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Jim Bedwell
Here is my Aggie buddy's take on Maui. You should be able to click on the links.
Alternate title to this ought to be Death by Government, as an overly powerful and intrusive government is ultimately deadly. Worse, the deadliness is related more to the simple banality of evil than actual focused, bad intent. Here in the US, it is almost always related to mind numbing, stupefying incompetence, typically long-term, democrat cities and states. Why? There are only so many brain cells to go around. When they are being used to do foolish things, there is little brain power left to apply to things that actually do matter. To set up the following discussion of the Maui fires, I return to aviation accident investigations, that of identifying the chain of events. The chain of events is a sequential list of things that had to happen for the aircraft to crash. The thinking is that if you disrupt that chain anywhere, cause one thing not to happen when it did happen, no accident. Of course, in the real world, if you disrupt a chain, there is always another link forged that will complete the chain, and something awful will eventually happen. So, let’s take a look at the Maui fires and see if we can identify any links in the chain. Interestingly, all of these links have some sort of government involvement, taking us full circle back to Death by Government.
- What happened? August was a really rough month across Hawaii with multiple wildfires breaking out. Most were contained by Aug 4. The fires on Maui were driven by a strong, gusty, dry downslope wind. Wind warnings were issued on Aug 7. Fuel for the fires on Maui were grasses that had grown on abandoned pineapple plantations, which were in turn grew wild in a wet spring. The dry downslope winds dried the grass, downed powerlines with gusts around 100 kph, sparked the conflagration, which was driven downslope into the seaside town of Lahaina. WUWT had a pretty good explanation of how this sort of mountain wave worked. We see this sort of thing here in ANC and California with downslope Chinook winds driving wildfires. The first government failure was the lack of a reasonable weather forecasting network and modeling on Maui. Such a capability existed on the Big Island and Oahu, but Maui somehow never got the word.
- Once the fires were alive, awake, and being driven into town, local government officials decided not to use their tsunami warning siren network. Reason? They were afraid the warning would drive fleeing residents into the flames. Why? The network had never been used to provide anything other than tsunami warning, another government failure of vision. Response to a tsunami warning? Get as high above sea level as possible. This is government failure number two. Why? Once you have a siren network, you can use it for more than one thing. All you have to do is modulate the sound, say a constant pitch for tsunami and a variable pitch for anything else. Public education is important here also, as if you are going to use the system for more than one thing, tell the public what that second or third reason is going to be and what their expected response is going to be.
- Next up is Hawaiian Electric, which was aware of infrastructure issues that could contribute to wildfire threat but chose to focus on shifting toward renewables instead. As far back as 2019, it had concluded that it needed to invest in preventing its power lines from emitting sparks and other wildfire risks. It studied what California had been doing and came up with a plan to replace conductors with insulated conductors and utility poles with fire resistant poles. Over the period, it spent a whopping quarter million dollars (/sarc) on wildfire mitigation. It did not request permission to increase rates for wildfire mitigation until 2022. Instead, it chose to focus its resources on state-mandated shift toward renewable energy. The statewide political focus was on renewables, so that is what they did. There are videos of utility poles snapping off during the winds, and electric sparking as the lines come down. For their part, the utility tried to respond quickly to downed poles, and appropriate response. But no good deed goes unpunished, as their trucks were blocking escape routes for those fleeing the fires. This is the third government failure, and one that should be well considered by every single electric utility falling kettle over teacup to change over to renewables while ignoring the boring, mundane job of keeping the lights on.
- Next on the Hit Parade of incompetence was M Kaleo Manuel, Hawaii’s DLNR Deputy Director of Water Resource Management. While based Oahu, he was in charge of approving requests to divert water for emergency use. Unfortunately, being an activist, he decided his job was to “focus on bringing planning and indigenous knowledge to the fields of water advocacy and management in Hawaii.” He has made public comments about water use requiring some sort of “true conversations about equity.’ How equity had anything to do with water will become apparent in a bit. As the DLNR water guy, he fielded requests early on to divert water for firefighting. His response was to demand the requestors contact downstream indigenous farmers for permission. That took five hours, by the end of which it was too late and the hydrants were dry. Apparently letting your neighbors burn to death is a positive lifestyle choice for native Hawaiians. As of this writing, due to public heat, he has been temporarily reassigned, buried in the bureaucracy until it is safe for him to crawl out from under his rock to kill again. This banality of evil, death due to bureaucratic inaction, is government failure number four.
- The final major government failure was local law enforcement blocking escape routes and keeping parents from rescuing their children at home. This is particularly heinous, with the true scope of what happened being buried behind the Blue Wall. As of this writing, death toll is around 110, with perhaps another 1,000 missing. Appears that the local government is slow-rolling release of those names although names and ages of the missing are all known. As I understand the timing, local schools in town on the beach released their students around noon due to the fire threat. Kids walked home. By the time they got home, power and communications started going down (cell, landline, TV and radio). No siren ever went off. There were no warnings received. The fires arrived and they were burned to death at home along with their mothers if the mothers were there. Frantic parental attempts to drive to the homes were blocked by local law enforcement at roadblocks. As Hawaii is a high gun control blue state, generally law enforcement was armed while the public wasn’t, meaning they couldn’t force their way in. Speculation is that local government is delaying the release of names and numbers to allow an incensed public to calm down a bit. I don’t think that is going to work.
Overall, a really ugly event, and my sense is that it is going to get worse as more and more information comes out. Political reaction has been predictable with all the Usual Suspects blaming the entire mess on climate change. Biden is in Maui today making that precise case. OTOH, Bjorn Lomborg wrote in The Daily Caller Friday that politicians are hiding behind climate change to duck their responsibility for failures. And Lomborg is spot on with this. At a time like this we need to take a step back and consider the enormity of destruction wrought by leftist governance. It is today busily destroying major American Cities, making them just as unlivable as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made 80 years ago. The two differences are that the bombs did it in seconds while the blue policies took half a century of rot to do. The other and more important difference is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt. The destroyed American cities never will be until something major changes with their local politics. Given that most of the floundering blue cities are the governance foundations for the blue states they are located in, change the local government, and the state government won’t be far behind. Note that there are still parts of US cities burned down during the 1960s riots that have not yet been rebuilt after more than half a century. Two weeks ago, they managed to destroy Lahaina.
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