Building on front street, the old baldwin house. the roof was on fire and i started taking a video of it because i was amazed that there were no fire trucks there. reporter: roughly 500 miles to the south, hurricane dora is helping fan strong winds over the islands with gusts up to 80 miles per hour knocking out cell towers and 911 service. the hospital system are overburdened with burn patients, people suffering from inhalation. the reality is that we need to fly people out of maui to give them burn support. reporter: claire says she barely escaped her burning home but fears not all her neighbors did. i know for a fact people did not get out. there were quite a few homeless people in the area and people who don t have access to vehicles. reporter: other victims jumped into the ocean to escape the flames. the coast guard says it rescued 12 people from the waters off lahaina, survivors thankful to
You can see the hot spots right here. this is higher terrain across the central portions of maui. and then they just raced down towards the coast impacting historic lahaina. we have wind gusts up to 82 miles per hour for the most part, mid-50s to mid-60s is what we saw for the winds. and so that just caused the wildfires to spread rapidly. so as you mentioned, we had dora to the south and also an area of high pressure to the north. so these were working together to basically funnel very strong winds in between the high and low. and so that is what caused the winds to blow out of control. the high pressure is normal. this is what causes the breeze, the trade winds across portions of hawaii. the storm to the south was not normal. so when you have the two together, that created the scenario. so dora has pushed away. winds are starting to weaken, so
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They will steady decrease as we go forward in time. we have drought across portions of hawaii, maui is seeing the most extreme drought which is actually just moderate grout, but enough to dry out the grasses and create fuels for fire especially when you haves winds that we saw. so lahaina, 20 to 25-mile-per-hour winds, this is basically right now. and then we ll see the winds drop steadily throughout the afternoon. and then by the time we get into tomorrow, the winds will die down even more. it is hawaii. you are not going to have zero winds. but you will have about 10 to 15-mile-per-hour winds which is definitely normal across the island chain. so we ll continue to see breezy conditions. however those should improve, but again the damage has already been done. you ve seen that from the pictures. officials there saying that it will be a long road to recovery. jennifer gray, thank you. turning to a brutal political assassination.
How quickly the wildfires arrived at their homes. bill weir picks up the story. we never anticipated in this state that hurricane which did not make impact on our island will cause this type of wildfires. reporter: while hurricane dora is hundreds of miles south of the hawaiian islands, the storm brought winds of up to 80 miles per hour to maui turning the tinder dry hillsides into a blow torch and catching hundreds of people between flames and the pacific ocean. nobody was prepared. reporter: the lieutenant governor issued an emergency proclamation tuesday and the governor is returning to the state tonight. he is cutting his trip by a week and that tells you the magnitude of how grave we think the situation is. reporter: thousands are in evacuation shelters and rescue operations are under way for both maui and the big island of