Hawaii Wildfires

[RolexPD]

Originally Posted by Blansky

Often these type of tragedies are “perfect storm” scenarios and there will tons of finger pointing in the weeks to come.

A city/town like downtown Lahaina is mainly made up of very old structures and tarted up with nice facades and pretty stores. There is essential one main road in and out with a split farther up the hill called the Lahaina bypass that connects back to the highway a couple of miles out of town.

There is also a road around the mountain if you continue past Lahaina and Kaanapali/ Napili/Kapalua etc but it’s essentially a one lane mountain road in areas and a nightmare if you were to meet traffic coming the other way.

Once the initial fire early that morning that was pretty much extinguished started back up again and the Lahaina bypass was closed, there was one way in and out and it soon was blocked by downed power poles, traffic and emergency vehicles.

So a place like Lahaina was not like a mainland city with evacuation points. Basically everyone was trapped. And once the winds started…..literally all hell broke loose.

Fires were unfortunately farther down the line on suspected/expected disasters that could affect Maui and less resources were directed to it. Probably the economy after closing the island for Covid affected money allocations as well. Bottom line they were literally overwhelmed, which once the winds started was much like the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa California in 2017.

I’m guessing obviously money will now be thrown at the kindling/brush that started this and other Hawai’i fires, but things move slowly in Hawai’i.

And imagine, yay …..we’re going to Maui for a week and you get there and that’s one of the weeks that they decided to do preventative burns to take down the brush. And your vacation is filled with smoke and ash everywhere. Think of the complaining then.

An excellent summary in my opinion. Maui’s had several brush fires over the past 5+ years that could have been truly tragic had they started in or spread to more heavily populated areas. Seems like now our state’s luck just ran out when everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

I can only expect that the climate changes we are seeing will continue to make these events more frequent and destructive. We’re all trying to figure out what happened, what could have been done differently, and where we go in the future.

I’m also confident that aloha will help everyone get through this terrible tragedy.