| Lahaina’s wildfire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. Now the community is grappling with the botched response as it tries to rebuild.  Photograph by Bryan Anselm / Redux for The New Yorker The details of the wildfire that spread through Maui in August are terrifying. Towering flames moved with sudden speed, shifting with the high winds. The fire reached temperatures more than a thousand degrees hotter than the temperature on Venus. Glass and aluminum melted away; houses and people were turned to dust. Many residents dove into the ocean to escape the smoke and flames. “The speed of the fire, the level of fatality and physical destruction, the level of trauma to those who survived—it’s unspeakable,” an official with the American Red Cross explained, calling the disaster unprecedented. In this week’s issue, Carolyn Kormann captures these scenes of horror in a dispatch from Maui. But she also takes the story a step further, examining how the experiences of the people of Lahaina are terrible previews of what will inevitably become a shared nightmare. As Kormann writes, “People often view disaster survivors’ stories as they would an apocalypse film—a frightening but faraway and anomalous event, witnessed from a safe place. But these stories are missives from our immediate future—postcards from what, one day, might be your circumstance, in this era that some climate-change experts now call the Pyrocene.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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