'Devastated' Hawaii Woman Races Against Time to Survive Wildfire: 'I Didn't Want to Leave'

Photo:Courtesy of Kelley Chapman

Courtesy of Kelley Chapman

A business owner in Hawaii will forever feel the impact of the island’sdevastating wildfires.

The Maui wildfires began on Tuesday. On Thursday, authorities announced that the death toll had risen to at least 53 people and rescue efforts remain underway, per theAssociated Press.

“My husband had to literally grab me and shake some common sense into me,” Chapman, 43, says.

Chapman and her husband Vini Pimenta fled with their two cats, Samhein and Sheba, and pet chicken Freedalynn, she tells PEOPLE.

Chapman has been in business since 2015, she tells PEOPLE, but in 2018 she signed both leases for her home and store.

“We got our house and my store [on] the exact same day, and we lost it [on] the exact same day,” Chapman says. “It was pretty wild.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and a cycling accident involving Pimenta left Chapman in the rebuilding stages of her business. Now, she has to start again, creating aGoFundMein hopes of collecting money because her business was uninsured.

“Kelley, our building alarm is going off. Can you go?'” she recalled to PEOPLE. “Because she knows I’m really close. I don’t think other people on the rest of the island realized the heavy amount of wind that we were receiving.” Chapman says the strong winds made driving much more difficult.

“I got in my car and I quickly drove down Front Street and I started noticing traffic heading towards my store started kind of slowly coming to a halt,” she tells PEOPLE. “My tree in my yard fell down right next to my car. There was trees down, awnings were completely torn off. "

Thinking someone might have also broken into the building, Chapman pulled her car off to the side of the road only to witness smoke coming directly in her direction.

“I started seeing ashes flying. And I knew from my experience from 2018 when we had a fire during a tropical storm that it was quite dangerous. So, I just went and I looked at my store and then I heard a massive explosion and then I said, ‘Holy sh–, this is not going to be good,’ because I started seeing it growing really quick. I mean, 70-mile-per-hour winds and fire. I just knew it was really bad.”

Faced with the reality in front of her, she tells PEOPLE that she “decided to go let all the people that were stuck in traffic know that they needed to quickly turn around.”

“I was just trying to let everyone know that there was a fire coming,” she explains. “I let all my neighbors know. And then I finally got to my house and I looked at my husband and I said, ‘This is not good.’ By the time I got back to my house, the amount of flames and smoke and everything exploding was… it grew so fast, it was just unbelievable.”

Chapman tells PEOPLE she was pounding on neighbors' doors, screaming their names to alert them of the fire and telling them to make sure to retrieve their important documents and get out.

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“We were all gathering in the streets, all of our neighbors, and we were watching as it was getting closer,” she tells PEOPLE. “My husband wanted to leave instantly, and I tend to think I can be a warrior and there were some people saying we’re going to stay and fight with the hose.”

“My husband finally grabbed me and shook me and he said, ‘Kelley, we are leaving right now,'” Chapman says.

After looking back at what happened, she tells PEOPLE that she felt getting out in time was an act of divine intervention.

“Because the fact that our alarms were going off but no one was breaking in, all the doors were secure. There was no forceful entry,” she tells PEOPLE. “I think what was happening is the building was just shaking so much that things probably fell over. But still, if I didn’t know that… I mean, some people wouldn’t have as much time to prepare and we really didn’t have that much time.”

source: people.com