Tag: hawaii

US Navy FINALLY recovers spy plane stuck in Hawaii bay two weeks after it overshot Marine base runway and ‘destroyed’ endangered ocean coral – as crews find a dead sea turtle at recovery site

The US Navy has finally recovered a spy plane that crashed into the sea after overshooting a runway in Hawaii two weeks ago. 

But the extraction has cost an estimated $1.5million and, as a sea turtle is found dead onsite, experts warn the plane has damaged the endangered ocean coral. 

The US Navy P-8A plane missed its mark while attempting to land at a US Marines base, located ten miles from Honolulu, on November 20. 

For two weeks it sat floating in Kaneohe Bay – home to coral reefs and a range of marine life, from sharks to octopus and fish.

Its wheels lodged in the coral bed and Navy contractors had to design a complex inflatable and rope system to float it to the surface and remove it from the water. 

Officials said the removal operation took 13 hours starting around 6.30am Saturday.

‘Our team went through a detailed planning process to develop the best course of action to get the P-8 out of the bay as quickly and as safely as possible,’ Rear Adm. Kevin P. Lenox, the salvage operation’s on-scene commander, said.

‘At times, it took us an hour to move the aircraft five feet.’

The Navy estimated the total cost of the operation will be $1.5million as they focus on preserving the aircraft so it can return to service once removed.

But the cost to marine life has been high too, and on Thursday, a ‘deceased sea turtle’ was found ‘floating between’ two of the Navy barriers around the plane.

‘This one is unfortunate. DLNR observers this morning found a deceased sea turtle floating in between two of our barriers,’ Lenox said. 

‘I have no information on the cause of death on that particular sea turtle. DLNR did report a sick sea turtle struggling in the vicinity yesterday, we suspect that may be related. 

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Hawaii Attorney General’s Office Defends Marijuana Legalization Proposal From Law Enforcement Attacks

The office of Hawaii’s attorney general is pushing back against criticism of the official’s recently released marijuana legalization plan, defending its public health and safety provisions as members of the law enforcement community voice opposition to the reform.

After announcing in April that her office would support efforts to enact legalization, Attorney General Anne Lopez (D) unveiled a comprehensive cannabis bill last week, earning praise from supporters in the legislature and mixed reactions from advocates who want to see it revised to more aggressively address equity issues and reduce criminalization.

On the other side of the debate, however, Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm says representatives of law enforcement are firmly against legalizing marijuana in general and the attorney general’s plan specifically, arguing that the current system of prohibition is “not broken,” and regulating adult-use cannabis would lead to increased hospitalizations without mitigating the illicit market.

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My dad was killed by an insane satanist ‘phrogger’ who secretly lived in stranger’s home – I want justice

A US Navy veteran slammed Hawaii‘s lax prison policies for placing his father in a cell with a Satanic ‘phrogger’, who beat him to death while hapless guards failed to open the door due to allegedly faulty locks. 

Nelson Coburn condemned a string of failings that allowed mentally-ill Satanist Ezequiel Zayas to be placed in a cell with his father Vance Grace, 62, who was just weeks away from freedom after spending 34 years behind bars for theft and drug offenses. 

With dreams of starting a Koy Pond business in Hawaii and reconnecting with his family, Grace was placed in a cell with Zayas, then-29, who captured headlines the year prior in 2019 when he was caught secretly living in a Honolulu family’s home. The crime known as ‘phrogging’ and is named after the practice of leap-frogging someone into their home. 

After Zayas was discovered, the family later realized he planned to perform nightmarish surgeries on them. Despite his clear mental illness, he ended up in a cell with Grace, leading his son to speak out over the short-sighted policies that resulted in his father’s grisly death. 

‘The problem is no one speaks up, and you think ‘it’s just another inmate that got killed in prison, oh well he’s a criminal” Coburn told DailyMail.com. ‘My dad did his time and he was working to improve his life.’ 

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Media Blackout: Black Curtains Go Up In Lahaina Blocking View of Ground Zero Investigation, Clean Up

Footage out of fire-ravaged Lahaina, Hawaii, shows crews have erected an extensive line of black curtains blocking citizens from seeing what’s going on as hundreds of people are still reported missing.

Video courtesy of citizen journalist Geoff Cygnus on TikTok depicts miles of fencing and curtains have been put up alongside Front Street, one of Lahaina’s main highways, obstructing the view of ongoing activities.

“There seems to be a huge emphasis on ensuring that the media and anyone else can’t see what’s going on,” Cygnus reported in a recent video.

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Thanks to government, Maui’s Lahaina fire became a deadly conflagration

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.

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To Tackle Highest Housing Costs in the Country, Hawaii’s Governor Declares YIMBY Martial Law

The loss of life from the deadly wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui has been made even worse by the loss of shelter. Some 2,000 homes have been destroyed so far, leaving thousands more homeless or displaced.

The fire has only worsened an insufficiency of homes on the island and in the state more broadly. In Hawaii, median home prices are close to $1 million and regulations on adding new supply are incredibly strict.

Weeks before the fires, Democratic Gov. Josh Green had already proclaimed a statewide housing emergency with the purpose of slashing through all that regulation to get thousands of new homes built.

“We don’t have enough houses for our people. It’s really that simple,” said the governor at a press conference last month, where he promised “bold action to streamline processes for creating thousands of affordable housing units.”

Green is in fact taking bold action by suspending whole sections of state and local laws and regulations that relate to homebuilding.

Local governments are given far more flexibility to expedite housing approvals, while developers will have the chance to route around basically all existing regulations on home building to get housing projects approved.

It’s a radically deregulatory approach that’s received praise from across the political spectrum.

“This is probably the single most significant state-level action on accelerating housing production maybe in the whole country, maybe ever,” Sen. Stanley Chang (D–Honolulu) tells Reason.

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A LOT of Coincidences Surround the Maui Fire That Destroyed Lahaina

Maui just suffered its worst disaster, with a death toll at 115 as of Thursday and nearly a thousand people still missing. While this loss of life is tragic in and of itself, as time goes by, more questions pop up.  How did the fires begin?  How did they get so out of control?  How come damage seemed to occur almost exclusively to the natives while celebrity estates in the area were miraculously unharmed?

Why was the governor almost immediately making plans for the land?  Why has media been so restricted in what they can report on?

Officials always start by blaming climate change whenever some sort of natural disaster occurs.  I always start by assuming incompetence, and there was certainly plenty of that to go around in this situation.

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Hawaiian Electric may have compromised evidence for fire investigation

There is suspicion that the utility company in Hawaii could have compromised evidence as part of the ongoing investigation to the cause of the fires, the Washington Post reported.

Hawaiian Electric is being blamed for an alleged role in starting the fire on the island of Maui in Lahaina and the center of the island. A video emerged of downed powerlines that could have sparked the fire.

A class-action lawsuit was filed less than a week after the fires, ABC News reported. According to the lawsuit, the utility company had documents showing that they were aware that preemptive power shutoffs like the ones used in California could help stop fires, but they refused to do it.

The Post cited documents showing that under the guise of restoring power, Hawaiian Electric removed “fallen poles, power lines, transformers, conductors and other equipment from near a Lahaina substation starting around Aug. 12.”

Investigators from he Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) arrived on the scene for their investigation after the objects had been removed.

“If a lot of equipment is already moved or gone by the time investigators show up, that’s problematic because you want to observe where the equipment was relative to the ignition site,” said Stanford’s director of Climate and Energy Policy Program, Michael Wara. “Maybe there was a homeless encampment, kids, or a power line down on the ground where the ignition occurred. But once you move these things it’s much harder to understand what happened.”

Hawaiian Electric spokesman Darren Pai released a statement saying that their company has been “in regular communication with ATF and local authorities and are cooperating to provide them, as well as attorneys representing people affected by the wildfires, with inventories and access to the removed equipment, which we have carefully photographed, documented and stored.”

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Maui Residents Burned To Death In Their Cars Because Of Barricades Blocking Escape

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that residents of Lahaina in Maui were prevented from escaped the horrific wildfire by barricades that were put up after electric polls were downed.

The report contains shocking details revealing that people were turned back by a crew as they attempted to flee, with several being burned alive in their cars or in the middle of the street as a result.

The report notes that some disobeyed the order and drove around the barricades, enabling them to escape and survive:

One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their 4-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took an dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.

But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety.” 

One survivor noted that if she had obeyed the order to turn around she and her children would have been cooked alive:

“The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came,” said Cuevas-Reyes, 38. “I would have had to tell my children to jump into the ocean as well and be boiled alive by the flames or we would have just died from smoke inhalation and roasted in the car.”

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Satellite Images of Maui Fire Taken Down “At the Request of Responding Organizations in Hawai’i”

Actions by officials on Maui have contributed to an air of suspicion about the handling of the Lahaina fire that killed over 100 and left around 1000 people unaccounted for, including many children. Media access is tightly controlled, drones are grounded for getting too close to the suspected origin site of the fire and now satellite images from the fire have been taken down from a news site. The censorship incident appears to be isolated but troubling just the same. The photos were widely published and remain online elsewhere.

A Gateway Pundit reader sent in a tip (thank you) that an interactive satellite map APP comparing before and after photos of Lahaina has been taken down. The map was featured in a news article by Scooty Nickerson with the Bay Area News Group headlined: Interactive Maui wildfire map: Before and after images of Lahaina show scale of devastation

A message where the images once were reads: “At the request of responding organizations in Hawai’i and out of respect for the ongoing situation, the imagery and data in this app have been removed.” The before picture is still available by clicking the “close” button in the display.

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