Run to the Water. Run for Your Life…Updated 8/23
If you’ve ever visited the beautiful Lahaina town on the west coast of Maui you cannot help but feel a huge loss, not only for the lives lost, a number that is likely to increase, but for the loss of Hawaiian history. The historic city center and waterfront were filled with old wooden structures dating back to it whaling origins in the 1800s, now filled with tourists going on whale watching excursions. In 1802, King Kamehameha made Lahaina the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. He built a brick palace there, along with residences and other royal buildings, and Lahaina served as the center of the Hawaiian government for over 50 years, until permanently relocating to Honolulu for its harbor.
In 1802 shortly before King Kamehameha united the Hawaiian Islands under his rule, leading to a long period of peace before colonization, he made Lahaina the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. He built a brick palace there, along with residences and other royal buildings, and Lahaina served as the center of the Hawaiian government for over 50 years, until permanently relocating to Honolulu. The Lahaina Historic District was a National Historic Landmark District encompassing most of the community. It has been reduced to rubble. While tourists shelter in posh resorts and queue up to catch the next flight out, indigenous and settler residents of lesser means find themselves in cramped refugee centers. It’s all heartbreaking. The body count will likely exceed the forty killed in late July in the Mediterranean, including thirty-four in Algeria.
The title of this blog post is due to the eerie similarity to one I wrote in January of 2020 where Australian residents fled into a lake, while their PM, Tony Morrison, vacationed in Hawaii. One has to wonder if he visited Maui on that trip. In that post I also referenced the 2019 tragedy when over a hundred were killed when a wildfire tore through a Greek seaside community east of Athens. As in Lahaina, desperate residents trapped by smoke and flame were driven to the ocean, hoping to not find a cliff or insurmountable seawall standing between them and safety. With each passing year, I dwell on and regret my conjecture, when doing the 2018 shoot for our Carr Fire dozer video, when I speculated that we would see more and more civilian deaths in wildfires to come. This was coming off the jarring 85 dead after the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California. That bit got edited out of the final video…too morose, I suppose, but I remember it well. FUSEE has always advocated for the safety and well being of wildland firefighters. Never in my wildest imagination, when FUSEE was in its infancy, did I think we would see scores upon scores of civilian deaths. Back then it was the Dude Fire I was on as a rookie hotshot in 1990 that left an indelible mark on my soul, followed by South Canyon and the hopeful policy revisions that brought, but the dawn of the 21st Century seems to be the harbinger of something much worse. A single firefighter killed in a vehicle accident or a tree strike starts to feel routine, and even an entire crew lost as on the Yarnell Hill Fire starts to seem mundane in comparison to women and children leaping for their lives into the ocean. Climate change is normalizing chaos.
American wildland firefighters are catching a break this year, while earlier in the season residents in the Upper Midwest and Eastern Seaboard got to experience the same existential dread of Blade Runner blood red skies from Canadian wildfires, that West Coast residents experienced in 2018 and 2020. Yet, as I watch the coverage of the Hawaiian tragedy unfold, I hear very few commentators making the linkage to climate change. I tried to find some fire danger rating material for Hawaii, but destructive wildfires are fairly uncommon there, so Hawaii enters the wildfire world like Siberia, the Amazon, and Texas - areas where, until recently, massive wildfires were unknown. Apparently, it can be dangerous to your career to publicly make the climate connection when calamity strikes. Even if your network allows the coverage, the death threats will do the trick to silence your voice. While we know a warming climate will increase mean wind speeds, vorticity, and the number of hurricanes, like the distant hurricane that brought windspeeds over 60-80 mph to Lahaina. No helicopters or airtankers can fly in those winds. Like a replay from other recent fires on the mainland, winds likely ripped energized powerlines from their connections, sparking fires right in the middle of town. In some photos from Lahaina you can see a string of powerlines laying over to one side. Whether the we pushed over from wind or flames, it’s impossible to tell, but this is the pattern we see more and more often. Our atmosphere is becoming more and more turbulent.
August 23, 2023 Update
After some consideration, I decided to update this post and drop the anti-racist, anti-imperialist screed into which my first post devolved. I apologize to our readers who still believe there is a role for partisan politics in solving problems like climate change and the resulting wildfire dilemma. The day Lahaina burned was almost to the moment 78 years after we dropped the second nuclear warhead on Nagasaki, Japan, killing thirty- to forty-thousand people instantly and and equal number in the months afterward, as many people continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, and injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. At that point the United States had already pioneered a whole new phenomenon, that of the urban conflagration, as was seen in Dresden and Tokyo. And so, here we go again. The New York Times correctly framed the Maui fire not as a wildland fire (though that was the trigger), but an “urban inferno.” Still, there is nothing new under the sun, only an increasing amount of said sun.
Two days after the fire in Maui House Republicans from the Natural Resources Committee staged a ridicules Field Oversight Hearing in Yosemite National Park. Of course they were there to try and revive the go-go logging days of yore by doubling down on the logging for fire risk reduction narrative so embraced on both sides of the aisle, but so empty of truth. How would logging schemes helped the people of Lahaina? Was climate change a contributing factor? Yes. Forest health? Not so much. The entire hearing was a farce where “fuel reduction” accurately characterized (citation #104 from the hearing documentation) as having saved both infrastructure and natural resources in Yosemite by park managers was used to promote logging by lawmakers acting in bad faith, when it was prescribed burning, using wildfires, and the pile burning of unmerchantable brush and small trees that protected Yosemite in subsequent fires like the Rim, Ferguson, and Washburn Fires. In fact, at no time in the hearing was any credit given to Yosemite’s fire management staff that has been conducting prescribed fires, managing wildfires, and burning piles for over sixty years.
On a more positive note, five days after the Maui fire there was a favorable ruling in Montana in a landmark climate case, where young people dared to suggest that a livable climate was something they should expect to have handed down from previous generations. Of course it was soon revealed that Biden officials working behind the scenes have asserted that “there is no constitutional right to a stable climate system.”
As of this writing, we are now two weeks out from the tragedy in Lahaina. The body count stands at 115 and over a thousand are still missing. This blows past the human tragedy of the 2018 Camp Fire in the hills above Chico. Tepid responses from government at all levels have fueled more than the usual amount of hyperbole and conspiracy theorizing. From Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers to the contemporary moral panic around child trafficking that has many believing Lahaina’s missing children have been whisked away to be drained of adrenochrome, so the “elites” can live forever…no this isn’t Hunter S. Thompson reaching out from the grave. It’s just an exhausted America slipping backward into magical thinking from the willful destruction of trust in all institutions…a new Dark Ages led by those who cannot fathom Capitalism as our undoing. Biden’s belated visit to the site of America’s biggest wildfire catastrophe in over 100 years was abysmal, almost resulting in he and his entourage being voted off the island. Nonetheless, it was hailed as marvelous by the partisans on cable news, though back in 2005 Bush was eviscerated during his famous Hurricane Katrina “flyover.” But then, nobody younger than 60 is watching cable news, anymore. All the cable news channels, no matter their blue/red variation, represent just another set of American institutions that have lost relevance and lost control of the narrative. They are a joke and their pretense is laughable and worthy of the endless mockery they receive from independent media. All one can say for certain, is as long as we are promising just a $700 check for Lahaina fire survivors, but have already committed over $3,000 in military & financial aid for every man, woman and child in Ukraine with no end to the carnage…well, you get the point. If we can’t love one another, what hope is there for the kind of international cooperation needed to ensure a livable planet for future generations?
