Tag: hawaii

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.”

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

Speculation Swirls Over Reports Of Obama-Linked Hawaii Official’s Refusal To Release Water During Blaze

Hard questions are being asked about what role a Hawaiian water official connected to President Barack Obama had in delaying fire prevention measures that could have reduced opportunities for the Maui blaze to rapidly spread and take the lives of over 100 individuals.

M. Kaleo Manuel, a Hawaii water official and an “Asian Pacific Leader” with the Obama Foundation, gained notoriety in the days following the horrific fires after a previous video was unearthed showing the water throttler explaining his philosophy that water should not be seen as “something we can use” but rather an “earthly manifestation of a god.”

“Native Hawaiians treated water as one of the earthly manifestations of a god… So that reverence for a resource and reciprocity in relation is important to our well-being. Over time, we’ve become used to looking at water as something that we use, and not necessarily something that we revere,” said Manuel.

“If we can look as islanders at how we reconnect to those traditional value sets. My motto is, let water connect us and not divide us… It requires true conversations about equity.”

Keep reading

Maui wildfires spark conspiracy theories about space lasers, Oprah land grabs and suspicious trees

The Maui wildfires have drawn bizarre conspiracy theories that elites — such as President Biden and Oprah — may have used lasers to intentionally set the deadly blaze for their own nefarious ends.

Photos claiming to show space lasers raining destruction down on the Hawaiian city have gained millions of views across social media, while images of trees still standing amid the inferno’s aftermath have been cited as evidence that the fires were not natural.

“Everything is burnt but the trees, but don’t point that out or ur a conspiracy theorist,” wrote one user on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, alongside footage of people driving through the cindered remains of a neighborhood.

But the unlikely internet sleuths’ hypotheses were easily debunked.

That post, along with others like it, was flagged by readers who linked to a Britannica article concisely explaining why the trees were still standing.

Keep reading

Hawaii governor says state is looking to ‘acquire land’ that was destroyed in fires

On Monday, Hawaiian governor Josh Green announced that his administration was considering acquiring properties in the seaside resort town of Lahaina that had been destroyed by the recent wildfires.

He vowed to prevent foreign buyers from swooping in to exploit the tragedy, suggesting the state was better suited to take control of the land.

“I’m already thinking of ways for the state to acquire that land so that we can put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or make it open spaces in perpetuity as a memorial to the people who were lost,” Green said while standing amongst the rubble.

“We want this to be something we remember after the pain passes as a magic place. Lahaina will rebuild. The tragedy right now is the loss of life. The buildings can be rebuilt over time, even the banyan tree may survive, but we don’t want this to become a clear space where then people from overseas just come and decide they’re gonna take it. The state will take it and preserve it first.”

In a separate press conference, Green reiterated his committment to ensure the land was protected for residents, and revealed that he had spoken with the Hawaiian attorney general regarding “options to do a moratorium on any sales of properties that have been damaged or destroyed.”

“It’s going to be a very long time before any growth or housing can be built, so you will be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here,” he said, adding, “I will try to allow no one from outside our state to buy any land until we get through this crisis and decide what Lahaina should be in the future.”

According to the Honolulu Civil Beat, over 2,000 structures were destroyed in the fire, three quarters of which were residential. Nearly 100 people have been found dead, though that number is expected to rise as crews continue searching the area.

Keep reading

A Rural, Waldorf Microschool Gets Shut Down By State Regulators

Ariel Maguire gathered together with other moms in her rural area of the Big Island of Hawaii to create a child-centered educational solution for local families. It was late 2021 and the parents realized that nearly two years of pandemic policies had left their kids behind both academically and socially.

There weren’t a lot of child care or early-education options nearby. “The closest place to send our kids would be a little over an hour drive each way and it has a huge waitlist,” Maguire told me in a recent podcast interview. “We were all struggling because we’d been stuck at home with our kids without community for a couple of years and needed to get back to work.”

So Maguire and the other moms decided to build what they couldn’t find. They established their program, Kulike Learning Garden, as a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, as well as a private membership association, or PMA, that works legally like a social club to facilitate voluntary association within a cooperative community of shared roles and expectations. They hired an experienced Waldorf teacher, and opened their Waldorf-inspired, child-focused, nature-based microschool on a family farm in January 2022 with about 15 children, ages three to six. Parent volunteers shared in the teaching responsibilities.

Over the following months, the microschool, which cost families $600 a month, flourished. “The kids were all thriving,” said Maguire, an accountant and mom of four young girls. “The feedback we were getting was that the kids were doing so much better at home because of this new routine. A lot of their behaviors that we were experiencing during the pandemic had calmed down. The kids were having a blast.”

Then, in November 2022, officials from the Hawaii Department of Human Services showed up on the farm property. “They were very Men in Black style,” recalled Maguire. “They had glasses on, masks on, multiple cars. A representative from the Attorney General’s office was there, and they were interrogating us, really making us out to seem like we were doing something really wrong, but we truly felt that we weren’t.”

One week later, Maguire and the other parents got served with a $55,500 fine and a court date for operating as an “unlicensed preschool.” They tried to challenge the state regulators, but it seemed like an uphill battle. “Circuit court takes at least a year to get through, and so looking at the attorney costs of doing that and the time it would require of me, and meanwhile, I have these four children who I’m trying to educate and prepare for life. I just didn’t have the time or the money to do that,” said Maguire. So she and the other moms agreed to shut down their microschool and pay a $5,000 fine.

“It was devastating for all of these children and families to suddenly close at the end of December,” said Maguire. “Everybody is homeschooling right now because there’s really no other option. We have play dates and meet up at the beach or the market, and that’s really it.”

Keep reading

Former Hawaii Lawmaker Gets 2 Years in Corruption Case That Led to Release of Sewage Into State Waters

A former Hawaii lawmaker was sentenced Thursday to two years in prison in a federal corruption case that’s drawn attention to a perennial problem in the islands: the tens of thousands of cesspools that release 50 million gallons of raw sewage into the state’s pristine waters every day.

Cesspools — in-ground pits that collect sewage from houses and buildings not connected to city services for gradual release into the environment — are at the center of the criminal case against former Democratic state Rep. Ty Cullen. He has admitted to taking bribes of cash and gambling chips in exchange for influencing legislation to reduce Hawaii’s widespread use of cesspools.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Oki Mollway said she gave Cullen a sentence at the shortest end of the term recommended by prosecutors because he had cooperated extensively with investigators. Yet she didn’t go as low as the 15 months requested by his defense attorney because of the serious nature of his crimes.

“This was a grievous breach of public trust on your part. It appears to have been motivated by greed, and it stretched out over a number of years,” Mollway told Cullen. “I am very concerned that this was not a momentary lapse of judgement.”

Cullen told the judge he took full responsibility for and was ashamed of his actions.

Keep reading

First Balloons, Now Space Lasers: Chinese Satellite Blasts Green Lights Over Hawaii

Chinese spy balloons aren’t the only strange thing flying over U.S. airspace as of late.

Numerous green laser lights were spotted over Hawaii on Jan. 28, initially believed to be from a NASA satellite that monitors the thickness of ice sheets on earth. However, the claim was retracted on Feb. 6, and responsibility was instead attributed to a Chinese atmospheric monitoring satellite.

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan published a photo of the lasers on Jan. 28 saying they were “thought to be from a remote-sensing altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613,” the NASA satellite. Then, on Feb. 6, NAOJ released an updated report and said it was unlikely to have come from the NASA satellite due to the trajectory of the lasers.

NASA scientist Dr. Alvaro Ivanoff determined via a simulation that the culprit was likely China’s Daqi-1/AEMS satellite, according to Science Alert.

Daqi-1 monitors the earth’s atmospheric environment and can project lasers from its Aerosol and Carbon Dioxide Detection Lidar (ACDL), according to The Science Times.

NASA’s IceSAT-2 functions similarly and fired 10,000 lasers per second to measure changes on the earth’s surface, according to The Science Times.

Keep reading

The mysterious disappearances on Hawaii’s Napali Coast and the Kalalau Trail on Kauai

The Kalalau Trail is considered a dangerous trail, located in the Napali Coast State Wilderness Park of Kauai. Most people know this trail for the first 2 miles to Hanakapiai Beach, but permitted backpackers can go the full 11 miles to Kalalau Beach at the end, where camping is allowed.

Set among a coastline of steep cliffs, valleys and streams, the Kalalau Trail requires the most rescues on Kauai. Aside from the usual risks that come with hiking, rain on this coastline can cause the many streams in the area to flash flood. Kauai’s red clay dirt can crumble when dry and be extremely slippery when wet. Strong ocean currents can pull swimmers out to sea.

Deaths on the trail happen often enough that a sign posted at Hanakapiai Stream tallies its victims — close to 100 the last time I visited. This doesn’t include deaths at other streams and beaches, those from falling rocks or falls from great heights.

Still, the trail’s wild and remote beauty attracts day hikers, backpackers, free spirits and illegal campers, who stay for extended periods. About 500,000 visitors and residents ventured out on the trail in 2015, according to the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources.

Keep reading