What is the government hiding in Maui?

[QuantumLogic]

I found a couple of articles this morning concerning details about the fires in Maui. The first can be found here-

Thanks to Government, Maui's Lahaina Fire Became a Deadly Conflagration | Connor O'Keeffe

08/16/2023Connor O'Keeffe
The most destructive natural disasters are never 100 percent natural. Human choices, land use, and government policies play a big role in how harmful hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, flash floods, and wildfires are to the affected communities.

And after catastrophes like the wildfire that destroyed much of the historic Hawaiian city of Lahaina last week, it’s worth taking stock of how much of the disaster was the result not of natural or accidental factors, but of policies and institutions that can be changed.

Though details are still emerging, it’s becoming clear that government failure did much to make this disaster worse—and possibly even started it. While the so-called experts are blaming climate change—and in the process demanding that government grab even more power and authority ostensibly to someday give us better weather—the destructiveness of this fire was the product of an all-powerful and all-incompetent régime.

The specific origins of the fire are still being investigated, but there is much we already know. The city of Lahaina sits on the west coast of Maui, Hawaii’s second-largest island. It is surrounded by grassland, much of which the state owns.

Nearly a decade ago the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a research nonprofit, warned the Hawaiian government that the area around Lahaina was extremely fire-prone due to frequent downslope winds, steep terrain, and dry grass. Little was done to address these risks. A subsequent report in 2020 added that an invasive species of exceptionally flammable grass was prevalent in the surrounding fields and that passing hurricanes created strong winds known to fuel wildfires on the islands.

Early last week, Hurricane Dora crossed the ocean south of Hawaii. By early Tuesday morning, August 8, winds as fast as sixty miles per hour were blowing down the slopes of the West Maui Mountains into Lahaina. Around sunrise, a large fault was detected in the power grid, indicating a downed power line. Twenty minutes later, the first reports of fire came in from the area around Lahainaluna Road, uphill and upwind from the city.

The area where flames were first spotted is full of electrical infrastructure, mostly operated by Hawaiian Electric, the state’s monopoly electricity supplier. This included a substation and a multitude of power lines. Most of the land in the area is owned by the State of Hawaii except for a parcel belonging to the estate of one of Hawaii’s last princesses. This parcel housed a solar farm supplying electricity to the Hawaiian Electric substation. Early last year, NPR published a glowing article about the solar project, praising it the direct result of government regulation crafted to help transition Hawaii to 100 percent renewable power by 2045.

But on the morning of August 8, as winds hammered the old wooden utility poles, this highly electrified area in the dry grasses above Lahaina was quickly becoming dangerous. Yet no formal procedure was in place to shut off sections of the grid in the face of severe fire risks. As a result, twenty-nine fully energized poles fell across West Maui that day.
But even with downed poles in the way, the first firefighters on the scene met with some early success. Around 9 a.m., the county fire department declared the fire “100 percent contained.” But the message to residents included an ominous request. The county’s water pumps were powered by electricity, much of which was frantically being turned off to deactivate the downed lines. Officials asked the public to conserve water to preserve water pressure.

But by midafternoon, a flare-up brought the fire back to life on the Lahaina Bypass, a major road that heads straight into town. The flames moved swiftly into Lahaina at 4:46 p.m., one minute after the county government finally sent out an alert to warn the city’s population, largely without power, about the flare-up that had occurred over an hour before.
To make matters worse, county officials failed to activate emergency sirens, leaving residents unaware of the danger bearing down on them. And as firefighters heroically rushed toward the flames to try and save their community, they found that there was little to no water pressure in the fire hydrants, which quickly ran dry.

With a single backed-up highway leading out of the city, many residents of Lahaina had nowhere to go. Some scrambled into the ocean to escape the smoke and flames. But in the end, many couldn’t get out. At least ninety-nine people have been confirmed dead at this writing, making this the deadliest American wildfire in over a century. In addition, 2,207 buildings were destroyed, with property damages expected to reach $5.5 billion.

To review, a power company shielded from competition by the state placed electrical infrastructure among highly flammable state-owned grass fields above the historic city of Lahaina, which the government was twice warned were highly susceptible to fire. And once a fire broke out, a combination of defective water infrastructure, terrible communication by government officials, and only one escape route doomed the people of Lahaina to the worst wildfire experienced in this country in over a hundred years.
This was government failure through and through. In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises explains that on the market, the ultimate source of profits is foresight—the ability to anticipate future conditions. And economic loss occurs when market actors fail to anticipate the future. This possibility of riches if one succeeds, and the guarantee of painful failures if one doesn’t, forces producers and service providers on the market to constantly weigh risks and opportunities.

Government immunizes itself from the profit and loss system, and therefore from much of the need to weigh risk. Sure, some county officials may resign because of this. And the share price of Hawaiian Electric may dip. But the people of Maui will be forced to keep compensating the very organizations that have failed them. And there’s nothing natural about that disaster.

This is exactly what has happened in the US in the last 20 years with various hurricanes. For most of us here, the government incompetence is no surprise. But then I found this next article that raises some serious questions about the fire-

Military Arrests FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks

United States Marines on Saturday arrested Deputy Administrator of FEMA Erik Hooks on charges of treason, alleging in a 34-page indictment that Hooks and his boss, Deanne Criswell, ordered agents in Maui to deny fire victims food and water, to inhibit civilian relief efforts, to stop “by any means necessary” displaced persons from exiting fire-ravaged Lahaina, and to dispose of bodies as “discriminately as possible,” a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News.

The arrest occurred Saturday night at Hooks’ home in Arlington, Virginia, not far from FEMA’s D.C. headquarters. The Marines cuffed Hooks while he was sleeping, showed him a military arrest warrant listing the charges against him, and carted him off to a holding center for processing.

A central piece of evidence, our source said, is a typewritten memo bearing Hooks and Criswell’s signatures. In it, the text encourages FEMA supervisors in Maui to either incinerate or discreetly bury the dead. The memo’s sinister language—“entomb them deep”—is emblematic of FEMA’s wanton disregard for human life.

Although no part of the letter specifically tells FEMA in Maui to execute civilians, Marines on the scene have reportedly found 250 bullet-filled corpses whose wounds are consistent with small arms used by FEMA and the FBI.

Our source said mass grave sites near Lahaina prove that FEMA personnel were following Hooks and Criswell’s instructions. As reported Saturday, Marines caught FEMA operatives piling corpses into a mass gravesite at the Maui Forest Reserve.

More disturbing, the letter was dated August 5, three days before the August 8 fires began, meaning FEMA is either clairvoyant or had foreknowledge of a premeditated crime.

Moreover, FEMA moved 850 D.C. agents to Honolulu on August 6.

Our source said that additional evidence against Hooks will be available at his military tribunal.

Criswell, he added, is next on the list.

“We’re closing in on her, and it’ll be soon. She was warned.” our source said.

This is beyond disturbing. The fact that the memo was dated 3 days before the fires began, with those inhuman instructions to agents, brings up a few possibilities. One, which was addressed in the first article, is that government officials knew- because of the terrain and the environmental conditions- that a catastrophic fire was imminent, and did nothing to warn the population. A second possibility, as mentioned in both articles, is that this was a deliberately set fire that the government knew was coming- possibly even under someone's orders.

But there is also a third possibility- something much darker and hidden which was not addressed in either article. If the memo was written with the instructions to bury or incinerate the dead 3 days before any fire started, what was killing these poor people that the government wants so desperately to hide? And why would FEMA move 850 agents there if there was no fire yet but had already instructed agents to dispose of bodies beginning the day before the transfer? Was the fire actually set to hide something else going on in Maui? These are the $64,000 questions I would like to know the answer to.

Something very wicked is happening in Maui, and I hope the truth can be found in the near future.

 

[BHelmet]

"About Real Raw News​

Real Raw News tried to bring light to topics often ignored by others.

Real Raw News is owned and operated by Michael Baxter, a former mainstream journalist and former English teacher. I can be reached at michael@realrawnews.com I delete all trollish email without reading them."

Snopes (which I know is garbage) is saying it is satire

Pretty sick satire if it is.

Wait and See

 

[QuantumLogic]

"About Real Raw News​

Real Raw News tried to bring light to topics often ignored by others.

Real Raw News is owned and operated by Michael Baxter, a former mainstream journalist and former English teacher. I can be reached at michael@realrawnews.com I delete all trollish email without reading them."

Snopes (which I know is garbage) is saying it is satire

Pretty sick satire if it is.

Wait and See

Hmm, I would never have thought that anyone would put out a story like that as satire. Pretty sick indeed.

I did a search and now have found that Real Raw News has evidently done this before. On Aug. 15th RRN stated that the CEO of Pfizer was arrested, and back in 2021, again oddly on Aug. 15th, they stated that Andrew Cuomo, then Governor of New York, had been arrested as well. To me, this is what would be classified as actual disinformation- not satire.

Funny how we don't see the government trying to shut down RRN as a misinformation site, but yet people like Tucker get shut down. The world really is upside down anymore.

 

[heinrich]

I found a couple of articles this morning concerning details about the fires in Maui. The first can be found here-

Thanks to Government, Maui's Lahaina Fire Became a Deadly Conflagration | Connor O'Keeffe














This is exactly what has happened in the US in the last 20 years with various hurricanes. For most of us here, the government incompetence is no surprise. But then I found this next article that raises some serious questions about the fire-

Military Arrests FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks



This is beyond disturbing. The fact that the memo was dated 3 days before the fires began, with those inhuman instructions to agents, brings up a few possibilities. One, which was addressed in the first article, is that government officials knew- because of the terrain and the environmental conditions- that a catastrophic fire was imminent, and did nothing to warn the population. A second possibility, as mentioned in both articles, is that this was a deliberately set fire that the government knew was coming- possibly even under someone's orders.

But there is also a third possibility- something much darker and hidden which was not addressed in either article. If the memo was written with the instructions to bury or incinerate the dead 3 days before any fire started, what was killing these poor people that the government wants so desperately to hide? And why would FEMA move 850 agents there if there was no fire yet but had already instructed agents to dispose of bodies beginning the day before the transfer? Was the fire actually set to hide something else going on in Maui? These are the $64,000 questions I would like to know the answer to.

Something very wicked is happening in Maui, and I hope the truth can be found in the near future.

all this is indeed very disturbing. there should be no stone left unturned to clarify the intended purposes. and one suspicion more is better than one ignored.

 

[Meg]

There is already a thread about the Maui fires here: Were Maui Fires Started Deliberately? If so, why?

 

[Lilou]

Real Raw News is satire. This from their website, in the “about us” section:

Disclaimer:​

Information on this website is for informational and educational and entertainment purposes. This website contains humor, parody, and satire. We have included this disclaimer for our protection, on the advice on legal counsel.

I had acquaintance who was always sharing stuff from real raw news and believed it was all true. I did burst her bubble with the above disclaimer. Some of the stuff is what we wish were true, but alas it is not.