Hawaii

[GDS_Starfury]

holy fuck!

https://twitter.com/i/status/1689384898958917633

[Staggerwing]

I went to Maui as a kid and I remember it being just beautiful. Seeing it like this is crushing.

[Gusington]

I have a trip there (my first) next February. My in-laws have had an apartment in Honolulu for the last 10 years. I hope there is something left.

[FarAway Sooner]

Really heartbreaking scenes there.  Given the rainfall, the landscape will recover quickly.  The town?  Not so much.

Living in the arid southwest of the United States, we've been practicing fire control measures near our homes for 10 or 15 years now.  Who ever thought Hawaii might need the same?

[ArizonaTank]

I am actually on Oahu (Honolulu) for a work-related trip. 

Oahu did experience some of the very high winds Tuesday, but thankfully no fires.

However, the level of destruction on Maui is unprecedented. The Coast Guard says that about 100 people went into the water to escape the flames. The 'Coasties' said some 40 or so of these folks needed help to get out of the water.

Watching on TV, it looks like the fire damage is like something we have been seeing out of California in recent years.

These folks will need our help and prayers.

[Sir Slash]

Terrible to see that.

[JasonPratt]

That escalated quickly! -- last I saw it on the news yesterday evening, it was 'hey lots of wildfires kicking up in Maui right now, here are some videos from a distance!' I think they said 4 or 5 people had been caught by the fires and died so far, at that time.

This morning I come to work, and the nearby volcanoes look like underachievers.

[ArizonaTank]

NASA's real-time updated map of the Maui fires:

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#m:advanced;d:24hrs;@-156.3,20.8,11z

The town of Lahaina in the west has basically been wiped out.

[Uberhaus]

It's heartbreaking seeing what is happening to the kind, welcoming people of Maui.  A guide, a Marine, who took my wife, myself and a group through Hana Rainforest explained that the west of the island is a desert, the prevailing winds carrying moisture from the east and then blocked by the volcanic craters falling mostly on Hana. 

The hurricane passing nearby didn't help grounding aircraft, blowing cinders, damaging electrical lines. 

Can't help but think of the ending scene of From Here to Eternity and tossing the leis into the water.

[GDS_Starfury]

[GDS_Starfury]

ffs

https://twitter.com/i/status/1689617277543424000

[W8taminute]

If there is any truth to this then the wicked will be held to account one day.

[Gusington]

NBC reported yesterday that the fire was started by faulty utility equipment. If that's true, we can probably hear the sound of the incoming tsunami of lawsuits here on the US east coast.

[FarAway Sooner]

A huge fraction of fires these days are started by faulty electrical equipment.  One good way to prevent that is putting the cables underground, but that costs money.  I have no idea what the specifics are in the Hawaii situation.

[JasonPratt]

There are definitely videos showing fires started by faulty electrical shut-off of wind-blown wires, including a major fire starting up in Laihina itself (which local firefighters thought they had put out but got blowtorched up again and got away from them.)

Directed energy weapons would need proper line of sight, and while it's true that one of the United States' two (known) DEW labs is on Maui, it doesn't have line of sight to start many of the fire areas (maybe not any of them). This is why usually DEW theories concentrate on Chinese space weapons, which have apparently had a habit of green-lasering the area harmlessly (so far) from orbit (though I don't know the evidence for that).

On a much less exotic level, I've also heard that environmental activists have had a habit of starting fires in Hawaii and on Maui more specifically over the past years. Due to past action, it's plausible they could have taken advantage of the very rare dry-gale conditions.

However, the catastrophically poor condition of Maui's electrical grid is well known, and definitely has video evidence directly explaining some of the starts -- I think would easily explain all the startups. An author friend of mine, David Haggith, used to work as a property manager in Hawaii for many years, and while his office was based on Oahu he was very familiar with Maui (and its islet clusters). He had no doubt at all that the fires would be explained as faulty shutoffs failing from downed wires, and that was before the visible evidence; he went into detail about his experiences in an article a few weeks ago. I could probably get permission to copy-paste here.