Body-worn camera footage shows officers racing to hose down a burning shed, barreling through a gate and evacuating a group of people barricaded in a coffee shop as a massive wildfire bore down on Lahaina town on Aug. 8.

The Maui Police Department released 16 minutes of footage during a news conference in Wailuku on Monday as it faced a public records request deadline to put out roughly 20 hours of footage. Chief John Pelletier said the department wanted to “give some context to some of the videos” that the public would see.

“This is not just pulling off a Band-Aid. This is ripping open a deep wound for this entire community. It’s not lost on us,” Pelletier said.

The edited clips give a glimpse of how officers responded to multiple fires that broke out in Lahaina and Kula, forcing widespread evacuations, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and claiming at least 99 lives in Lahaina.

Most of the 16-minute footage focuses on Lahaina, where officers began going door to door to evacuate residents after an early-morning fire broke out near Lahainaluna Road.

At one Hookahua Street home at 6:41 a.m., an officer pounds on the window glass before kicking down the door to the home and evacuating an older man in shorts. As flames flicker in brush next to the driveway, two officers lead the man down the stairs of his home and into a waiting police vehicle before evacuating him from the area.

Fire crews declared the morning blaze contained by 9 a.m. before saying it had flared up again around 3 p.m., which is when evacuations began in earnest across Lahaina town.

Back on Hookahua Street at 3:06 p.m., an officer races through a yard and tries to put out a burning shed with a garden hose alongside another officer as a powerful wind picks up part of the shed’s roof. Eventually they leave to conduct door-to-door evacuations of homes on the street.

“Fire started up again,” an officer can be heard saying on camera. “This house is going to catch on fire pretty soon. They have propane tanks. So I would get out now.”

The same officers stay in the area until about 3:22 p.m., when they move to the Kelawea Mauka neighborhood below the Lahaina Bypass and start announcing on a loudspeaker system that “everybody’s gotta evacuate.”

Residents rushed to get out of the area by any means possible, including on unpaved roads where locked gates barred their path. In one clip at 4:31 p.m., a resident with a Sawzall cuts through the lock on a gate blocking a dirt road parallel to the stream just off the Kelawea Mauka neighborhood. At Kanakea Loop at 4:43 p.m., an officer attaches a tow strap to the back of a police vehicle and rips open the gate. Two minutes later at 4:45 p.m., an officer in another area rushes toward a gate where cars are backing up next to a burning structure.

“Jesus f—— Christ! You gotta go!” the officer yells as he barrels his body through the fence and starts ushering cars through.

Evacuees on foot were hustled into the backs of police cars. At the Lahaina Foodland’s Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at 6:42 p.m., officers found about 15 people barricaded inside, loaded them into their vehicles and took them to the Lahaina Civic Center, Sgt. Chase Bell said. Footage shows an officer pulling the doors open and a line of people streaming out as smoke clouds the air.

“Get in, uncle,” an officer urges a man trying to squeeze into the back of the police vehicle.

Another man found with severe burns at the Lahaina Cannery Mall around 1:30 a.m. the next day was loaded into a patrol car and taken to the hospital, Bell said.

Footage also shows officers evacuating homes in Kihei, which was under threat from the approaching Pulehu fire, and Upcountry, where multiple blazes burned forest and pasture land in Olinda and homes in upper Kula.

One clip at 10:53 p.m. on Holopuni Road shows officers trying to hack apart and move a tree blocking a resident’s driveway as the approaching fire glows orange in the background.

Bell said that there were about 13 officers in the Lahaina district at the start of the afternoon fire, including a captain, a lieutenant and a supervisor. More officers were called in to assist with issues such as falling poles. At the height of the response, MPD had about 38 officers in the district later that night.

Assistant Chief Keola Tom said that 11 of the 13 MPD officers and staff who live and work in Lahaina lost their homes, and one officer in Kula lost his cottage and had his house burned.

MPD used the footage to try and push back on public concerns raised in the wake of the fire, including some residents’ accounts that police blocked exits out of Lahaina.

“To say that the Maui Police Department did not do their due diligence to save lives is false,” Tom said.

Pelletier said that the footage shows officers saving lives and risking their own.

“There’s been multiple narratives about what took place on the day of those fires,” he said. “This body-worn camera footage makes it very clear and convincing that the Maui Police Department, the men and women of MPD, went above and beyond, and their actions reflect the finest tradition of this noble profession.”

He said that police began their review of the incident about eight weeks ago, and that a preliminary after-action report is expected about six months after the fire, with the full review finished about 18 to 24 months from now.

“We are jotting down what went right, what went wrong and how we can get better,” Pelletier said. “And we have identified some of those things as far as action items. Some of those things include certain equipment things, certain policy things.”

For example, policy dictates that officers activate their body-worn cameras once they arrive on scene. Pelletier said they could consider changing that to require cameras activated once officers are dispatched, which could capture more of the situation.

*Managing Editor Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.