September 8, 2023
"It has been one month since a wind-whipped wildfire engulfed the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, and the authorities are still trying to determine exactly how many people died..."
"... in the nation’s deadliest conflagration in more than a century.
Nearly all of Lahaina has now been searched by teams of rescuers, cadaver dogs and anthropologists trained to detect fragments of human remains, yet the official death toll has stood at 115 people for more than two weeks.
That has meant an agonizing wait for the families of more than 380 people whose names populate a list that the F.B.I. says it is still trying to reconcile.... The last time the death toll changed was on Aug. 21, the day that President Biden visited Lahaina.... The authorities will have to determine whether their investigative results are sufficient to declare those still missing as dead.... The heart of Lahaina is still closed to the public.... But... the county had moved closer toward allowing people to return and inspect their properties before the Army Corps of Engineers begins bulldozing and clearing debris...."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
47 comments:
One month after 9-11, we knew with far more precision the death toll. Why do the "authorities," as we now generically refer to government officials, continue to make it easier and easier to believe in Holodomor- and Chernobyl-level conspiracies?
Oprah handed out pillows and toothbrushes. There's that. She donated nothing.
The deadliest wildfire in history was in Wisconsin.
https://www.history.com/news/peshtigo-fire-america-deadliest-wildfire
Did they count Biden as a dead person and change the total for his visit?
But seriously. Do they mention McCarthy's visit? He actually said responsible, appropriate, and actionable things.
Hopefully one of the things that comes next is accountability for those that blocked access. Access to water to fight the fire. Access to roads leading out of Lahaina. Access to aid to help those immediately impacted by the fire.
It's a major sadz story if they can get it to work. They have sadz oriented readers, unlike the conservatives, but there are implications that are not good for the left, like helplessness is not a good idea.
I always take such claims with a grain of salt, but the more I've read about this catastrophe and the more I hear from eyewitnesses who've been making the claims, it actually appears that in Maui, those who refused to obey government directives are alive and those who followed are burnt to a crisp.
Just like the vaccine...there's a lesson here.
Feel bad for poor Biden. He almost lost his precious corvette and penis extender in a fire, once.
Please be sad for the crook and liar that is our all-caring presnint.
"survivors wonder what comes next"
The 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). Honestly though these days it needs to just be the 4 stages of grief, because we're seeing very few people who ever get to the acceptance stage, even 20-30 years down the line.
Trauma is getting harder and harder to heal, if not impossible, partially because any possibility of "returning to normal" is getting harder and harder to achieve. There was a time when the opportunity cost of - and this will sound harsh - replacing a loved one with another loved one was easier. It was lower context and we were less atomized, and younger generations are starting to act and feel as though the best way to avoid catastrophe is to not engage or pursue major life milestones at all.
After speaking to a couple of senior enlisted Marines who are stationed at K-bay, who were in a position to know how, when and where help was offered by 3rd Marine Division and the helo’s and Osprey’s of 1st MAW; I was dumbfounded to be told the local government declined all aid by the Marines. I can’t speak to what the Army, Navy and Air Force offered for aid. I can guess it was similar logistical help of water purification, shelter and field kitchens. I know from past experience that evacuation coordination between the Air Force and Marine units is outstanding. This whole situation defies logic or reason.
Can you see Russia from Lahaina?
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist, but I am predicting that town will be replaced by tourist hotels and luxury resorts.
A high resolution model forecast the high winds flowing down the hillsides. A model run on a computer that was previously occupied by a climate model that maintains a pretense of skilful decadal predictions. That, and alien grasses invading the land, leaving a known flammable blight.
I'll be surprised if someone doesn't come up with a movie plot about this that fantasizes what happened to one, some, or all of the 380 people still unaccounted for. That's a lot of unaccounted for people. Seems improbable, if not impossible, that every single one of them were incinerated without any trace whatsoever. A series of possible vignettes in fact could be very interesting.
So there’s actually no such thing as private property in Hawaii?
I’m sorry, but the “before they begin bulldozing just comes off as creepy.
Katrina vs. Lahaina: compare and contrast.
Anyone wanna play name-that-party?
1) Why is Joe Biden's Gestapo aka the FBI involved?
2) Why are 380 people still "missing"? This isnt 1923 or a warzone. All these people should be accounted for.
3) WHy isn't the Press doing an independent investigation of why this happened and who is responsible?
4) This never should have happened, and people should be outraged and demanding answers. Instead we're getting sob stories.
6) Our local stores are collecting funds for Maui. I've not given a penny. I have zero idea who or what is behind this "charity". In any case, Maui and Hawaii are among the richest places in the world and most of them are Democrats. I'd love to know how much they gave red states when these places have torandos, floods and fires. My quess would be zero.
Its amazing how many Americans just want to cry, give money to charity, or place flowers and candles when things go wrong, instead of actually holding people accountable and making sure it doesn't happen again.
Quite likely most of the missing were among those who ran into the Ocean and never returned.
This is a total and complete failure by the Dems who run Hawaii; no apostrophe.
But just watch. The Dems will keep their one-party rule. People never learn.
An old acquaintance, artist and custom furniture builder I once knew was never found.
Good thing the idiotic democrats who control everything over there didn't sound the tsunami sirens. //// (I say with angry sarcasm)) The local lazy and inept "officials " assumed sirens would cause people to run into the fire.) yes really. A SIREN IS A SIREN. (typical democrats assume people cannot think for themselves... OR ACT IN THEIR OWN INTEREST) The left assume everyone is as dumb and inept as they are.
Instead of alerting residents with a siren - any siren - (who cares is it's a tsunami siren?!?!) to the fact that everything was on fire - they did nothing. Many didn't see the fire coming coming)
Again - A siren is a siren.
The inept left will get a pass.
The leftwing D-hack press/ and the local inept d's who run the show- they think this is logical and understandable.
Trauma is getting harder and harder to heal, if not impossible
=======
since it is mostly self-inflicted and 'you' are always with 'you'self
I wonder if the missing list is calculated based on the voter rolls. In other words, perhaps a lot of the unfound were long dead or just fake identities for electoral purposes.
Hopefully one of the things that comes next is accountability …
@Leland, there will be no accountability, there will not even be any effort to review what happened and to learn lessons from the mistakes made. These are Democrats.
Can’t find them? It’s an island, FFS.
They got the original list of 1100 missing down to 388, so it sounds like they found a lot of people living with friends or some such.
There may be instances of entire families dying, so there is no immediate relative to report them missing. Authorities have to figure out which families feel into that category vs. those who fled to other states.
There is apparently reason to believe that a lot of kids were at home during the fire, so they may be afraid of the outcry that will come from having to announce dozens of dead children. Also, the surviving children who formerly attended school in Lahaina are probably attending any number of other schools in a displaced basis, now, so I can understand some confusion in accounting for them all.
Still and all, it's been a month now, and the longer this drags on the more suspicious people will be. They need to offer more transparency into how they're examining the list.
I’m sorry, but the “before they begin bulldozing just comes off as creepy.
I agree.
Big Mike, key word is "hopefully", but yeah. The officers that blocked outbound traffic killed more people than Derek Chauvin, but I don't think we will hear how much Hawaiian native lives matter.
What GatorNavy wrote should get people in the streets but it won't.
2) Why are 380 people still "missing"? This isnt 1923 or a warzone. All these people should be accounted for.
Um, the first images I saw of the aftermath looked a lot like fire bombed Tokyo at the end of WWII. I had that thought because of the "Oppenheimer" movie and the silly people that still argue the bombing of Hiroshima wasn't necessary yet know nothing of the destruction of Tokyo that failed to lead to a surrender. That fire was fed with lots of air/oxygen from those hurricane winds, which means it was very hot and nearly everything in the town was fuel. The bodies were incinerated, and the only chance of survival for the missing was that it turns out they were not there at all and are found alive in a nearby village.
Quite a few may want to be missing. Perfect opportunity.
"and the authorities are still trying to determine how many people died"
This needs a little fixing: "and the authorities are still trying to determine how many people they killed.
“Can you see Russia from Lahaina?”
China maybe. Wouldn’t be surprised if they built some artificial islands off the HI coast, to keep an eye on our military there. They are already buying up farmland around our military bases, on the Mainland, and sneaking onto the bases as tourists. Imagine if the Japanese had been able to do that in late 1941, and had known that our carriers weren’t there at Pearl Harbor. Delay their attack until the carriers returned, sink them, along with the battleships, and there would never have been a battle of Midway (etc).
Yancey -
What? Majority in Hawaii are solid D. I promise you.
I have no doubt that some of the "missing" are folks who have decided that they'd like a new, anonymous start in life.
But not all of them.
If there are lessons to be learned here they should be these;
You are always the first person on site of the disaster you're involved in. Prepare accordingly. (even if you're incapacitated or dead your foresight will help others)
Never, never, never, Trust the authorities to do "the right thing". They won't. They are doing what they get paid to do and are working from a template. You are in charge of you.
Apple,
There are contested local elections where the Democrats need to pass funding, for example. Let's say that they need to pass a bond bill for pay raises for teacher unions. Those nasty voters who go to the polls to vote might decline to pay the extra taxes involved, so some extra fake votes are always handy to have.
"This whole situation defies logic or reason."
When a situation "defies logic", that means you are starting from the wrong premises.
Big Mike, key word is "hopefully", but yeah. The officers that blocked outbound traffic killed more people than Derek Chauvin, but I don't think we will hear how much Hawaiian native lives matter.
Exactly ! Except that Chauvin didn't kill anybody.
Quite likely most of the missing were among those who ran into the Ocean and never returned.
@baghdadbob, seems correct to me, and there are probably some large and well-fed sharks swimming around Maui right now. Also, it was reported that the fire was hot enough in spots to melt aluminum and even glass. Compare the temperatures at which aluminum and glass melt with the temperatures used in crematoriums. There may be nothing to find.
"This whole situation defies logic or reason."
Not really. This is exactly what happens when you have people in charge trying to manage the optics of the problem instead of the actual problem.
And really there's very little downside to this, the people that made the terrible decisions will slide away and end up as professors or minor appointed officials or become permanent bureaucratic fixtures with titles and roles that mean nothing.
So many missteps with this situation that is really starts looking less and less like an accident. Given the number of high rollers who own property on the island, I do think it was a crisis and opportunity thing. What's especially distressing is that a goodly number of school-aged children have not turned up registered in other districts on Maui or the other islands; they've just gone poof.
I was just thinking about the whole tsunami warning sirens thing. San Francisco has a similar system, and every Tuesday at noon, the sirens would go off, followed by an announcement in English and Chinese. They were taken offline in early 2020, right as the lockdowns were imposed, supposedly for a major maintenance effort. They've yet to return to operation. Putting myself in the place of those Maui residents, hearing the siren go off on a day when it wasn't expected would certainly cause me to figure out why. Especially when all cellular communications suddenly went offline.
How many people have a plain radio in their houses anymore in order to hear alerts through the Emergency Broadcast System?
How do the morons-in-charge --the genius who set up the roadblock so people couldn't escape in their cars, the other genius who refused to release water to firefighters "because equity," the third super-genius who decided the sirens would just confuse people-- how do they live with themselves?
And why are they not very publicly gone from their posts?
(Maybe they are, I just haven't had the stomach to follow the story over last several weeks. Hard to believe it's been a full month.)
KellyM is correct. Many school-aged children missing. Where are the parents? Why aren't they shown on CNN?
rcocean is also correct. Why doesn't CNN devote the same resources to Maui as it did to that plan that was never found.
Wny don't WaPo and the NYT have a dozen reporters there. Where's Maggie Haberman?
This is a Dem coverup.
My understanding is that the one highway out of town was blocked by utility vehicles that were trying to repair downed lines and poles, with police cars assisting them. They can obviously be faulted for not clearing out of the way, but remember how quickly everything was happening; they may not have understood how bad the fire was.
"Um, the first images I saw of the aftermath looked a lot like fire bombed Tokyo at the end of WWII."
No war is going on in Maui. This isn't the unexepected fireboming of major city with 70,000 people getting killed. And this isn't 1945 Tokyo relying on paper records. Maui has computers, almost everyone is known to Government, and we have computers and computerized records. The fire covered a fairly small area and the total population affected is relatively small.
OTOH, it takes weeks if not months for California to figure out the vote totals. So, maybe we'll figure out how many people died in Maui sometime in 2024. Assuming we ever do.
Many school-aged children missing. Where are the parents?
Next to them in the car, dead. That's likely to be a confounding factor in counting up the missing; whole families killed, with no immediate survivor to report the dead.
CivilBeat.or reports that the spokesperson for the state department of education explained:
“For students, we can’t release their identities or numbers right now because the n-size is so small. The n-size is too small, if we said it we’d be in effect identifying them.”
Blogger Tom T. said...
My understanding is that the one highway out of town was blocked by utility vehicles that were trying to repair downed lines and poles, with police cars assisting them. They can obviously be faulted for not clearing out of the way, but remember how quickly everything was happening; they may not have understood how bad the fire was.
Maybe but that is not what the eyewitness said.
"OTOH, it takes weeks if not months for California to figure out the vote totals. So, maybe we'll figure out how many people died in Maui sometime in 2024."
They need to get the final count of the dead in Republican area tragedies in order to know how many fewer dead they need to "find".
The guy who didn’t blow the siren and the guy who didn’t turn on the water should both be indicted. Criminal negligence.
Post a Comment