Maui Police Officer Kenny Carroll tried to stay calm as he fumbled with the thick chain around the yellow farm gate near a burning Lahaina neighborhood. It was locked, and on the other side, a line of cars waited, residents trying to escape as orange flames exploded behind them, roaring winds sending sails of black smoke across the sky.

“Central,” he says urgently into his radio at around 4:30 p.m. “Do you guys have the combo for the gate direct by the river?” No one answers him. Instead, other officers are heard relaying information about traffic-clogged streets and frenzied efforts to get people out of town.

“Does anyone have bolt cutters?” Carroll yells to residents, before running down the dirt road along the line of cars. He curses, choking. The officer of 19 years asks a woman if there is a way she and the other drivers can get out. “It’s locked on that side, too,” she responds.

He curses again, sprints back to his police cruiser and, panting, desperately tries to find anything inside he could use to pry open the gate. The black smoke is getting closer.

Such tense, terrifying moments on Aug. 8, captured on police dash-cam footage obtained under a public records request, document the chaos that first responders endured as they tried to save people from what would become the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century. Nearly 100 people died, many of them in their cars.

The videos released raise disturbing questions about communications breakdowns and the county’s emergency response planning and execution, which forced officers to make complicated evacuation decisions and put them and others in dire situations that, some say, could have been avoided.

The Washington Post watched and listened to nearly 20 hours of police video, spoke with two former veteran and two current longtime Maui police officers, one of whom is familiar with traffic operations, and also obtained internal documents from the department and the county that outline rules and procedures for responding to emergencies. The Post’s review found officers on the ground were not receiving information during the most critical time of the fire, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., due to an absence of proper protocols that hindered their ability to safely and efficiently evacuate people.

Officers like Carroll, however, did save scores of residents, often putting their own lives at risk. The footage shows them pushing down metal fences so cars could drive through, running into homes and urging residents to flee immediately, as ash and debris swirl around them. Officers are seen choking on smoke as they try to douse people’s burning homes and lawns with small garden hoses. In other scenes, they are helping burn victims, transporting them to the hospital and packing as many residents as they could into their cars.

As they drive through flames, past burning cars, realizing that people are trapped and there is nothing they can do, their fear and shock is palpable. The footage also is a reminder that officers are watching their homes and neighborhoods go up in flames. In one clip, an officer walks up to another sitting in his cruiser and watches firefighters as they shoot water onto an inflamed roof.

“That’s my house,” the officer replies, stunned.

While the video is revelatory, the raw audio also captures the officers’ desperation.

“They can’t get out of Lahaina. They can’t get out of Lahaina.”

“You guys got to push Komo Mai [street], the flames are coming and the cars are trapped you guys have to push them somewhere.”

“The town is on fire. There are multiple people who have died.”

The west Maui fire moved with such deadly speed that it likely would have overwhelmed even the best preparations. But according to the officers, Maui’s police chief also did not follow multiple internal orders, such as the department’s All-Hazard Plan, which was first reported by Hawaii News Now. That plan details how information should be shared with command staff, who, current and former officers said, could have directed more officers and resources from other districts to assist.

Maui Police has more than 300 officers. During the most chaotic parts of the fire, there were maybe 15 to 20 there, according to the officers.

A current longtime officer from a different district said that neither he or others received any alerts about the Lahaina fire flaring up that afternoon. He went to bed, he said, not knowing what his colleagues were going through on the other side of the island. Around 5 a.m. the next morning, he was sent to help officers in Lahaina, and as he drove in, he said he could not believe what he saw.

“No one gave us a head’s up. No one sent out alerts about how bad it was getting. No one heard from the chief. There wasn’t enough direction or information coming down from above in real time,” said the officer, asked to speak on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The leadership failed us and there needs to be accountability.”

Maui County officials declined to comment on claims that communications were mishandled that day. Maui Police declined The Post’s request to formally interview Carroll, saying media requests “have been voluminous.” Previously, Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said the county did it everything it could to respond to the fast-moving fire. A county spokeswoman also has criticized the media for seeking to obtain and publish 911 recordings and video footage, claiming that such material re-traumatizes members of the community.

Many residents, however, have being pressing for accountability on how the county handled the fire, and the video footage provides crucial if incomplete details.

A point of contention is Maui County’s delay in fully activating its Emergency Operations Center (EOC) — a crucial command post where leaders from various agencies and utilities share information and coordinate resources in real-time. EOC’s are essential, experts say, in rapidly fluid situations when every minute is critical.

In response to the hurricane threat, Maui emergency officials partially activated the EOC the night before the fire, but it was not fully activated until 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 8, according to officers, which the county confirmed. This delay has come under scrutiny, given that multiple major fires had been burning on the island since very early that morning, and downed power lines — which had been reported to police and fire departments — were blocking roads and posing safety risks.

By 4:30 p.m., according to their body-camera videos, Carroll and other officers were already rushing to evacuate residents and trying to put out fires. “What a f---ing sh--show,” Caroll says at that time in the footage. Officers were radioing in that the fire was speeding toward the Lahaina bypass - a major evacuation route — and that Lahaina’s traffic was at a “standstill.”

Shortly after the EOC was fully activated, around 5 p.m., officers started alerting dispatch about burn victims, people trapped in burning homes and reports of fatalities.

However, Maui County Police Chief John Pelletier was not at the EOC, according to emails obtained by The Post. Neither was the county’s Emergency Management Agency Director Herman Andaya, who resigned after the fire. Bissen, who later confirmed he was at the center, said shortly after the fire that he was “not sure” who was in charge that day. The released footage also makes it harder to comprehend how the mayor and the police chief both said they did not know that people had died in the fire until the next morning.

Lahaina, a historic plantation town with old, narrow roads, gets congested easily. There are only two ways out — going north or south on Hawaii Route 30, also known as the Honoapi’ilani Highway. Taking back roads is an option, but these dirt roads cross a mix of private and county property and usually are blocked by locked gates that, according to the police officers, they have been able to use in past emergencies — if the Department of Public Works can come with keys or equipment to cut through the private locks.

And that day, powerful winds had knocked down power poles, leading to road closures all over town. So when the fire flared up again in the afternoon, officers were already dealing with major obstacles and put in “an unwinnable situation” because there was no real plan of where to send people, said Billy Hankins, a recently retired MPD Traffic Division commander with nearly 31 years of experience. Hankins, who ran the traffic operation for a big Maui fire in 2019, watched much of the Lahaina fire body-camera footage and spoke to former colleagues who were on the ground.

A big problem was that officers could not use the southbound lanes of the highway because utility trucks were there dealing with the downed lines. Maui police officers, said Hankins, are trained to treat a downed line as an active line. In the footage, you can hear officers discussing the downed lines, trying to work around the blocked lanes, lamenting about utility trucks blocking the roads. In a full blown evacuation like this was, Hankins explained, “Maui Electric should not have been trying to repair and reconnect. They needed to be off the road and help clear it.”

Although Hawaiian Electric told The Post that they’d informed Maui Police the lines were not energized, police conducting evacuations did not know that, the two officers said. They did not know that they could move cars over the lines. It’s also not their role to tell Maui Electric (owned by Hawaiian Electric) to move the trucks, but upper command’s responsibility to relay information to officers on the ground. As a result, officers started directing cars away from the cracked poles, further snarling and slowing traffic. In multiple recorded instances, officers questioned the lack of action to resolve bottlenecks.

“If the EOC was fully operational, leaders would have heard all this and they could have quarterbacked to help the on-scene commander figure out how to get people out of there,” Hankins said. “They should have told MECO to get the trucks off the road, could have relayed to officers that the lines are de-energized and they could move cars freely.”

To work around the gridlock, officers started sending cars through already clogged neighborhoods, “pushing everyone down to Front Street to try to get them out of there because the fire is coming down.” But that only amplified the chaos.

“Bro, it’s f--ked. . . . The firetrucks are blocking the roadway.”

“Everything is at a standstill. Front Street is at a standstill.”

“Flames are coming and the cars are trapped. You guys have to push them somewhere.”

Knowing how to properly evacuate people in a challenging environment such as Lahaina takes experience, Hankins said. Officers with just a few years of experience were thrust into making traffic decisions that, as Hankins put it, “was contributing to the backlog.”

It’s also curious, he said, that only a few minutes of the 20 hours of the released footage shows what was happening at key roadblocks. There is no video from major intersections, such as the highway and Lahaina Road, as well as others farther north. Some residents captured and shared videos of Maui police cars blocking crossings, rerouting traffic to Front Street, where they got stuck.

In response to questions, Maui Police said that everything will be in their after-action report, which will not be released for 18 to 24 months. Experts question why the report should take so long, given that the county’s internal all-hazard plan states that an after-action report should be produced seven days after the event.

Meanwhile, officers say they are still trying to process all that they saw and what they endured.

After busting through that locked gate with the help of a resident, just 30 minutes later, Carroll drove up to yet another yellow barrier blocking a back road; this time, flames were nearly licking the cars as they tried to get around it. With his hands and cruiser, he made an opening in a chain-link fence, bellowing at drivers to go through, the wind pushing the fire toward them, his body camera shows.

Today, those neighborhoods are gone. The homes and yards right next to that first dirt road, where the cars were trapped, are now scorched black. The yellow gate is still swung open.

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