The Lahaina Aquatic Center was more than just the place where West Maui’s youth trained for swimming competitions.

It was where young children, teens and adults learned to swim, did laps and sometimes just cooled down.

Even though it didn’t burn in the fire that destroyed much of Lahaina in August 2023, the 31-year-old county facility was a mess and has been closed ever since.

It is now scheduled to reopen Saturday, thanks in large part to the work of volunteers.

“My big push now is just to get some normalcy back to the families and the kids,” said Lahaina Swim Club president Bob Dezotell.

County spokeswoman Mahina Martin announced at a town hall Wednesday that the pool will reopen even though the county continues to work on it.

The aquatic center features an eight-lane, Olympic-length swimming pool, a 15-by-20-foot keiki pool, a scoreboard, timing system, bleachers, conference room and lockers. Besides swimming practice and competitions, the center was also a venue for water polo, children’s swimming classes, water aerobics and leisure.

The nonprofit Lahaina Swim Club has taught countless children how to swim and produced many swimming champions at the facility. Dezotell’s daughter was one of them. She went to San Diego State University on a swimming scholarship and graduated in May.

‘Oh My God, It’s Spared’

On the day of the fire, 142 children were members of the club. As many as 32 families associated with the club lost their homes, including the club’s president.

“I lost my home just right up the street, on Shaw Street,” Dezotell said.

A few days after his own house burned, Dezotell drove to the aquatic center and confirmed his hunch. “I went, ‘Oh, my God, it’s spared,’” he said.

In the aftermath of the fire, many families were living in hotel rooms and had to move more than once, and club members just wanted a piece of normalcy back in their children’s lives, Dezotell said.

“So, I’ve been pushing since early on to try and get the pool back open, because the pool was not damaged by the fire. It got dirty, but it wasn’t damaged by the fire,” he said.

It’s taken over a year, hundreds of volunteer hours, thousands of dollars in donations, the steady support of a nonprofit focused on disaster response and a lot of community insistence.

Last May, county Parks and Recreation director Patrick McCall faced criticism after estimating it would cost $3 million to reopen the aquatic center. He said it would take at least three months just to get results from testing the water that had been sitting in the pool for months.

Some felt then the facility should have already reopened.

“I want to know what we can do to make this a top priority,” firefighter Aina Varona said at a town hall in May. “How long can we wait? … My kids are struggling, I’m struggling, and I’m getting therapy.”

Alongside her husband, also a firefighter, Varona battled the fire that took their home and family businesses.

Aside from wind damage to the scoreboard and other fixtures, the facility was largely intact. But two decades of deferred maintenance had taken its toll, Dezotell said.

A general contractor on Maui for 25 years, Dezotell saw the $3 million price tag as “just ludicrous.”

‘These Kids Had No Recreation’

LaCammien Shiffler, a lifelong Lahaina resident, said the county’s estimate was based on a complete redo of the pool. She said the administration later decided to follow the community’s wishes to reopen it as soon as possible, and concentrate on fixing what could be fixed rather than replacing it.  

Shiffler was assisting Salvation Army disaster director John Berglund and Red Lightning, a nonprofit organization that specializes in disaster response, on a project to install satellite Internet service throughout Lahaina.

Red Lightning CEO Michael Shiffler, LaCammien Shiffler’s brother-in-law, said in a statement that after its leadership met with county officials July 7, they identified two immediate goals: draining and cleaning the swimming pool, and clearing debris from the entire facility, including lockers, pumps and support rooms.

With support from its partners — UPS Foundation, Salvation Army, Airlink, United Airlines and nearly 100 volunteers providing hundreds of hours of labor — Red Lightning went to work.

The next phase included six to eight weeks of repair and maintenance work on the pool’s pumps and filters by a third-party contractor. Additional work was needed to replace pool and locker room equipment, landscape the area and repaint the facility, Michael Shiffler wrote.

Red Lightning recruited off-island volunteers to work with community volunteers to clean up the swimming pool. He called it a “Herculean effort.”

Other Recreational Facilities Nearby

Altogether, about 100 people from all ages helped with the cleanup, as young as 8 years old, Dezotell said.

“We have far exceeded 1,500 man-hours of cleanup,” he said.

Volunteers scooped sludge off the bottom of the pool — it had turned into a frog pond — and pressure-washed the pool and decks, Dezotell said. A landscaping company worked on the entire property and at the adjacent skate park.

A team of about 30 painters from the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Council 50 union painted the entire facility in six hours on a Saturday morning, with hundreds of gallons of paint donated by PPG Industries.

“They had spray crews with multiple sprayers. It was like an Army exercise,” Dezotell said.

Dezotell pointed to the skate park next door, the nearby baseball field scheduled to reopen soon, and an adjacent area where dozens of kids were practicing Pop Warner football as other symbols of normalcy returning.

“Sports in the community is really important,” he said. “So, that whole stretch is kind of a big deal, and it’s very visible, especially now that they have opened the road again and people see it.”

Dezotell said he is heartened by the community’s response.

“So many people, when we’ve had a need, have stepped up, and for all the bad that happened with the fire … ,” he said. “This is good”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Atherton Family Foundation, Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.