And otherwise, they would fall off the roof and then ignite the foliage around the house.”

Fire helicopter lacked collision-avoidance system before midair crash

One of two firefighting helicopters involved in a fatal midair collision last week lacked an electronic warning device that alerts pilots to nearby aircraft.

Roofs are the No. 1 factor that contribute to the flammability of a home because they can serve as large landing pads for embers, said Susie Kocher, forestry advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension, who co-authored a guide on how to harden homes against wildfire. In this case, a regular asphalt composition roof would likely have done just as good a job as metal, as most have a Class A fire resistance rating, she added.

That’s followed by the “near home environment” — the area immediately surrounding the structure, she said. Experts suggest that homeowners clear flammable vegetation in a 5-foot radius and replace it with a hardscape feature such as paving stones or gravel — similar to what the Millikins did, she said.

“If shrubs and bushes, especially flammable ones, are right up next to the house and embers catch them on fire, the heat can burst the window and it goes right into the home from there,” she said.

The home may also have benefited from the fact that it was not that close to neighboring properties, she said, pointing out that it was bordered on three sides by the ocean, a road and a park-like empty lot, respectively.

“One of the biggest sources of fuel is the homes,” she said. “So when one home goes up, if another is very close, the radiant heat can catch the other house.”

That risk is highest when the other building that burns is 30 feet away or less, said Stephen Quarles, UC Cooperative Extension advisor emeritus. Vulnerable components would be the siding, windows or under-eave area, as well as any foundation or attic vents, he added.

Road to Lahaina reopens. For many, heartache awaits

Over a week after fire incinerated Lahaina, locals are pressing for a return to work as they seek some sense of normalcy.

Aug. 16, 2023

It appears that combustibles were largely removed from the under-deck area, and the ember exposure of the deck was lessened because it faces the ocean, he said.

“A ‘noncombustible zone’ near the home and under the deck is an excellent strategy to reduce the vulnerability of the home to a wind-blown ember exposure,” Quarles wrote in an email.

Kocher worries that surreal images such as the one of the Lahaina house can lend themselves to conspiracy theories if people don’t understand the science behind how fires spread. She recalled when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speculated that the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people when it destroyed the California town of Paradise, might have been started by a laser beam in space.

Already, some online commenters have suggested the survival of the Millikins’ home was evidence that the fire was actually sparked by directed energy weapons or a massive solar flare.

“I think conspiracy theories can flourish when we don’t understand how things happen,” Kocher said.

But when wildfires ignite a neighborhood, it’s fairly common for some homes to remain standing while others burn, as wind drives embers into structures’ vulnerable points or surrounding vegetation, and some houses are more resistant to embers than others, she said.

“People generally think that it’s a big wall of flames that is catching houses on fire, but often the mechanism is embers,” she said. “So embers are coming from the flaming front, which could be some distance away.”

In the ruins of Lahaina, a surfing legend leads a volunteer army to get supplies to survivors

Legendary big-wave surfer Archie Kalepa has turned his home in Lahaina into a well-orchestrated supply depot for survivors of the devastating fire.

Some have also speculated the home was saved by sprinklers, Atwater Millikin said. It did have a sprinkler system, but so did many of the other homes in the area that burned, she said. In any event, by the time the fire reached the home, the electricity was out and the system wasn’t working, she said.

Atwater Millikin is an artist who makes paintings of New England coastal scenery, and her husband is a recently retired portfolio manager. They have owned the home for about three years but lived elsewhere on Maui for about a decade, she said.

They first heard about the fire from a man who lives in Lahainaluna, a neighborhood about three and a half miles away, and uses two rooms beneath the house as a workshop. His home burned first, so he evacuated to the Millikins’. Then he had to evacuate from there, too, she said.

The county informed the couple that their house had survived in a phone call the following day, she said.

She hopes to return as soon as she can and open the place up for neighbors who have lost their homes.

“Many people have died,” she said. “So many people have lost everything, and we need to look out for each other and rebuild. Everybody needs to help rebuild.”

More to Read

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Owner of ‘miracle house’ that escaped Hawaii wildfires says he hates it being called that

Trip milliken says he and wife dora atwater millikin are experiencing ‘survivor’s guilt’ after neighbours died in the maui wildfire, article bookmarked.

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The owner of a “miracle house” in Lahaina that was spared from the devastating Maui wildfires says he feels uncomfortable with the description when so many of his neighbour’s homes were destroyed.

Photographs of Trip Milliken and Dora Atwater Millikin’s unscathed red-roofed home went viral as a rare beacon of hope after the destructive fires that wiped out much of Lahaina and left at least 115 dead. More than 1,000 people remain unaccounted for.

Mr Milliken told NPR that he and his wife felt terrible “survivor’s guilt” after learning that their recently-renovated 100-year-old home was left untouched.

“Everybody’s calling it ‘the miracle house,’” Mr Milliken told NPR.

“Our hearts are broken from what’s happened,” he said. “We love our neighbourhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it’s gone forever.”

• Maui fires – latest: California woman named as first tourist among victims as residents start returning home
• Maui homeowner reveals property upgrades that left her house the only one spared by wildfires
• California woman becomes first tourist identified among 115 victims of Maui wildfire

The retired couple were on holiday in Massachusetts when fires erupted on 8 August, and haven’t yet returned to Hawaii .

Mr Milliken told NPR that when friends contacted him with the miraculous news that their house had survived, he felt conflicted.

“There was a neighbour who sent a note to us and said, ‘Oh, you won the lottery.’ And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that,” he told the news site.

“I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbours. And that’s all gone.”

The couple purchased the home in 2021 and renovated last year. They removed the asphalt roof and installed a heavy-gauge metal one with an air pocket that allowed heat to escape.

Mr Millikin said they cut down vegetation surrounding the home and put in a stone buffer, which was originally intended to stop termites, but turned out to be effective at keeping airborne embers at bay. The relatively minor adjustments proved crucial to its survival.

He put the home’s durability down to the makeover and a healthy dose of “divine intervention”.

When a photograph of the home began spreading online, some wondered if the image had been doctored or pointed to a larger conspiracy.

Mr Milliken said many around 20 local residents pitched in to help out with the project. He thanked many of them personally and said they are welcome to return when they can.

He now plans to turn the home into a base to help with rebuilding efforts.

Ms Atwater Millikin said in a recent interview that some of their neighbours had died in the wildfire.

“So many people have lost everything, and we need to look out for each other and rebuild. Everybody needs to help rebuild,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

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'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina

MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

NPR digital archivist and researcher Will Chase contributed to this story.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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How one Hawaiian 'miracle house' survived the Lahaina wildfires

• Monday 21 August 2023 at 12:41pm

As images of the razed town of Lahaina in Maui are shared across the world, one house stands out among the charred rubble.

A house seemingly untouched by the deadly wildfires has gone viral on social media, and it has earned a special moniker - "the miracle house".

Some wondered if the image was photoshopped, or part of a wider conspiracy.

But the image is real - and the homeowners have since revealed that they recently completed renovations to the property that may have inadvertently saved it from the flames.

The couple that owns the house, Dora and Dudley Atwater Millikin, told the LA Times they recently replaced the 100-year-old property's asphalt roof with heavy-gauge metal.

They also cut back the foliage surrounding the property to reduce the risk of termites spreading to the house.

“It’s a 100% wood house so it’s not like we fireproofed it or anything,” Ms Atwater Millikin told the newspaper.

“We love old buildings, so we just wanted to honour the building. And we didn’t change the building in any way - we just restored it.”

She said if the asphalt roof was still on the property, it would have been ignited by the embers that were floating in the air. The fire may then have dropped down onto the foliage that would have fuelled the fire.

Roofs are a key factor when considering the flammability of a home, as they can provide a place for smouldering embers to land.

Often it is these embers that cause houses to catch fire instead of a wall of flames, meaning houses that are not necessarily near an inferno can be vulnerable.

The house also wasn't too close to neighbouring properties, saving it from the radiant heat emitted by other homes.

The couple were visiting family in Massachusetts when the wildfires began on the island .

The county called the couple to inform them that their home survived the fires after the town of Lahaina was razed.

Ms Atwater Millikin said she hopes to return as soon as possible to open the house up for neighbours who have lost their homes.

“Many people have died. So many people have lost everything, and we need to look out for each other and rebuild. Everybody needs to help rebuild.”

On Sunday, the death toll rose to 114 as investigators continued to search the scorched town. It is expected to rise further.

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said that around 850 people remain missing, a large decrease from the previous list of 2,000.

“Over 1,285 individuals have been located safe. We are both saddened and relieved about these numbers as we continue the recovery process. The number of identified will rise, and the number of missing may decrease,” he said. The mayor said that 27 victims have been identified and 11 families were notified of the losses. The FBI and the Maui County Medical Examiner and Coroner office are working together to identify the recovered remains.

Hawaii Governor Josh Green told CBS News that “an army of search and rescue teams” with 41 dogs have covered 85% of the impacted area.

US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are scheduled to visit Lahaina on Monday to survey the devastation and meet with survivors.

“I know how profoundly loss can impact a family and a community and I know nothing can replace the loss of life,” Biden said in a statement ahead of the trip.

“I will do everything in my power to help Maui recover and rebuild from this tragedy. And throughout our efforts, we are focused on respecting sacred lands, cultures, and traditions.”

Senator Brian Schatz said nearly 2,000 people remained without power and 10,000 were without telecom connectivity.

Hundreds of water pipes were also destroyed in the blaze, allowing toxic chemicals, metals and bacteria into the water lines. Residents have been urged not to filter their own tap water and instead drink bottled water.

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Who is Dora Atwater Millikin? Owner of Maui’s viral red-roof house reveals changes that contributed to its survival

8 months ago .

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2 hours ago . Los Angeles, CA, USA

• Dora Atwater Millikin is the owner of Maui's famed red-roof house
• Millikin shares the surprising changes that unintentionally safeguarded her home during wildfires
• Her revelations shed light on the house's remarkable survival

Dora Atwater Millikin is the owner of the viral red-roofed house of Maui which defied the wildfires. The captivating images of this untouched property not only captivated the internet but also led to outlandish theories, including space-based laser attacks. However, the owner of the celebrated house, Dora Atwater Millikin, has revealed that a series of unassuming changes played a role in its miraculous survival.

The red-roofed house, standing as an oasis amidst the ashes, captured global attention as a beacon of hope amid destruction. While conspiracy theories abounded, attributing the untouched state to bizarre causes, Dora Atwater Millikin, the owner of the house, offered insight into the subtle modifications that likely contributed to its survival.

Who is Dora Atwater Millikin?

Dora Atwater Millikin, a landscape painter, recounted how she and her husband, Dudley, undertook renovations on the 100-year-old house they have owned for three years. Their intent was to honor the building’s history rather than to fortify it against a disaster like the wildfires.

Amid the restoration, one significant change unknowingly bolstered the house’s chances against the raging inferno. The replacement of an asphalt roof with a heavy-gauge metal one proved pivotal. The choice of materials unknowingly safeguarded the house from flaming debris carried by the wind, which could ignite traditional asphalt roofs and escalate the destruction.

Also Read: Maui death toll estimate: Locals suggest it is at least 480

Another inadvertent measure was the ground’s covering with stones up to the roof’s drip line, coupled with the removal of combustible foliage close to the exterior walls. Although implemented for termite control, these actions inadvertently aligned with expert recommendations to mitigate fire risks.

The red-roofed house’s strategic location by the ocean, a road, and an empty lot inadvertently worked in its favor. With space separating it from neighboring properties, a primary fuel for wildfires, the house stood buffered from the main blaze. Despite having sprinklers, power outages rendered them ineffective, but the house’s under-deck area was clear of combustibles, adding another layer of protection.

Experts highlighted that the true threat often lies in embers rather than walls of flames, leading to misconceptions and conspiracy theories about the destruction’s selectivity.

Dora Atwater Millikin and her husband intend to not only rebuild their lives but also extend their compassion to neighbors who lost their homes. They embrace the shared responsibility of recovery and rebuilding, emphasizing the unity needed during these challenging times.

Also Read: Billionaires’ houses in Maui reportedly seen unharmed by Hawaii wildfires| Watch Video

The tale of the resilient red-roofed house and its owner, Dora Atwater Millikin, showcases the unforeseen power of routine choices and unintentional actions in the face of disaster. As the world grapples with nature’s fury, Dora’s story serves as a testament to human determination and the significance of supporting one another in times of adversity.

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'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina

MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

NPR digital archivist and researcher Will Chase contributed to this story.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Dora Millikin

Influenced by early American modernism, Dora Atwater Millikin paints the world precisely as she sees it, specifically New England’s coastal scenes, historic towns, and fishing industry. Using flat patterns and juxtaposing solid color planes, Millikin creates movement on and across her works, interlocking “image with paint so that paint becomes the image and vice versa…I enjoy rendering potentially unpicturesque motifs and everyday objects and scenes in my life. I wish to present my world as it looks today without the nostalgia and sentimentality attached to past times…I am always searching for ways to deliver the unexpected to my viewer,” she says.

Website http://www.wynfieldstudio.com/home

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August 24, 2023 12:27 PM

• Bill Chappell

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MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

NPR digital archivist and researcher Will Chase contributed to this story.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org .

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Lahaina was expensive before the fire. Some worry rebuilding will price them out

Since the fire residents have gotten multiple calls from realtors offering to buy their land. Activists want a role in planning, to keep developers from pushing out those who call Lahaina home.

• Jennifer Ludden

A Filipino congregation took in its own members after their Lahaina homes burned

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'miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding lahaina.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery,'" Trip Millikin, whose house survived, told NPR. "And I almost...

MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

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Putin taunts the West with 'first ever' visit to remote ice-covered 'frontier region' just 55 miles from the US - as Zelensky tries to drum up war support in Lithuania

• Chukotka is Russia's easternmost region, sharing a maritime border with Alaska

President Vladimir Putin  has arrived for his first-ever presidential visit to Chukotka in Russia 's Far East - just 55 miles from the US state of Alaska . 

Putin arrived in Anadyr, the local capital of the Chukotka region this morning after flying from Moscow some nine time zones away. 

Chukotka is the easternmost region of Russia, with a maritime border on the Bering Strait with Alaska.

The Russian president was met in Anadyr by a motorcade and was whisked away in a limousine amid frigid temperatures of -28C. 

It's the closest he has come to US soil since he met with President  Barack Obama in New York City in 2015.

Chukotka is so close to Alaska that Roman Abramovich - the ex-Chelsea FC owner - was reported to fly to Anchorage in Alaska for lunch when he was the governor of the region from 2001 - 2008.

Putin's visit comes at a time when US-Russian relations are at their lowest ebb in decades amid the war in Ukraine and a growing East-West divide. 

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today landed in Lithuania as part of an unannounced trip to the Baltic states to drum up more support for the conflict. 

Global war for control of the ARCTIC: Climate change is unlocking untapped natural resources, new trade routes... and a new international conflict that RUSSIA is already winning  

The three Baltic states - all former Soviet republics which are now EU and NATO members - are among Ukraine's staunchest allies.

'Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are our reliable friends and principled partners. Today, I arrived in Vilnius before going to Tallinn and Riga,' Zelensky said on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

'Security, EU and NATO integration, cooperation on electronic warfare and drones, and further coordination of European support are all on the agenda,' he said.

The Baltic tour marks Zelensky's first official trip abroad this year.

In Lithuania, a key donor to Ukraine, Zelensky said he will hold talks with the president, prime minister and the speaker of parliament, and meet with the Ukrainian community.

The visit comes as other Kyiv allies waver on fresh aid, nearly two years into Russia's invasion.

Ukraine has come under intense Russian shelling in recent weeks, retaliating with strikes on Russia's border city of Belgorod.

Zelensky has urged allies to keep military support flowing and held in-person talks with officials from the United States, Germany and Norway last month.

But an EU aid package worth 50 billion euros ($55 billion) has been stuck in Brussels following a veto by Hungary, while the US Congress remains divided on sending additional aid to Ukraine.

Following his trip to Chukotka, Putin is expected to visit several regions in the Russian Far East to boost his re-election campaign amid the war with Ukraine, which has seen more than 300,000 Russians killed or maimed.

He is due to stand in March, seeking another six years in the Kremlin.

The only Kremlin leader ever to travel to Chukotka previously was Dmitry Medvedev in 2008.

Putin's trip sees him escape a wave of ugly protests in western Russia over hundreds of thousands of people scraping by in freezing conditions due to breakdowns in communal heating supplies.

In Elektrostal, Moscow region, desperate residents say they have had no communal heating - which Russians routinely expect the state to supply usually through piped hot water - for the entire winter so far.

'We have been without heating since [9 October],' one resident said in a video circulating on Telegram.

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'Miracle house' owner hopes it will serve as a base for rebuilding Lahaina

MAUI, Hawaii — When an inferno tore through Lahaina on the island of Maui, it reduced a historic and charming town to ash and rubble. But the fire left a red-roofed house seemingly untouched by the devastation around it.

"Everybody's calling it 'the miracle house,'" Trip Millikin, who owns the home at 271 Front St., told NPR. But that label makes him uncomfortable, he added, citing the flood of emotions that came with learning that while his house was spared, his community was gutted.

"Our hearts are broken from what's happened," he said. "We love our neighborhood and love our friends, and just cannot believe that that world that we knew so well and loved — it's gone forever."

Photos of the wooden house, standing intact while its neighbors were reduced to ashes, quickly became an online fascination. Millikin's friends call it a beacon of hope. To him, the historic house's survival means it has a new role to play.

"As soon as we can, we want to open it to our neighborhood and open it to everybody who worked on it, as a base to help rebuild our part of Lahaina," he said.

Nearly 100-year-old house withstood a historic fire

It's not easy to explain how or why the house survived a fire that obliterated hundreds of structures around it. Millikin points to two big factors: luck, and the metal roof he and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, installed during recent renovations.

"I think it's a combination of a commercial-grade corrugated metal roof, the stone [area] around the house, the palms around the house that absorb the heat — and a lot of divine intervention," he said.

The house has roots dating to 1925 — it's believed to have been moved from another location on Maui. After Millikin and his wife bought it in 2021, they finished a restoration project in 2022.

"We removed five layers of asphalt that were on the roof," Millikin said. When the new metal roof was installed, he added, it included an air pocket to allow heat to dissipate. At the ground level, they removed all vegetation along the house's dripline and added a stone buffer — a step taken to thwart not fires, but termites .

By intention or not, those changes jibe with wildfire guidance from the Colorado State Forest Service , which stresses the importance of steps such as reducing your home's ability to ignite.

The first priority mentioned on the CSFS checklist: ensuring the roofing material has a Class A fire rating — a designation that includes metal roofs .

Airborne embers are the most common source of wildfire spread, the Colorado agency's Daniel Beveridge told NPR.

Beveridge said there's no way to know for sure exactly what preserved the house on Front Street, but "the metal roof and lack of adjacent flammable material ... certainly limited the means by which the structure could have ignited."

The house sustained minimal damage

When strong winds from Hurricane Dora drove the fire through Lahaina, large embers soared through the air — but they didn't cause a catastrophe at the Millikins' house.

The fires singed one part of the structure, but the only damage there was a warped PVC pipe on a wall. He also found paint blistered by intense heat on a wall near the kitchen.

"What's behind it are the original — I think they're redwood — planks from about 1920. They didn't burn," Millikin said.

A nearby section that holds a propane tank was also left intact.

"Can you imagine if that propane tank caught?" he asked. "The whole place would have gone."

Following a fire from 5,000 miles away

The Millikins weren't in Lahaina when the fire hit: they've been visiting friends and family in Massachusetts. And with so much uncertainty, they haven't been able to return to Maui yet.

Millikin, a retired portfolio manager, says he first learned about the wildfire from a friend who was fleeing the blaze.

From some 5,000 miles away, he got live updates from his friends who were on the ground, watching their neighborhood be destroyed. As more houses exploded into flames, his friends finally fled.

Then came the miraculous news that his house had survived.

"Dora and I, the term is 'survivor's guilt,' and we feel awful, just awful," Millikin said.

"There was a neighbor who sent a note to us and said, 'Oh, you won the lottery.' And I almost wanted to throw up when I got that. I felt so badly, because these are my friends. These are my neighbors. And that's all gone."

"It's so horrifying because this is just the most wonderful community of people. Everybody knows everybody, everybody works together, it's a community."

Before they bought the house, the Millikins had been living in an apartment nearby for around 10 years. When they managed to buy the dilapidated oceanfront house that had been sitting on the market, neighbors welcomed the news that they planned to restore it.

"Hawaiians worked on this house"

A flood of names come to mind when Millikin thinks of the 20 or so people who w0rked to renovate the house. Names like Bill and John; Eric and Baba. Or Hoi, the carpenter who helped coordinate the work, and Kenji and Wayne, who painted, and Ongele and Gloria, the husband and wife who repaired stonework and did other tasks.

The list also includes Harry, he said, who by virtue of his work on the house's roof has the right to park at the house and go surfing any time he wants to.

All of them, he added, should feel proud that the house is still standing — and they should know they're welcome to return when they can.

"They're part of our ohana ," Millikin said, using the Hawaiian term for family. "And when this is all over, we're going to have them all there to celebrate that house."

After the renovation, the house was nominated to join the National Registry of Historical places . Identified as the Pioneer Mill Company/Lahaina Ice Company Bookkeeper's House, the dwelling was used by bookkeepers of a company that did everything from delivering ice and soda water to selling electric power to the town of Lahaina.

For now, a return is uncertain

There are many questions about when residents of the worst-hit parts of Lahaina might be able to come and survey what's left of their community. Officials warn of toxicity in the air, ground, and water. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for , two weeks after the fire.

"I'm probably coming home in a couple of weeks, or when I can," Millikin said, adding, "I can't stay at my house."

Friends have offered an apartment in a nearby town and Dora and Trip plan to come and volunteer to work in the recovery effort. When they do, they'll also cope with the shock of seeing Lahaina without the people and places that, until Aug. 8, made up the town's fabric.

"We want to help our town," Millikin said. "The world I knew is gone and will never come back, and my heart is broken."

The work ahead of them now, he said, is to find ways to help.

"This is the place we love, and it's home and we want to protect it."

After a pause, Millikin added, "Alright, I'm gonna stop. Because I'm gonna start crying."

NPR digital archivist and researcher Will Chase contributed to this story.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Na Ulitse Yalagina 13B Apartments

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