This NPR article shows the banyan tree still standing while surrounded by fire destroyed buildings. They say it is scorched. Hopefully it will continue to live.
Scorched by Maui wildfire, historic Lahaina banyan tree appears still standing
Okay, when you started posting again the content was so distinctive I recognized it as being the same person but didn’t even notice that you were doing under a different name from before.
Death toll now reported to be 55, with fears that it could increase significantly.
I know there are many reasons something like this can happen. As someone posted above, downed power lines throwing sparks is one possibility. But somewhere in the back of my mind is always the sneaking suspicion that it was some idiot carelessly throwing a cigarette butt out of the car window.
Steve here. Wife and I live on Oahu, on vacation now. We have a number of family and friends on Maui. Most near the Kahului airport away from the fire. They all checked in on the facebook group page. There maybe some friends of friends in the area.
The hurricane was some 500 miles south. A large high pressure area is north. Maui was in the wind tunnel driven by the two systems. Picture a counter clockwise flow from the hurricane and a giant clockwise flow from the high meeting like two grinding wheels over Maui.
One thing to be investigated in the aftermath is a failure of the all-disaster siren warning system. Most often heard as a tsunami alert but also for any other emergency. Power and communication failures driven by wind damage even before the firestorm is a possible cause. Cellular and other wireless services (911, …) failed early.
They’re not focusing on this in the news but they said they didn’t get the traditional alerts in a timely manner but people got alerts on their phones. So that means the phone towers were in place.
Many fatalities–this is from WaPo today:
The deadliest U.S. wildfires
Deaths in each fire
A bar chart showing the 10 deadliest wildfires in U.S. history. The 2023 Lahaina fire is the seventh-deadliest, with 55 dead as of August 11. The top 5 deadliest fires are all from 1910 or earlier.
02004006008001,000
Peshtigo, 1871
1,152
Cloquet, 1918
453
Hinckley, 1894
418
Thumb, 1881
282
Great Fire, 1910
87
Camp, 2018
85
Lahaina, 2023
80
Yacolt, 1902
38
Griffith Park, 1933
29
Oakland Hills, 1991
25
Firestorm At Peshtigo by Denise Gess and William Lutz is an excellent book about that horrifying fire.
A potential (non life threatening) danger I recently saw pointed out: is there any way to prevent some billionaire from swooping in, buying all the land on the cheap, and turning Lahaina into a private playground estate or charging massive rents or whatever?
People not selling?
Well there was already a billionaire (who bought up a 1000 acres of land) handing out blankets and other essentials to the survivors. So, no. But there’s also nothing stopping a billionaire from handing out free cars.
It’s moved up to 5th and largest in the last 100 years:
Maui has very expensive housing with a median home sales price of $1.2 million and an average sales price of $1.7 million:
Typically, a desert receives less than 10 inches of rain a year, whereas a semi-desert receives 10-20 inches. Some people use the terms arid and semi-arid instead.
Lahaina is basically a slightly drier Los Angeles.
But there’s no Owens Valley to steal water from.
Boy, the officials’ actions seem awfully poor. Will be interesting to eventually hear who decided it was unnecessary to sound the sirens.
I’m familiar. We endured smoke from a wind fueled fire that was able to jump the Columbia river because of the wind-driven embers.
Some people in some places got alerts at some time. There were some initial small fires that were extinguished in the morning. People in Lahaina got alerts about those on cell phones. The big fires started later in the afternoon. By then everything was down. Police were driving around trying to alert people.
Here’s an excellent timeline with photos and video. It’s a gift link, so no paywall.
There’s no question to me after seeing that that it started from downed power lines. They’re everywhere in the videos. Really terrifying narratives.
I’m so sad for this place where I just was a few weeks ago. I felt such a connection to it, I knew I wanted to keep coming back. And I can’t help but picture if this had happened while I was there, with my spouse and two ten-year-olds. It makes my blood run cold.
I also read yesterday that more than 1,000 people are missing. So this fire is likely going to keep moving up the list of deadliest.
Strange that Cloquet and Hinckley, only 50 miles away from each other, had such devastating fires so close together.
According to press reports, the head of Hawaii Emergency Management indicated none of the conventional emergency warning sirens in Maui (which would just be a signal to people to tune in on the radio or their mobiles to find out what’s the problem and what to do) sounded at any point.
None needed, when parts of your island receive more than 20 ft of rain per year.