Torrents of murky, brown floodwaters surged through the streets of Kīhei, carrying away cars and uprooting slabs of pavement. The water sliced through resorts and condominium complexes before cascading into the ocean, carving sandy canyons into the beach. 

It could have been this weekend. But it was not. It was late January 2023 and Tre’ Evans-Dumaran, a 24-year-old firefighter with the Maui Fire Department, was responding to severe flooding when he was swept up and sucked into an uncovered storm drain. 

The current dragged Evans-Dumaran more than 1,350 feet through the drainpipe before spitting him out into the Pacific Ocean.

The young firefighter was rescued 40 to 50 feet offshore and rushed to Maui Memorial Medical Center, but, on Feb. 4, he died after eight days in the intensive care unit. 

Three years later, Evans-Dumaran’s family says they were never compensated for his exceptionally painful death and that few changes have been made to prevent similar tragedies from occurring. 

Chelsie Evans, Evans-Dumaran’s mother, sued the fire department supervisor who instructed her son to wade into the floodwater even though, court records say, no lives were at risk. He went in without safety gear or flotation equipment. 

Evans said that she hopes the lawsuit, filed two years ago last month, will not only prompt county officials to implement better safety measures but empower young firefighters to stand up to their superiors if they feel unsafe.

“What I’m worried about is that they haven’t changed the culture of the place, the culture in which Tre’ couldn’t say, ‘Hey, I haven’t been trained in swift water training yet. I don’t have my PPE equipment on. I shouldn’t be getting out of this fire truck right now,’” Evans said. “The culture right now does not allow that.”

The lawsuit calls on Maui County officials to hire a third party auditor to assess the fire department’s safety procedures every two years, purchase better safety gear and establish a memorial for local first responders who die while on duty. It also requests that damages be paid to Evans and the nonprofit that she established in her son’s memory, The Live Like Tre’ Foundation, which supports local firefighters and families in need.

Workers compensation laws protect the county from being sued directly but the Maui Department of the Corporation Counsel is helping defend Martin. It declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. However, Maui County spokeswoman Laksmi Abraham said that “Tre’s service and sacrifice will not be forgotten,” adding that first responder memorials are planned on both Maui and Honolulu.

In September and November 2024, Evans’ lawyer offered county lawyers settlement deals to dismiss the claims made against the supervisor, Scott Martin, in exchange for $1 million to compensate Evans for her loss and a $12 million contribution to the Live Like Tre’ Foundation. The proposed settlements would also have required the county to create a memorial and conduct safety audits. 

County lawyers did not accept the terms, but Evans says she remains hopeful they will still come around.

“I would like to just get a solution on the table that doesn’t pit two firefighters against each other, that’s much more supportive of the firefighter network as well as their whole community,” she said. “I don’t understand why they would not prefer to do that instead of continuously putting more money and more money into attorneys.”

Evans and Kanoe Enos, Evans-Dumaran’s stepfather, noted that the family was never paid any workers’ compensation. The lawsuit, they said, would provide them enough money to devote the rest of their lives to ensuring nothing like this ever happens again.

“The money means very little,” Enos said. “We just want to fund Tre’s Foundation. Because I can tell you right now, his mom is not gonna stop until Tre’ is remembered, until she can do good stuff in his name.”

Evans’ lawyer, Gary Okuda, said the family did file a workers’ compensation claim, but no payments have been made. 

A jury trial in the lawsuit is currently scheduled for June of next year.

‘There Was Just Nothing To Not Love About Him’

Evans was 15 and a student at Maui High School when she had Evans-Dumaran. 

“In a lot of ways… we grew up together,” she said. “He was with me during times where I was still very much trying to grow up.”

When Evans-Dumaran was still little, the two moved to the Big Island, where he was raised primarily in Hilo. Evans-Dumaran’s father was out of the picture for most of his childhood, but his mother met Enos when he was still a teenager.

Enos said he quickly bonded with Evans-Dumaran. They would play basketball, surf, golf and play video games together. Enos had hoped Evans-Dumaran would be one of his best men when he married Evans, but he died three months before the scheduled wedding. 

“We just really got along,” he said. “There was just nothing to not love about him.”

Evans-Dumaran attended Kamehameha Schools, where he participated in student government, basketball and football. By his senior year, he was a track champion in hurdles.

But summers and holidays were spent with family on Maui, and Evans said her son always considered the Valley Isle home. Shortly after he graduated high school, his parents and younger siblings moved to Honolulu to be closer to doctors who were able to treat his younger sister’s autoimmune disease. A year or two after that, he moved to Maui to be with his grandmother.

“His dream was to be a pilot,” Evans said, adding that Evans-Dumaran had been training to become a helicopter mechanic when he decided to become a firefighter.

“He was going to try to work his way up in the airline industry around it as much as he could, until he had enough money to pay for his pilot hours and start toward his dream, but the money still wasn’t great,” she said. “The opportunity to apply to be a firefighter opened up.”

At 20, Evans-Dumaran was among the youngest in his recruitment class.

Road Has History Of Flooding

South Kīhei Road runs along the South Maui coast from Wailea to Māʻalaea​​. It has long been known as a place where conditions can quickly turn perilous in a storm. 

South Kīhei Road has been damaged by severe flooding every year for at least the past five years and climate change could make intense storms and severe, catastrophic floods more common. .  

Enos used to get nervous about his stepson responding to the floods, he said, especially when his Evans-Dumaran texted him photos of rushing water, sinkholes and downed trees.

“I would get super scared for him,” he said. “He was telling me it was like this every year. That’s why it wasn’t a freak accident.”

As a supervisor and captain for the Maui Fire Department, Martin had a responsibility to know the area’s propensity to flood, the lawsuit maintains, as well as understand the risks associated with flooding and ensure that his company was adequately trained to work in those conditions. 

During the January 2023 flood, Martin was with Evans-Dumaran and one other firefighter, the lawsuit says, even though they should not have been out without a full firefighting crew, according to established protocol. They were responding to concerns that debris stuck to the bottom of a chain link fence above the Kūlanihāko’i storm drain channel could worsen the flood’s impact on Oluea Street homes, according to public records and a statement released by county officials three days later. 

Firefighters have access to safety gear intended to protect them while responding to flood conditions, according to the lawsuit, and the department’s risk management plan states that firefighters “will risk a lot to save a lot” and “risk nothing to save nothing.” However, Martin directed Evans-Dumaran to help other county personnel who had removed the fence above the storm drain, and wade into the water. 

Enos said he believed his stepson would not have felt comfortable disobeying his supervisor’s orders.

“He gave everything to save nothing, and that wasn’t his decision,” he said.

Martin, according to the lawsuit filed by Evans, “knew or reasonably should have known” that his actions put Evans-Dumaran at extreme risk of injury or death, and it is because of his “wanton and willful misconduct conduct,” that the young firefighter was sucked into the storm drain.

‘My Baby Is Suffering’

Evans, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Hawaiian Community Assets, was working from her home on Oʻahu when she first realized that something must have gone horribly wrong. She received back-to-back calls, one from her mother and the other from the mother of her son’s girlfriend.

“That’s the only reason those two would call at the same time,” she said.

She returned the call from her mother, who was crying and said she had learned through friends that Evans-Dumaran was in the emergency room after a serious accident, Evans recalled.

Without fully understanding what had happened, Evans was already racing to get on the next plane to Maui so she could be with her son at Maui Memorial Medical Center.

“Everything just felt like it was a blur,” she said. “It was almost like I had to almost remove myself from my body — if that makes any sense at all — to just watch what was happening.”

Evans and her husband did not leave the hospital for several days, sleeping in the lobby of the intensive care unit until staff offered to let them stay in an apartment for traveling healthcare workers.

Evans-Dumaran had sustained numerous injuries related to head trauma and drowning, and Evans said his lungs were damaged so severely that he needed a ventilator to breathe. 

While her son was unconscious for almost the whole time he was in the ICU, Evans said, she was at his bedside on the day doctors briefly weaned him off of sedation to determine if his brain was still active.

“I kept telling him, ‘Hey, it’s Mommy, there was an accident, don’t move around too much. Everything’s gonna be okay, we’re here,’” she said. “His eyes were still closed, but he was moving. I told him, ‘If you can hear mom, squeeze my hand,’ and he squeezed my hand.”

Noticing that Evans-Dumaran appeared agitated, Evans said, a nurse asked him to give them a sign if he was in pain.

“His eyes opened really wide, and he grabbed my hand really, really hard,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut at the memory.

The nurse gave Evans-Dumaran pain medication once again, Evans said, but she was haunted by her son’s frantic, pained expression.

“As much as everyone else is excited that he’s up, my baby is suffering,” she recalled thinking. “I did tell him that he didn’t have to stay for us if it’s too hard. He didn’t have to fight for us.”

Not long after, a doctor gathered his family and loved ones — Evans, Enos, his sisters, his girlfriend — and explained that scans were no longer showing signs of brain activity.

“They were basically asking us — or asking me — to make the decision of how long this keeps going,” she said. “What was I going to do? Keep him on life support for however long? He was suffering. It was horrific to have to make that decision. It felt surreal. I think we all felt that way, that this cannot be real.”

OSHA Report Cites Failures

In the weeks that followed, the Hawai’i Occupational Safety and Health Division conducted an investigation into how firefighter handled the situation, and found that the fence that county workers had removed from above the storm drain had been “the only safeguard to prevent anyone from falling in.” 

The firefighters were “not adequately trained in the dangers of flood incident response, guidance for flood response hazard assessments, or response protocols for incidents involving flooding,” according to the agency’s April 2023 report, and Martin was not trained to identify the hazards associated with the situation.

Maui County was fined nearly $150,000 for occupational safety violations that contributed to Evans-Dumaran’s death, according to the report. 

The agency also recommended that the department develop and institute a health and safety training program for all employees, require supervisors to be able to recognize potential hazards and ensure safety procedures are followed, instruct employees not to remove or damage safety measures or warning signs intended to reduce risk, and provide firefighters with access to reliable personal protective equipment.  

Evans-Dumaran’s family was so consumed with grief that they said months went by before they began to consider the possibility of filing a lawsuit.

At the hospital, his mother said, firefighters and county officials were nearly always there in the waiting room.

“The firefighters were very kind and very supportive during that time,” she said. “I mean, there was always a firefighter downstairs at the hospital, and not just one firefighter — there were like 20 firefighters.”

Over time, though, Evans began to hear from current and retired firefighters who told her that her son’s death could have been prevented if standard safety measures had been taken. 

“The story, I think, that we were told at that time was different from the information we got later,” she said. 

After talking it over with Okuda, Evans decided a lawsuit might be a way to push for change. 

“If we can settle it, it’ll be something positive that comes out of this,” Okuda said. “This would not be a fair trade-off in any way, but the hope is to fund a foundation that will allow Chelsie to continue to help benefit the community.”