Kafka in paradise: Hawaii fire survivors in bureaucratic trap as US ends mail delivery

Wildfire victims rebuilt their homes in Lahaina only to find USPS had ‘eliminated’ their addresses – while houses that didn’t burn receive mail as normal

T wo months after a devastating wildfire whipped through Lahaina in August 2023, Pam Reader was allowed back to see what was left of her home. With a heavy heart, she returned to the Hawaiian oceanside town now filled with endless blocks of burned houses. As she rounded her corner, she saw the only thing remaining was her bright turquoise mailbox.

“It was an old crappy mailbox,” Reader said. “It was metal, though, which is why I think it survived.”

She could see many neighbors’ mailboxes also outlasted the flames. There was one shaped like a fish, some built into lava rock walls, and other metal ones. She and her daughters had painted their mailbox when the girls were young, with drawings of fish, butterflies and surfboards.

“Everybody’s house was ash, but their mailboxes were standing,” Reader said.

As fire victims have started to return to Lahaina after going through the process of rebuilding their homes, dozens of these mailboxes have become useless. Residents say they’re not getting mail service. They see mail carriers drive by without stopping, only to make deliveries a couple blocks away – to houses that didn’t burn.

“You never really realize how shitty it is to not get your mail, until it actually happens,” said Calvin Cox, whose home also burned in the 2023 fires. “At first, I was like, ‘It’s just junk mail and I have everything on auto-pay,’ but that’s not the case.”

Residents were initially in the dark as to why the mail carriers were passing them by. When Cox moved back in February, he stopped by the main post office to re-register his Lahaina address. When the postmaster looked up his house, he said the United States Postal Service, USPS, didn’t yet have a neighborhood route re-established because not enough new homes had been completed. He told Cox to check back in a month.

Cox went back several times over several months, and still didn’t get any clarity. In July, he filed a complaint with the agency’s federal headquarters. After a back-and-forth with a customer relations specialist for USPS’s Hawaii district, Cox got an answer.

“All dwellings that were affected by the fires in 2023 that have been rebuilt will no longer receive street delivery,” reads an email from the specialist, seen by the Guardian. Cox was told Lahaina’s reconstruction was being treated as “new development”, and under current USPS policy that means no door-to-door mail service.

Cox said this was shocking, considering Lahaina was a centuries-old town and the first capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1962, the National Park Service even took the rare step of designating downtown Lahaina as a “national historic landmark”.

“If the fire wouldn’t have happened, then we wouldn’t be a new development,” Cox said. “But, because our houses burned down, we’re a new development.”

Three years after the fire killed more than 100 people and destroyed roughly 2,000 residential buildings, only about 25% of homes have been rebuilt .