Survivor of Hawaii resort explosion shares recovery story

CTV’s Danton Unger talks with a Winnipeg man about his recovery a year after an explosion at a Hawaii resort.

Darren Stevenson lifts his shirt and shows the scars, still in the process of healing, that stretch across his side—a permanent reminder of the day that changed his life forever.

It was Feb. 20, 2025. Darren and his wife Diane were on vacation at The Whaler resort on Maui’s Ka’anapali Beach in Hawaii.

Darren was standing directly in front of a barbeque when it exploded.

“I feel this concussive force hit my body, and I look down and I see my right leg in the position it’s not supposed to be in,” Darren said, recalling the sheer pain that washed over him.

The blast threw him 30 feet. He remembers hearing his wife screaming, and the firefighters working to save his life.

“Honestly, at that moment, I didn’t think he was alive,” said Diane, who saw everything unfold in front of her. She said when she ran over to her husband, he was covered from head to toe in blood.

“It was such a relief to see his eyes open and talking. But even at that moment, I didn’t know if he was going to die in front of me.”

But Darren said, in that moment of chaos, he experienced something else.

“I was in a pink room with pink walls and ceilings and floors and furniture, and everything was otherwise indistinguishable,” he said. “A warm, comforting feeling came over my body, and a voice said to me, ‘I’ve got you.’

“I contend that that was God saying, ‘You’re going to be okay.’”

The next thing he remembered is waking up intubated in hospital. The explosion left him with extensive injuries – nine broken ribs, his jawbone snapped in half and his teeth knocked out, a compound fracture in his leg that nearly forced an amputation, and shrapnel across his body.

“I feel grateful to have survived this.”

Darren was among 13 victims in the blast. Those victims have now launched a lawsuit against the resort alleging negligence led to the explosion.

“Our investigation thus far has revealed that the gas lines feeding the barbeque grills were encased in an unvented cabinet,” said Mark Davis, a partner at Davis Levin Livingston and one of the lawyers representing the victims.

Davis said the lawsuit alleges there was a gas leak inside the cabinets, ultimately leading to the blast.

“This was a completely avoidable catastrophe, and there’s the lives of a lot of people have been forever impacted by it.”

A spokesperson for The Whaler declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Since the explosion, Darren has gone through six surgeries with several more to come.

He’s had to relearn how to walk and even eat.

“Just in the last two weeks, I had my first burger since this has occurred,” he said.

And every step along his road to recover, was his wife Diane.

“It’s one day at a time,” she said. “We still got a little road ahead of us to go.”

While there are still many ups-and-downs ahead, Darren said he’s looking forward to driving a car again, getting his own cup of coffee, and playing flag football with his son.

But most of all, Darren said he feels he’s been given a second chance at life and is thankful for all the people who made that possible – from the first responders who ran towards the blast when everyone else was running away, to the surgeons and doctors, and especially his family.

“This whole thing has restored my faith in humanity,” he said. “At the end of the day, people are good and they just want to help, and they do the right things when it’s supposed to happen, and I’m living proof of that.”