Trouble In Paradise
Trouble In Paradise
In Maui, a natural disaster destroyed a beautiful seaside town. The incompetent response of local and state governments should serve as a warning to the rest of us.
Two years ago my family traveled to Hawaii for our summer vacation. After enduring a couple of days in Honolulu and the throngs of tourists on Waikiki Beach, we boarded a small plane for a quick hop to the island of Maui. Our hotel for the week was a couple of miles north of a resort town called Lahaina, and we went there almost every day. Its main street was filled with the usual tourist traps and bars, but the locals were friendly, the homes had that cool rustic vibe that you’ll find in SoCal beach towns, and the weather was perfect. On a clear day we enjoyed a breathtaking view toward the neighboring island of Lanai. Lahaina felt like paradise and I fell in love with it immediately.
Last month that idyllic setting was wiped out in a couple of hours, amidst the worst wildfire disaster that this country has seen in over a hundred years. As of today the death toll stands at 115 people, with another 850 missing. For anyone who has ever been to Lahaina, the photo below is almost impossible to believe. How could a town be leveled so completely by a fire?
Sadly, recent events created the conditions for a ‘perfect storm’ that transformed Lahaina from a tropical paradise into a deathtrap. The town sits on Maui’s western coast, directly in front of the West Maui Mountains. The coastline road, Hawaii Route 30, is the town’s only evacuation route unless you have access to a boat. Lahaina also experiences extreme drought in the summer and its surrounding fields are covered in grassland. By early August of this year, Lahaina was already a tinderbox and local firefighters were on high alert.
This was not Lahaina’s first brush with tragedy. In late August 2018, those same conditions created a fire that very nearly destroyed the town when high winds knocked over several utility poles that supported the power lines of Maui’s aging electrical grid. The sparks created by the falling power lines ignited a brush fire that torched 13 homes and 30 vehicles. Disaster was only averted because local firefighters managed to prevent the fire from jumping to the west side of the coastal highway. As the town’s head of emergency services later testified to Lahaina’s city council, “It nearly, nearly reached Lahaina Town. And, had it jumped Lahainaluna Road, it would have been, I mean, it would have been devastating.”
Five years later, on August 8th of this year, another fire began when Hurricane Dora passed 500 miles south of Hawaii and battered Maui with gale-force winds that knocked down more of Hawaiian Electric’s antiquated power lines. One resident saw sparks fly as early as 6.30am that morning and called 911; the local fire department reported that it had extinguished that fire by 10am that day. Yet the high winds continued to pummel the coastline, more power lines went down and by 2pm another fire had started in the hills above town. A hot, dry wind carried the fire down from the mountains at over 60 miles per hour, and this time the coastal road did not stop it. Within minutes the entire town was engulfed in flames. Local schools had stayed closed that day because of the high winds, and many children were at home alone when the fires descended upon the town. I cannot even imagine how gut-wrenching the body recovery activities in Lahaina must be today.
This story is already bad enough, but what happens next is why I am writing this article.
Many indications are emerging that the response of Maui’s various government agencies not only failed to protect its citizens, but very likely contributed to the rising death toll. After compiling the list below, I am struggling to identify a single organization that did their job well:
County officials operate a disaster early-warning system that includes many air-raid sirens to alert residents of emergencies. Even though officials were aware that the fire was rapidly moving toward Lahaina, they failed to activate the system, thereby depriving local residents of advance warning that may have reduced the death toll.
When questioned, Hawaii’s head of emergency management (who has since resigned, citing ‘health reasons’) claimed that he declined to activate the sirens because ‘people are trained to think the sirens are a tsunami warning and we did not want them running up to high ground where the fires started’.
The idiocy of this statement almost defies belief. The only way it makes sense for an official to say this, is if that official has no valid explanation for why this team failed to sound the alarm, and is hoping that by making this statement the public will consider him to be incompetent instead of criminally negligent.
Police and fire department vehicles barricaded the coastline road after the fires began, preventing citizens from escaping the burning town. Those who drove around the barricades escaped and survived, while those who followed orders and returned to Lahaina were trapped and many of them died in their cars.
Maui’s police chief has claimed that law enforcement officials blocked the only exit from the town because they ‘didn’t want people driving over live power lines’. Whether the power lines were still on at that point remains in dispute, as Hawaiian Electric has denied that they were. What is not in dispute is that local police forced many citizens to return to certain death in the town rather than expose them to the possibility of electrocution.
Maui’s Deputy Director of Water Resource Management refused to release water to help fight the Lahaina fires for more than five hours. The official has gone on the record as saying that water should be ‘an important tool of social justice’ and that access to it should be ‘predicated on conversations about equity’. He has since been ‘reassigned’.
In an effort to share the burden of blame with others, Maui County has now filed suit against Hawaiian Electric and accused the utility of gross negligence. According to the lawsuit, Hawaiian did not shut down its grid even amidst an emergency weather and fire warning from the National Weather Service. The company has also been accused of evidence tampering as they moved downed power lines after the fire, before federal investigators could reach the scene.
Doubling Down
The Lahaina fire has become the worst disaster in Hawaii’s history as a state. As we just reviewed, government incompetence at the state and local level almost certainly elevated the death toll. Given these circumstances, one would assume that state officials would be working 24/7 to bring relief to their affected constituents.
Sadly, you would be very wrong for making that assumption. Four weeks have passed since the fire, and Maui’s elected leader has yet to provide any answers regarding the government response in Lahaina. Maui Mayor Richard Bissen’s only real communication since the fire includes a video recording (!) that his office released last week in which he stated that he “wasn’t sure” who was in charge of the island’s emergency management efforts during the fire. Worse, he told a CBS national correspondent that he did not make a single phone call during or after the fire.
Bissen attempted to ‘pass the buck’ to Maui’s emergency management head, Kenneth Hara, who has refused to confirm his whereabouts as the fire was gaining strength. Hara also claimed that he was unaware of any fatalities until the following day. Perhaps if he had actually spoken to a local resident on that day…?
But the award for most unbelievable comment goes to Hawaii’s governor Josh Green, when reporters asked him about how the state might help Lahaina. His response: “I’m already thinking about ways for the state to acquire that land so we can put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or to make it open spaces in perpetuity as a memorial to people who were lost.” Just imagine the stress that a local resident might feel after losing their home, and possibly their family, and then hearing a politician speculate about how the state might ‘acquire’ their land.
Of the 50 states, Hawaii has the fourth-highest income tax rate in America with the top bracket set at 11%. Many Hawaii residents no doubt have serious questions about how their tax dollars are being spent at this point.
The Consequences of Bad Government
Unfortunately Hawaii is no stranger to government ineptitude. You may recall how the state made headlines a few years ago when Hawaii’s emergency management agency sent the below text message to the phone of every resident on the island.
You can imagine how panic ensued when this alert was sent. This was early 2018, and local nerves were already frayed amidst President Trump’s ongoing war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. For twenty minutes, most of Hawaii thought the apocalypse was imminent. Parents rushed to their childrens’ schools to pull them out of class. People called their loved ones from work to say goodbye, and hid in basements.
But as it turns out, this alert was not sent because of incoming North Korean Hwasong-18 ICBMs, but a state employee with a history of inept performance who mistook a practice drill for an actual attack. The subsequent investigation included this gem of a finding:
The Associated Press reports that the fired employee had "confused real-life events and drills in the past, the state said in a report. His poor performance has been documented for years, and other members of the team say they were not comfortable working with him in any role." The AP says the state's internal investigation found that the employee was told to cancel the alert, but he "just sat there and didn't respond." Another employee eventually made the correction, as the worker "seemed confused."
At least the 2018 false alarm could be attributed to the stupidity of a single employee. In the ensuing five years, that ineptitude appears to have spread like syphilis on a pirate ship.
Elections Have Consequences
Hawaii’s local and state government failed to warn the people of Lahaina about the fire, impeded their ability to escape, and are now refusing to meet with local residents or provide any meaningful assistance. At some point one must consider the possibility that these actions venture beyond gross incompetence and more closely resemble actual malice.
It is difficult to understand how an elected official could conduct themselves in such a callous manner. One problem might be that one political party in the state has maintained near-total control for over six decades. Hawaiian politics has been dominated by one political party since statehood was granted in 1959. Hawaii’s electoral college has not voted Republican in nearly forty years.
This isn’t meant to be partisan and I am not about to tell you that a change to Republican leadership would solve Hawaii’s problems. However, it is apparent that long periods of political dominance by one party can lead its politicians to complacency, which ultimately evolves into laziness and a general lack of accountability. I have watched a couple of the videos that the Maui Mayor, who was just elected last November, has recorded in response to the Lahaina fire and ‘low-energy’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Perhaps the Democratic party apparatus might have sought out a more charismatic candidate for mayor if it had faced stiff opposition.
Voter apathy is also a real problem in Hawaii, as this recent headline from the Honolulu Civil Beat shows:
Hawaii recently became the fourth state to allow for mail-in voting – a process that almost guarantees a certain level of fraud and corruption. The change was made, ostensibly, to encourage higher voter participation. If that was indeed the intent, it has obviously failed since only 41% of registered voters participated in the mid-term election that elevated the incompetent Bissen to the position of Maui Mayor.
It sounds callous to repeat the old saw that ‘people get the government that they deserve’, but the citizens of Hawaii are currently receiving the quality of public service that they voted - or more likely, failed to vote - for.
Solutions
As I write this, I am seeing images of National Guard vehicles blocking the roads leading into Lahaina - a full four weeks after the fire - and hearing reports of aggressive Maui police officers threatening to arrest anyone who approaches the roadblocks. This is not the behavior that one would expect from someone who believes that their primary responsibility is to protect and serve the public. And this, I believe, points to the two lessons that we as Americans need to take away from the aftermath of Lahaina.
The first lesson we need to learn is that local elections matter. Most Americans today focus incessantly about the presidential election and allocate enormous amounts of emotional bandwidth to worrying about who the next president will be. They are egged on by a media that has been captured by powerful corporate interests, and saturates the airwaves with a nonstop flood of useless information about the presidential election as if it were a WWE cage match.
The unfortunate result is that many, if not most, of the voting public cannot recall the name of their state representative, their local sheriff, or a single member of the local school board. We have a crisis of priorities today.
As we have just seen in Hawaii, and in cities around the country, the actions (or in Maui’s case, lack of action) that these local officials take can have a profound impact on the everyday lives of their communities. Yes, of course it’s frustrating to hear that the White House has just asked Congress for another $24 billion of “aid” to Ukraine, while offering only a $700 one-time payment to affected residents of Lahaina. (Assuming that all of Lahaina’s 15,000 surviving residents qualify, that equates to $10.5 million of assistance, or 0.04% of the latest Ukraine aid package).
This is clearly infuriating to anyone who is still capable of independent thought. However, as frustrating as national-level politics might be, its impact pales in comparison to what can happen if, let’s say, the wrong person is at the helm of your city’s emergency management team when a wildfire blows into town.
A majority of eligible voters in Maui and Hawaii made a choice to not participate in elections, and to allow opaque “grassroots voter groups” to push through electoral changes that are almost certainly tailor-made for corruption. Hawaiians are now being confronted with the consequences of their choices, and the burden is on the rest of us to learn from their experience
The second lesson that we can learn from Lahaina is that it is time for Americans to hold our local elected leaders accountable.
Recent polls indicate that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that their quality of life is deteriorating at a rapid rate. Crime, inflation and social upheaval have the public on edge and yet the response from our government officials is at best apathetic and, in the case of Lahaina, almost contemptuous. Yet the sad truth is that anyone who believes a new president is going to single-handedly change the reality of their life and their community is delusional.
Change at the community level cannot be driven from the top-down, but from the bottom-up.
Are you unhappy that your local mayor refuses to meet with your community in person after a local disaster? Vote the bum out, as soon as possible.
Don’t like how your police chief or sheriff is treating you and your fellow residents like children and forbidding you to enter your own property after a month? Remember that when the next election comes around.
Is your governor making weird comments about acquiring your land? Make sure everyone in your community remembers that on election day.
Get out there and be heard. Be active.
Even more importantly, find out whether your state allows for mail-in voting or electronic ballots. You are tolerating the conditions for fraudulent elections if so. If it does, find out who was advocating the change. Who are they? Who provides their funding? You can no longer rely on the corporate media to report on these facts, or for anything of substance.
Luckily a host of new platforms (such as the one I am writing on) are creating a new generation of citizen-journalists who can get the truth out. There is a lot of misinformation out there and it can be difficult to find trusted sources. Unfortunately the days of relying upon Walter Cronkite to deliver the news are gone, and to be honest they were probably never here to begin with. The burden is now on us as individuals to find trusted sources.
We live in a country of 330 million people and our ability to enact change at the national level is, unfortunately, very low. However we do have substantial ability to drive change at the local level, and that ability is directly correlated with the effort that we contribute. Chaos seems to be on the rise in America, and the public must take more of an activist role at the local level if it is to be stopped.
Authors Note: Normally I like to write about crypto and global macro issues, however the rising political turmoil here at home has suddenly made America a very interesting place! I will be writing about this and other relevant issues for awhile. Fill in your email address below if you would like to be added to my mailing list. I never send spam and will never share your info with a third party.