Paradise was lost, and hell was closing in.
"I'm watching the fires get closer and closer to us," remembers Justin Rich of Newington.
Rich and his family are back home and safe, able to tell how they survived the Maui wildfires. "We were in our car ... a half hour from Lahaina town, and it's absolutely being decimated."
Justin Rich made it back here OK with his wife and their two children -- but his mind is still there, he tells WFSB TV Channel 3, with the other survivors -- the ones who don't get to come back to a home in Connecticut. "All you can do," he says, "is just pray and hope that they can get out of it."
They're wonderful people, says Rich, and they're hurting.