Belmont resident Ken Krilla was working at the Littleton Parks and Recreation Department last October when he received a call from his brother, asking him to board a flight to Hawaii just a few days later.
“He said, ‘We got a gig in Maui,’ ” Krilla recalled. “In theory, I was going to be gone for all the holidays, which sucks, but I was like, I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this to help out.”
So, despite the distance and six-hour time difference, Krilla accepted his brother’s offer and boarded a plane to Maui. After a 45-minute drive from the airport, he arrived at his final destination, the historic town of Lahaina.
“Imagine here to Watertown Square,” said Krilla, speaking from the Belmont Voice office on Leonard Street. “Gone.”
On Aug. 8, 2023, one of the country’s deadliest wildfires destroyed the historic town, located on the island of Maui. Just a few months ago, the death toll from the fire rose to 101, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Krilla arrived in Hawaii with K2, a company — owned by his brother, Jeffrey Krilla and second cousin once-removed, Peter Krilla — that provides professional technical consulting services to U.S. government clients. In this case, K2 was hired to provide quality assurance for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as it worked to clean up and, eventually, rebuild the town. The team collaborated closely with that agency, as well as archaeologists, safety experts, cultural monitors, and other professionals.
“We were basically assessing the properties for [safe] debris removal,” he said.
The Quality Control team’s responsibilities were to ensure everything on the contract was delivered.
“You’re making sure everyone’s doing exactly what’s supposed to be done,” he said. “Safety is a high priority. It’s paramount.”
One of Krilla’s jobs was to place signage outside properties, identifying the street address, as many were no longer recognizable. For debris removal, he would help assess whether there were any safety hazards on site – batteries, propane tanks, swimming pools, and car batteries, for example.
“You see some things you don’t want to see,” he said.
Krilla worked 12 hour days, six days a week.
“When I think of Lahaina …. [I think of] the dichotomy between the natural resources that were there – the ocean, the mountains, the culture – and the amount of devastation was unimaginable,” he said.
In the hotel where Krilla was staying, there also lived families who had lost their homes. People he came to befriend would try to describe their homes to him, in case maybe he came across it during his day – “the yellow house, next to the white one.”
“That’s what killed me. There was no color,” he said. “Everything was just gray, gray, gray.”
Krilla, whose brother grew up in Hawaii and who had visited the island on a few occasions in his youth, worked in Maui from October to December 2023. In February 2024, he returned for Phase II of the project. Though Phase II remains underway, Krilla is back in Belmont for knee surgery and recovery.
“We all know what ‘aloha’ means, or we think we do,” Krilla said. “There’s 400 things that it means; there’s just an Aloha spirit. … Sure, I was not a local, but by the time I had left, after Phase I, I felt like I’d been integrated into the community and learned that Aloha spirit.”
Krilla said he plans to return for a visit, and hopes to do so while the project is still running.
“This is not going to be resolved in a year,” he said. “The contract, right now, is to remove the debris, but you still have 200 structures that need to be rebuilt.”
To Krilla, the most important lesson learned on his months-long stint in Maui was his awareness of Hawaiian culture.
“The sincerity and genuineness and the heritage and culture of Hawaiians is marvelous,” he said. “And I had no idea what that was; sadly it was a tragedy that made me learn that.”
Emphasizing that while the fire was nearly a year ago this August, efforts to revive the town are still underway – and will be for quite some time.
“Our impression, being 5,000 miles away, is that Maui and Lahaina are gorgeous,” he said. “We also heard that on Aug. 8, 9, and 10, there was a fire. Then, by late August something else happened. There was a war in Ukraine, [a war] in Israel. I was there two days and there was a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine … It gets lost. … I think we have the misimpression that … the fire is done. That’s not how it works. It will be a long time.”