• A delicate tropical breeze that billows and builds and builds becoming a screaming cacophony, a Banshee wind howling through the thrashing palm trees. Yet it is merely a prelude to an incomprehensible catastrophe of such proportions it beggars the mind’s capacity to take in the sheer breadth and scope of its power.

• A decimation and razing of old Lahaina Town on the Kaanapali coast of Maui, Hawaii devoured by fire tornados, the air filled with choking ash and flying debris lashing the nearly breathless bodies of the hapless and screaming victims seeking refuge from the overwhelming and suffocating inferno.

• People searching for shelter from the sweltering heat, a plunging refuge in the surging surf pounding on the stony shore, amidst dead bodies bobbing like so much flotsam in the roiling and boiling sea.

• Houses and cars exploding like random bomb shells throughout the hellfire of old Lahaina Town but there is nowhere to turn, nowhere to run, choosing between a fiery death and a watery grave.

• Upcoast from the excruciating torment of the citizens of Lahaina, lies a yin to Lahaina’s yang, a place of emotional suffering from being witness to this abomination of nature and yet being unable to aid or offer succor, the guests and staff of the Hyatt Regency Maui are immersed in a state of inner incorporeal pain no less real than their neighbor’s corporeal trauma.