The second anniversary of the Lahaina fires is just fifty days away.
Tonight I heard Hawaii News Now Nausea tell me that (emphasis mine) the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization (emphasis mine)
is trying to shift thinking from blaming big landowners and government for letting grass get out of control to recognizing that Lahaina burned on its own.
Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization Executive Director Elizabeth Pickett said,
The fire only burned through a couple hundred yards of vegetation and then took out an entire town because of the fuels within the neighborhood, but that is because of the fuels around everyone’s homes and yards.
Are we supposed to believe that the fire would have stopped at the “couple hundred yards of vegetation” if only people didn’t have “fuels […] around [their] homes and yards”?
Attorney General [Anne] Lopez said her own garden was likely overgrown enough to need attention.
“I need to take responsibility for that,” she said.
OMG, the garden of death.
YOU DID IT, ANNE. YOU.
Do you really think Lopez has a guilt trip over her garden?
The website of Pickett’s organization is not subtle when it comes to pointing fingers:
What is the basis of that statement? How do we know that a wildfire is anthropogenic without unambiguous evidence: e.g., footage of someone setting a fire?
I’m not saying the statistic is wrong. I’m asking where it comes from. The ‘authority’ and its methodology.
Always question numbers. Especially nice and neat numbers like “99” which are easy to remember.
And I also ask - what kinds of humans, and how do they cause wildfires?
When I see the homeless in forests here, I wonder if their cooking fires could accidentally ignite the trees around them.
The Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization has no search engine, so I had to Google this reference to homelessness on their site.
Could a homeless encampment have been ground zero for the Lahaina fire?
I’ve never encountered that question anywhere. Are we not supposed to ask that?
Are we supposed to blame ourselves instead?
Look at how serious Hawaii Nausea reporter Daryl Huff looked while the captions for anchor Mahealani Richardson saying “much of the effort will fall to all of us” spilled over into his segment five seconds later.
(The out-of-sync caption exemplifies the omnipresent watevaz [whatevers = ‘it doesn’t matter’] mentality of Hawaii. Could carelessness have been a factor in the fire?)
So “much of the effort will fall to residents,” even though
[Fire Safety Research Institute i]nvestigators concluded that Maui County and the state were unprepared and complacent about Red Flag Warnings [With Capital Letters!] before the wind-fueled conflagration that destroyed Lahaina and homes in upcountry.
It would be interesting for the investigators to have a conversation with Pickett. Sounds like the former blames the government.
I don’t know who to blame. I have no knowledge of fires, much less this particular fire, and therefore I have no way to evaluate any of the explanations for it, mainstream or otherwise.
I can note the limited framing of the fires in the Hawaii Nausea story: “big landowners” or “government” or the residents as the culprits and “grass get out of control” as the sole means. (No climate change? Is the Burning taking a back seat to blaming residents?)
And I can wonder if it is wise to blame the victims when their wounds are still so raw.
Of all people you should dig into these fires, you're uniquely placed to sift through nonsense. Though I suppose I should add that if the conspiracy people are right doing so might endanger you.