Old Lahaina Town Utterly Destroyed - Recovery & Relief Efforts

[terracore]

Not like they weren't warned about it.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/mauis-top-emergency-officials-were-off-island-as-wildfires-hit-lahaina/?utm_source=Civil+Beat+Master+List&utm_campaign=5f9d451118-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_08_07_11_42&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-5f9d451118-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&mc_cid=5f9d451118&mc_eid=bb753109d3

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/experts...ate-change

However, several experts pointed instead to years of poor forest and brush management, in addition to declining agriculture, in Hawaii as the primary cause for the devastating fires this week.

"Blaming this on weather and climate is misleading," said Clay Trauernicht, a University of Hawaii at Manoa professor and environmental management expert. "Hawai'i's fire problem is due to the vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture."
"These savannas now cover about a million acres across the main Hawaiian Islands, mostly the legacy of land clearing for plantation agriculture and ranching in the late 1800s/early 1900s," he continued. "The transformation to savanna makes the landscape way more sensitive to bad 'fire weather' — hot, dry, windy conditions. It also means we get huge buildups of fuels during rainy periods."
He added that wildfire risk in Hawaii could be mitigated with "adequate support, planning, and resources for fuel reduction projects, agricultural land use, and restoration and reforestation around communities and the foot of our forests."

In 2019, Trauernicht submitted a letter to a local Maui newspaper, arguing that the island was at serious risk of continued forest fires without proper management. He stated that heavy rainfall causes more vegetation, which is then not tended to and poses fire risk.

"Maui is now firmly in the post-plantation era, and the West Maui fires are only the most recent example of what eventually happens when large, tropical grasslands go untended," he wrote. "But the fuels — all that grass — is the one thing that we can directly change to reduce fire risk."