Maui fire. What is going on?

[volinbham]

Gonna get a little nerdy here...

Once that fire started, they're was nothing that could stop it outside of an act of God. Even taking the fact there were only 200 firefighters on the whole island, it still wouldn't have helped. Basically this fire combined with the winds was going to "spot" way behind any fire lines they could establish. Spotting is where winds carry hot embers to new areas starting additional fires. It's way worse in grassy areas too.

Even in the residential areas there was no way out could have been stopped with the winds as they were. I'm not going to get into the conspiracy side of things, but once that fire started, it was never going to be stopped. We've got career firefighters on staff here a couple with 30-40 years of experience under their belt and they say the same thing...

The only way it could have been contained was an act of God.

On a much smaller scale but it reminds me of the Gatlinburg fires - once those 70+ winds get involved it's toast (no pun)

 

[hog88]

Litigation environment is a huge factor. Alabama got awful with auto settlements back in the 90s and everybody got out of there.

Alabama is still awful when it comes to commercial vehicle crashes.

 

[85SugarVol]

Question. Do most homeowners policies cover loss from a wildfire? I know for flooding, sink holes and earthquakes separate policies or riders have to be purchased to cover those losses.

I have an earthquake rider on my primary here in Memphis.

I wonder if I could get a climate change rider?

Then no matter what the eff happens to my house, I should be covered.

 

[McDad]

So is the "climate change as culprit" portion of the fire the dry weather preceding and the windy weather during?

I don't know enough about Maui weather to know if dry and windy is abnormal.

 

[Sgt_Nick_Fury]

So is the "climate change as culprit" portion of the fire the dry weather preceding and the windy weather during?

I don't know enough about Maui weather to know if dry and windy is abnormal.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the siphoning off of water from the natural streams and wetlands to feed the mono agricultural plantations probably contributed more to dryness than climate change.

 

[W.TN.Orange Blood]

 

[n_huffhines]

I have an idea, start a genuine go fund me for the Maui survivors to help make sure they do not have to sell their land.... and see if the powers that be are ok with that. I mean if it's all on the up and up why would they care? I mean surely they wouldn't want them broke and desperate would they? Haven't we been told all this time how desperately government wants to help "native Americans?"

You know you can do that, right?

 

[n_huffhines]

Deserves it's own thread. this is just the weirdest story and getting weirder by the day.

How is there already a book written, edited and published in 7 days? I mean are the burnt corpses of the kids even cold yet?


How strange is it that current Maui Police Chief John Pelletier was the incident commander during the Las Vegas massacre in 2017? Brought his Deputy from there as well.
Conservatives Alarmed After Report That Current Maui Police Chief Was Incident Commander During 2017 Las Vegas Massacre | The Gateway Pundit | by Cullen Linebarger

Locals say they have never ever had a storm come from the east before, everything about this storm was odd.

Why are they now blocking aid to the people? Is it just a coincidence that large investment groups have been trying to buy up the local indiginous Hawaiians property without success? I supposed it's also just a coinky dink, they have plans to make Maui a test site for 15 minute smart cities, and have the entire island locked down via cameras and teh rest of the big brother technocratic controls.

How many people really died? Why do they seem to be blocking press, and truth of what happened?


They seem to be slow walking the real deathtoll which may easily be over 1000 dead, many of them kids who were at home as schools were closed.



I know there's alot of talk about DEWS etc..... I don't know about any of that, and have doubts to say the least. However it doesn't take sci fi conspiracy to see the realestate play here. It's right up there with giving small pox laden blankets to indians, or every other pinkerton story when someone was in the way of the railroad.

So what would be the motive for intentionally causing this disaster?

Capitalism is the simplest answer on the book's quick existence. I bet Chat GPT wrote it, judging by how many publications this Dr. Miles Stone has this year (and sounds like a definite pseudonym).

 

[Sgt_Nick_Fury]

I don't know enough about Maui weather to know if dry and windy is abnormal.

Your question got me thinking about water issues so I looked into a few articles.

Ominous prediction... '“We don’t even have enough water to fight fire,” he said.'


'Ration Your Water’: A Plantation-Era Water System On Maui is Maxed Out

‘Ration Your Water’: A Plantation-Era Water System On Maui is Maxed Out
Families who rely on a Maui stream as their only source of running water found their supply suddenly dry.
By Marina Starleaf Riker / April 22, 2022
Reading time: 7 minutes.
For generations, Keeaumoku Kapu’s family has lived deep in the Kauaula Valley, tucked in the foothills that rise above Launiupoko.

He can trace his ancestors’ roots to the land back more than 170 years, and his family has always relied on the Kauaula Stream that runs through the valley to raise pigs and grow taro and other food they need to survive.
For more than a century, his family’s largest neighbor was a sugar plantation, the Pioneer Mill, which ran a system of irrigation ditches that used water from the stream for its crops — until the turn of the 21st century, when the business shut down and sold the land to a developer.
West Maui Land, the developer, created its own drinking and irrigation water utilities and took control of the century-old irrigation ditch system. It diverted water from the stream to a series of pipes and reservoirs to irrigate its subdivision. As part of a legal settlement, it also was required to use that same diversion system to supply water to families like the Kapus.

Families for generations have grown taro in the Kauaula Valley.

Competing Needs
In the years that followed, the developer built hundreds of homes, many of them sprawling multimillion dollar estates with pools, grassy lawns and lush landscaping. Demand for water soared. Then in 2018, the state told the developer’s irrigation company it needed to keep more water in the stream, leaving it without enough supply to meet the demand.
But the company didn’t fully comply with that order, according to the state. So just before the Easter weekend, when faced with fines of up to $5,000 per day, the irrigation company stopped taking water from the stream. It told its customers there would be no more irrigation water, and the ditch that is the sole source of running water for Kapu’s family and two others in the area ran dry.
“What really hit us was that none of us were given any notice,” Kapu said. “We went into frantic emergency mode, got in touch with the families and texted everyone, ‘ration your water.’”
Almost 70 people, between the ages 2 and 74, suddenly lost the only source of running water for their crops, livestock, showers, flushing toilets and other household needs, Kapu said.

(Many of Keeaumoku Kapu’s grandchildren live on his property, which lost water last week.)

As Kapu scrambled to help his neighbors, his attorney sued Launiupoko Irrigation Co., the private irrigation company charged with running the system.
This week, 2nd Circuit Court Judge Kirstin Hamman temporarily ordered Launiupoko Irrigation to restore water to the families and farmers on nearby Kamehameha Schools land who rely on the stream.
The state Commission on Water Resource Management also told the irrigation company earlier this week that it needed to provide 300,000 gallons per day to the families and farmers for the next 90 days, while regulators worked to figure out what to do next.
“I pretty much wake up every day wondering if I have water,” Gunars Valkirs, who runs a chocolate farm on Kamehameha Schools property that relies on water from the Kauaula Stream, told state regulators at a meeting on Tuesday. “That’s how I live these days.”
The dilemma underscores a harsh reality: There isn’t enough water flowing through the century-old irrigation system to fulfill the needs of everyone who relies on it.
The stream needs a certain level of water to keep it and the plants and animals that rely on it healthy. Then, the Hawaiian families and farmers on Kamehameha Schools property need water from the stream, as do the residents in the 400-home development below.

Increasingly Common Situation
The irrigation company says it would rather pump water from wells than the stream, but it argues that would require charging customers higher rates to cover its expenses. It’s in the middle of asking state regulators for permission to do that.
“This situation is dire,” Glenn Tremble of Launiupoko Irrigation told the state water commission at the meeting. “The users are competing against each other.”
The company didn’t reply to a request for further comment.
It’s a situation that some regulators fear will become increasingly common in the years to come. As the state has sought to better protect Hawaii’s waterways, it has in some cases ended plantation-era stream diversions, ordering companies to restore stream flows.
At the same time, the state says that rainfall has dropped significantly in recent decades, and water resource experts fear that as the climate crisis unfolds, the islands could increasingly face drought, leaving even less water in streams to draw from.
“This is not the first of these issues that we’ll be facing,” Mike Buck, a member of the Commission on Water Resource Management, told his peers during the meeting earlier this week. “The water is over allocated, there is not enough water, and the historic expectations of the amount of water that was available is just not going to be there in the future.”
“That’s just the reality that we all need to face,” he continued.

Community members have been concerned that there isn’t enough water to support all the proposed development in West Maui.

A Public Trust
In Hawaii, water is protected as a public trust — unlike in other states, water rights can’t be bought or sold. Instead, the state is charged with protecting and conserving water resources for the benefit of all its people.
Kapu’s ancestors were among the Hawaiian farmers originally granted land during the Great Mahele, the 19th century historical land division that for the first time allowed private property ownership in Hawaii.
As a young adult, his father would lead him high into the valley, to the place where the Kauaulu Stream met the dam that fed water into the plantation’s old irrigation ditches.
For decades, they took responsibility for cleaning debris from the ditches to make sure water continued to flow well. After heavy rains, they would clear the silt and rocks from the dam, so water continued to flow into the diversion: a large concrete structure that takes in stream water and directs it through gates either back into the stream or to a ditch that carries water down to Kapu’s land and the reservoirs that irrigate the subdivision below.

Keeaumoku Kapu’s family for years helped to clear debris from irrigation ditches that supply water.

But that changed when the plantation shut down, and the developer took over, he said. Over the years, his family had run into disputes with their new neighbor — almost two decades ago, for example, the two parties reached a settlement that said that the developer would have to keep providing water to Kapu.
Hawaii courts and government regulators have long ruled that landowners who were originally awarded property during the Great Mahele, known as kuleana users, have rights to access water for cultural practices and taro farming.
Last week, Launiupoko Irrigation told its customers it wouldn’t provide any more water for irrigation, according to notices sent to customers that were shared with Civil Beat. But for now, under the state’s order, the irrigation company must still provide water to families and farmers whose only source of water is the stream, and over the next few months, is supposed to work with state regulators, farmers and families like Kapu to find a solution.
What’s happening now isn’t working, Kapu said. Five years ago, his family used to have enough water to farm nine taro patches that he used to supply food for weddings, funerals and other parties across the community. Now, he can barely keep up with two and a half.
Earlier this week, he stood next to his taro fields, pointing to a dry patch of land, where his family used to raise hogs. There isn’t enough water for that anymore.
“We don’t even have enough water to fight fire,” he said.

Wait a second..where have I heard this plot before?

Which may have been a bigger grab? Land or water rights? Who and what entities share the fresh water supply with the town?

 

[Matt2496]

I don’t know about the conspiracies. I tend to lean towards the info lockdown being enforced as an attempt to cover up incompetence, negligence, and corruption within their local government that led to this outcome.

There are definitely a lot of weird things going on here though.

 

[BigOrangeMojo]

Can't blame them, how do you insure or underwrite an area that no longer honors basic rule of law? Have a feeling that the instability of the judicial system is the main reason insurance companies are abandoning California.

Bigger reason is California limits how much insurers can increase premiums. The State insurance commissioner has sole authority to deny any proposed premium increase...

If it costs 25% more to do business and you can only recoup 2% of that, then insurers either pass it on to everyone else nationwide or exit the market...

The judicial system for sure plays a part as well.

 

[volinbham]

So is the "climate change as culprit" portion of the fire the dry weather preceding and the windy weather during?

I don't know enough about Maui weather to know if dry and windy is abnormal.

I know the Big Island is near desert rain levels on one side and rainforest levels on the other. Wouldn't be surprised if Maui is the same.

 

[K-town Vol Fan]

So one thing I was asking my wife maybe one of you guys will have an answer, can they not use ocean water to put out fires? Seems like they could have gotten a bunch of the helicopters that have the big buckets on them that they use to take water from people's swimming pools and just scooped a bunch of the ocean? Why was that not a thing? Or maybe it was idk.

 

[Grand Vol]

On a much smaller scale but it reminds me of the Gatlinburg fires - once those 70+ winds get involved it's toast (no pun)

That's one of the reasons California is so bad. The Santa Anna winds drive those fires hard.

There are quite a few professional wildland firefighters out there that say we should be letting a lot of these fires do what nature intended and burn. Structure protection is fine, but let the forest and grasslands burn like they should be. But we've (humans at least) made it our task and purpose to fight fires regardless of whether we are doing more harm than good.

 

[85SugarVol]

So one thing I was asking my wife maybe one of you guys will have an answer, can they not use ocean water to put out fires? Seems like they could have gotten a bunch of the helicopters that have the big buckets on them that they use to take water from people's swimming pools and just scooped a bunch of the ocean? Why was that not a thing? Or maybe it was idk.

It doesn’t sound like they had the manpower or equipment in place. And if they did, not sure it could have stopped it.

 

[Orangeburst]

I know the Big Island is near desert rain levels on one side and rainforest levels on the other. Wouldn't be surprised if Maui is the same.

pretty wild

 

[Gandalf]

Generally speaking, yes. Premiums are higher in fire prone areas though. Most western states carry higher premiums in what they call the WUI for wildfires. (Wildland Urban Interface)

I get why they might not cover hurricane insurance but fires? right next to the ocean? what makes this place particularly fire prone?

 

[Grand Vol]

So one thing I was asking my wife maybe one of you guys will have an answer, can they not use ocean water to put out fires? Seems like they could have gotten a bunch of the helicopters that have the big buckets on them that they use to take water from people's swimming pools and just scooped a bunch of the ocean? Why was that not a thing? Or maybe it was idk.

Typically no, they wouldn't use it unless it's a dire emergency (yes, this would have qualified as dire).

Problem is, those aircraft assets very likely aren't in Hawaii where you really don't have a huge wildfire threat. Same thing on the fixed wing aerial tankers. Being used in CONUS and Alaska at the moment.

But the "reason" they wouldn't use seawater is actually to prevent further fires. You drop seawater on a fire, the saltwater kills the vegetation remaining and makes the fire danger that much worse.

 

[Sgt_Nick_Fury]

I get why they might not cover hurricane insurance but fires? right next to the ocean? what makes this place particularly fire prone?

Land value and water rights are flamable.

 

[Grand Vol]

I get why they might not cover hurricane insurance but fires? right next to the ocean? what makes this place particularly fire prone?

It's the difference in structural fire and wildland fire. Insurance companies treat them differently. I almost guarantee you if you read the fine print in your homeowners insurance, they have wildfire separate.

 

[Grand Vol]

So is the "climate change as culprit" portion of the fire the dry weather preceding and the windy weather during?

I don't know enough about Maui weather to know if dry and windy is abnormal.

That's politicians talking out their ass...

 

[Rasputin_Vol]

You people are nuttier than than a Snicker bar. WTF do you conspiracy folks come from all of a sudden?

The govt will fix this in short order. Relax.

 

[W.TN.Orange Blood]

Typically no, they wouldn't use it unless it's a dire emergency (yes, this would have qualified as dire).

Problem is, those aircraft assets very likely aren't in Hawaii where you really don't have a huge wildfire threat. Same thing on the fixed wing aerial tankers. Being used in CONUS and Alaska at the moment.

But the "reason" they wouldn't use seawater is actually to prevent further fires. You drop seawater on a fire, the saltwater kills the vegetation remaining and makes the fire danger that much worse.

 

[LadyVolette]

No, it's the same reason Florida is in an insurance crisis. Areas prone to natural disasters (wildfires, hurricanes, etc.) are too risky to insure. Insurers are pulling out of FL in droves as well. It will be near impossible to insure properties in these states in a couple of years.

We couldn’t get major homeowner’s insurance in Louisiana, had to have underwritten insurance that we had never heard of, and we were in Flood Zone ‘X’.. meaning it’s not likely to flood.. that was post Rita/Katrina.. and people using the federal money to build up higher to buy fishing boats lol

 

[BigOrangeMojo]

I get why they might not cover hurricane insurance but fires? right next to the ocean? what makes this place particularly fire prone?

You go 1-2 miles inland from west coast of Maui and it's all forest...