Only thing for sure is that Maui Fire was NOT cause by "Climate Change" - Despite Climate Commie False Claims!
Update: How Many Poeple are Still Missing and Why?
by Ruth Styles, Dailymail.com, August 29, 2023
When the people of Lahaina woke up on Tuesday August 8, it was to strong winds courtesy of a passing hurricane and sparking power lines.
By midnight, their town was gone – consumed by a vicious fire whipped up by the gales that tore through its wooden buildings in less than 20 minutes and left 115 people dead and hundreds more missing.
Three weeks on from the what promises to be the deadliest wildfire in US history and the blame game is underway.
A series of blunders by emergency officials and power company Hawaiian Electric left the residents of Lahaina with no warning of the impending disaster and without water to fight the flames as the electric pumps shut down when the power failed.
Benny Reinicke, 29, lived in Lahaina for six years before losing his home in the fire.
He told DailyMail.com: 'We were as surprised as surprised can be. I mean, there was no warning. It was literally us looking up in the sky and realizing we're about to die.
'This is it. This is the moment. This is how we're going out. We're going to catch on fire, and this is how we're going to die.'
Herman Andaya, 51, the official tasked with overseeing emergency preparations, resigned last week citing health problems but had been heavily criticized for failing to sound emergency sirens that could have alerted people to the fire.
Meanwhile, Maui County is suing Hawaiian Electric over its alleged failure to maintain power lines properly while the Maui Fire Department has been criticized for failing to completely stamp out a small bush fire it said was contained that later flared up into a deadly blaze.
The utility denies its downed lines were to blame.
READ from Maui Resident: More Than 450 Bodies Allegedly Recovered from Wildfire and ‘Lot of Kids’ Still Missing
Reinicke told DailyMail.com: 'The cell towers were down, and the cable was down – there's not much you can do other than sound the alarm to warn the people that there's some catastrophic danger approaching.'
He added: 'I haven't seen the data that others have seen but I have to assume that if the alarm had been sounded, many more lives would have been saved.'
The first reports of fire in Lahaina came at 6:37am when locals called 911 over a small brush fire that had flared up, sparked by power cables knocked down by strong winds.
Maui Management Agency Administrator Herman Andaya resigned last week amid mounting criticism, but cited health problems for his departure.
Click Here to Download the FREE We the People Convention Phone App!
Dominga Advincula, who lived in a house in the foothills on the northwestern side of town, spotted the flames on the hillside and called 911.
By 9am, officials said the blaze was 100 per cent contained and fire crews departed to deal with some of the other fires that had sprung up around the island; sparked by the same combination of fallen power lines and high winds.
One was in Kula; a tiny town on the western flanks of Haleakalā – the huge volcano that dominates Maui.
National Parks employee Ross Hart, 72, told DailyMail.com that the Upcountry Fire, as it came to be known, first flared up around 11am when a eucalyptus tree fell on a power line.
Within minutes, the flames were 'burning up and down, east and west' and coming ever closer to Hart's home.
With time to evacuate, the elderly and children of Kula were sent downhill to safety while Hart and other homeowners stayed to protect their property.
'The fire department drove past and said you better go because we're having a hard time,' Hart said. 'Every time they put a bit out, another bit would go up. It was crazy for them.'
Back in Lahaina, the last fire trucks called to the scene of the brush fire were departing, with all leaving by 2pm, according to eye witnesses.
WATCH: Here are the Facts to defeat the 'Man Made' Climate Hysteria
Advincula told the Los Angeles Times she had feared the embers would flare up again – and saw her worst fears realized around 4pm when she was forced to call 911 for a second time after seeing smoke 'spread like water' through the cul-de-sac where she lived.
She fled with her family to a relative's house a mile away, but less than 15 minutes after arriving, her son told her: 'Mom, we have to leave this house. It's getting hot.'.
She added: 'Coming up from that street – Paunau – to Front Street, it's a dead stop – like trees falling on the cars, black. Like apocalypse. It was hard to get out.'
Reinicke told DailyMail.com he had been repeatedly woken in the night by the wind and had experienced a power outage in the early hours of August 8, but he had no idea there was a fire until approximately 4:30pm that afternoon when he smelled smoke.
Taking an electric scooter, he drove a few blocks away and looked up to see the hillside on fire – but even then didn't realize the gravity of what was happening.
He said: 'That hill has been on fire maybe two, three other times. I'm thinking, 'oh good, here goes another fire. I'm going to report on my phone, show it to my friends, how close I am, things like that. Then it got a little bit darker.'
The 29-year-old headed back towards his home but when he got a block away, he saw embers jump 200 yards and set a building nearby on fire.
He said: 'That's how strong the winds were. It was so fast. I saw the smoke change color and get thicker, and I knew right then and there, I need to get out of here.'
Reinicke ran home, grabbed a bag containing his cards and personal documents and jumped in his car to flee.
By then, the two routes out of town were clogged with traffic as people tried to escape the flames, with many getting stuck along Front Street – the historic town's prime tourist attraction.
Among them was Candee Olafson, 65, who had seen smoke from her hillside home and driven into Lahaina on her blue moped to warn former neighbors.
She told DailyMail.com: 'I was in town when it started to right to flame up. The police had us going in circles. If they just let us go out of town, there'd be a lot less dead.
'But we kept going in circles and I made it out of town in a couple of hours, when it usually takes three minutes.'
She was one of the lucky ones. Others, among them whole families, burned alive in their homes and in their cars, while others were taken by smoke inhalation as they attempted to flee into the ocean.
Reinicke was among the people who made it into the Pacific and abandoned his car on Front Street after becoming stuck in traffic.
He described how he saw cars exploding one by one as the flames hit and how Lahaina's Outlet Mall blazed up just feet from him.
Despite the threat to his own life, he stopped to help others: a woman named Lisa and her 88-year-old mother, and then Sincerity Mirkovich and her daughter Lani Williams who were struggling to clamber over a boulder and into the safety of the Pacific.
Click Here to Watch the Newest We the People Convention News & Opinion Podcast!
Reinicke described the next eight hours as 'the worst of my life' as he and the women took refuge in the ocean, dousing themselves to stop their skin drying out from the heat of the flames and trying not to breathe in the thick, black smoke.
As the night wore on, the waves got bigger forcing the group to cling to rocks by the shoreline while all became increasingly cold.
Eventually, Reinicke and the women climbed on to the rocks themselves where they watched as boats sped out to sea after the harbor caught fire.
In the early hours of August 9, the coastguard approached and initially attempted to evacuate them on surfboards before they were finally rescued by firefighters who had battled through the flames and took them to safety.
Allisen Medina, who has been helping out displaced wildfire victims in Lahaina, said some have discovered the charred remains of their own loved ones
Tragically, that help came too late for some: Reinicke describes trying to help a man in his 40s lying near the cars only to realize he was already dead – a victim of the smoke.
Olafson, meanwhile, had fled her home on her moped and battled her way through gale force winds to the safety of Maalaea; a 16-mile journey that took her all night.
In Kula, Hart battled the flames approaching his house of 36 years until 10.30pm that night, only conceding defeat when power cuts meant the electric pumps supplying Kula and Lahaina with water shut off.
In both towns, the lack of water proved devastating: 19 homes burned in Kula while 2,200 were destroyed in Lahaina.
Hart told DailyMail.com: 'The way I saw it, we were winning – the main flames were moving down the gully [behind his house] – but the winds were something else; they kept kicking up sparks and embers.
'Once the water shut off, we couldn't fight that heat. It was because the power had shut off and there was no backup generator.'
Earlier this week, the State of Hawaii filed a lawsuit against power provider Hawaiian Electric for damages after multiple videos taken on the day of the deadly fires showed blazes being sparked by faulty power lines.
The company is accused of failing to maintain equipment and the power grid, and 'failing to power down their electrical equipment despite a National Weather Service Red Flag Warning on August 7.'
Meanwhile, Andaya, the now former administrator of Maui's Emergency Management Agency resigned.
He has been blamed for the decision not to sound the emergency sirens and was off the island when the fires broke out.
Click Here to Sign Up to get We the People Convention Emails and/or Text Messages!
Residents had also been left furious by the fact Maui appeared to be underprepared for disaster, the slow pace of recovery efforts and Andaya's insistence that the sirens are only used for tsunamis and that sounding them would have led to people running towards the flames.
In the week following the disaster, Allisen Medina, 24, told DailyMail.com: 'People have been doing their own recovery.
'I know there are at least 480 dead here in Maui and I don't understand why they're [the authorities] not saying that. Maybe it's to do with DNA or something.
'I do know they ran out of body bags by the first or second night and had to ship some in from the mainland.'
She added: 'Why didn't they turn on the sirens? They're not just for tsunamis – go to their website and it says they're for fires, other disasters, everything.
'What he [Andaya] said is so disgusting and disrespectful – does he really think people would run towards fire, that they wouldn't have looked out and seen it?'
Last week, as he surveyed the still smoking ruins of his four-bedroom home, Hart joked: 'I've been 36 years in this house. We built it. But at least the termites are gone and the rats ran away. Now we can start clean.'
Growing serious, he added: 'We had time and saw it coming. Lahaina didn't.'
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE NEWS IN THE DAILYMAIL.COM
