Left: Homes and vehicles destroyed by the wildfire in Lahaina in August 2023. Right: Pam Reader's painted mailbox in Lahaina. Composite: AFP via Getty Images/Courtesy Pam ReaderView image in fullscreenLeft: Homes and vehicles destroyed by the wildfire in Lahaina in August 2023. Right: Pam Reader's painted mailbox in Lahaina. Composite: AFP via Getty Images/Courtesy Pam ReaderKafka in paradise: Hawaii fire survivors in bureaucratic trap as US says no more mail deliveryWildfire victims rebuilt their homes in Lahaina only to find USPS had ‘eliminated’ their addresses – while houses that didn’t burn receive mail as normal
Two 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.
View image in fullscreenPam Reader’s daughter stands at the mailbox. Photograph: Courtesy Pam ReaderAs 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. To get mail, fire victims have to go to the main post office branch, which is more than two miles away. Residents say there’s often only one clerk working, and lines can be out the door. Opening times are limited. The office has PO boxes, but the cheapest ones, which can’t fit packages, are $250 per year.
Downtown Lahaina used to have a post office, but it burned in the fire. In a letter to residents last month, the USPS said it planned to permanently close that branch due to “irreparable damage”.
“Generations of people have lived here,” said Sara Clark, who has lived in Lahaina for nearly 40 years and says this situation is especially hard for the elderly. “You have these kupuna who are used to getting their mail at home and are also used to walking to the store, and now they’re having to catch rides to go get their mail.”
Clark moved back to Lahaina with her husband Gerald in June. She said their mail was initially delivered for six weeks, but then just stopped. They’d see the mail carrier drive by, she said, so didn’t realize anything had changed. Gerald said that led to being late on his car registration, because he didn’t get the DMV (department of motor vehicles) notice.
“Until we found out they were holding [our mail], we just didn’t know,” Gerald said. “They just took it away without notifying anybody.”
View image in fullscreenWildfires burn over the town of Lahaina as seen in the neighboring Kaanapali Alii resort in May 2023. Photograph: Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty ImagesCox said he had two home insurance policies lapse because he didn’t get notices, something that could be disastrous in a place where it’s hard to get insured. He said he also didn’t get his voting ballot for the primaries.
For Kesa Ferguson, not getting mail has been maddening. She was born and raised in Lahaina, her parents live down the street, so does her sister. Now, she’s raising her children there. All of them lost their homes in the fires. Ferguson said she’s nearly missed medical prescriptions, tax forms, her social security card and DMV paperwork for her son’s driver’s permit.
She said she first realized she wasn’t getting mail after the county called to ask if she moved. Apparently, her trash bill had been returned. Confused, Ferguson went to the postmaster to ask what was going on.
“His response, literally word for word, was: ‘Your address has been eliminated,’” she said.
The whole situation is Kafkaesque, Ferguson said. “That’s where I pay my property tax. That’s where we live. That’s the address I give out to people … Like, you can’t just delete me out of your system.”
The mail crisis in Lahaina comes as Donald Trump has put the USPS in his crosshairs, calling it a “tremendous loser for this country”. Just weeks after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, then postmaster general and top Trump donor, Louis DeJoy, signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to help with “efficiency gains” and “cost savings”. Since then, the agency has cut thousands of jobs and closed distribution facilities. Victims of major fires in years past, like those in Colorado and California, didn’t see their mail service terminated.
The USPS is a federal agency but functions like an independent business. It has suffered from drastic budget shortfalls over the past several years as competitors like Amazon, UPS and FedEx have moved in. In March, the agency declared a cash crisis and said it would run out of money if Congress didn’t intervene – this announcement coincided with Lahaina residents losing their mail service.
Residents have repeatedly taken the issue to local authorities and have received some promising results.
Clark sent a letter to Hawaii’s governor and her state and federal representatives, saying: “I watch the mail carrier drive past my house in the historic district on the way to deliver mail to new homes just two blocks away. I have lived in my home for more than 35 years, and it is deeply insulting for the USPS to call our neighborhood a ‘new development’.”
Cox and Ferguson also reached out to their representatives. Initially, they were told that because of the “new development” distinction, the downtown district would get cluster mailboxes dotted throughout the community. The timeline was unclear.
View image in fullscreenPeople attend a memorial for the wildfire victims in August 2024. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty ImagesJill Tokuda, a congresswoman for Hawaii, called this decision “absolutely unacceptable”, and said USPS needed to restore home delivery to these families.
“My staff and I have been pressing USPS on this and are working directly with USPS Hawaii leadership to get it fixed,” Tokuda said. “That’s not how you welcome people home. Lahaina has already lost enough.”
Richard Bissen, the mayor of Lahaina, too, is pressuring USPS to make restoring mail delivery to the town a priority. “Families should not lose an essential service simply because their homes were destroyed,” he wrote in a letter to the postmaster general.
A spokesperson for the federal USPS said the agency had received “many mail delivery questions” from Lahaina fire victims and that “local and national postal service representatives are diligently working to evaluate this input and determine next steps”.
“I swear to you, my mom’s favorite part of the day is probably going out to walk to her mailbox and check her mail,” said Ferguson of her 80-year-old mother, who’s been living in a trailer on her property as she and her husband work to rebuild their home. “You lose your house, and then to have that as a cherry on top – it’s kind of a slap in the face.”
Cox, meanwhile, has started a petition asking USPS to immediately reinstate their pre-disaster mail delivery. It already has about 130 signatures.
For Reader, the only remaining artifact she has from when her daughters were young is that bright turquoise blue mailbox. Before the fires, she was planning to buy a new one. Now, she says, there’s no way she’d get rid of it. Instead, she built a sturdier stand and painted it with clear shellac to preserve those paintings of fish and butterflies.
“We lost all of our kids’ little mementos and old drawings and all of these things, and then there’s the mailbox with all of our art on it,” Reader said. “Every little thing matters when you’ve lost everything.”
