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The wildfires that struck Maui earlier this month devastated the historic town of Lahaina, reducing nearly every building to ashy rubble — but one wooden house in the center of it all survived unscathed, and its owners can't quite figure out why.
"It looks like it was photoshopped in," homeowner Trip Millikin told the Honolulu Civil Beat, referring to how the white, red-roofed home now looks, as rubble surrounds it.
Trip Millikin and his wife, Dora Atwater Millikin, bought the Front Street house in 2021, according to the Civil Beat. The home, which once housed a local sugar plantation's management employees, is thought to have been moved from the plantation to its current location in 1925, the Civil Beat reported.
The house was pretty rundown when the Millikins bought it, so they decided to renovate it and preserve a piece of Lahaina history, the Civil Beat reported.
Atwater Millikin told The Los Angeles Times that she doesn't quite understand why the home was spared, but she thinks it might have something to do with how they renovated it. The couple had replaced the asphalt roof with a metal one and laid stones in place of foliage surrounding the house, she told the LA Times.
"When this was all happening, there were pieces of wood — 6, 12 inches long — that were on fire and just almost floating through the air with the wind and everything," Atwater Millikin told The Times. "They would hit people's roofs, and if it was an asphalt roof, it would catch on fire. And otherwise, they would fall off the roof and then ignite the foliage around the house."
"It's a 100% wood house, so it's not like we fireproofed it or anything," Atwater Millikin told the outlet.
Though the couple hadn't meant to make the house more fire-resistant, their renovations might have helped save it, The Times reported.
"I felt guilty. We still feel guilty," Trip Millikin told the Civil Beat, adding that he and his wife plan to open up the house to their neighbors who lost their homes.
"Let's rebuild this together," Millikin told the Civil Beat. "This house will become a base for all of us. Let's use it."
