Angry Planet - Fire Made Maui Look Like a War Zone

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Mysterious producer Kevin Knodell comes on to Angry Planet this week to tell us about his recent reporting trip to Maui. A timeline of the firePlaying the blame gameMatthew screws up island namesThe politics of taro farmingYakistanThe Range 12 FireDon’t ask him about the fucking treeOur fiery futureAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Don't ask reporters in Hawaii about the fucking tree. Because we still have a pretty big list of missing people. We're still counting dead bodies. The water system is messed up and we have all this mess to deal with. I don't know. No, we can include this. We can not. It's just a very weird thing. I'm going to put it up at the top. We're going to do it old. We're going to do it old school.

I'm going to put it up. I'm going to put this separate up at the top. And then the title of this is just going to be fuck that tree. Fuck that tree. And then the intro music. And then we'll get into the real episode. People will love it. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years time will be published.

When genocide has been cut out in the, country almost with impunity and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom, people. Freedom has never faith-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a people approach. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Jason is out today, but I'm here with Kevin Nodell,

our mysterious and often in the background producer. He is a reporter for the Honolulu Star Advert. and he just got back from Maui, or he was reporting on the wildfires there. But kind of as a way to get into why we think that's an important thing to talk about on Angry Planet and how Kevin, who is a military reporter, came to be reporting on it and covering it. Kevin, can you tell us, first of all, how are you doing today? I'm tired.

I think it's a misnomer to say that I just got back from Maui. That was now almost two and a half weeks ago that I was on the ground there. But still fresh in my mind. I'm doing okay. I just got back from a wedding. Been in Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years. It's very smoky out here still, though, because of wildfires, which we may get into also. I have not seen Mount Rainier the entire time that I've been here despite a cloudless day when I was looking in its direction.

So you can't escape the fires, essentially. No. Yeah, we'll talk about that. I've covered, you know, the military and conflict quite a bit. But fire has been a recurring theme throughout my career, writing in several places. But I'm sure we'll get to that in short order. So you were supposed to go on vacation when, it was like at the beginning of August, right? Right.

Well, I was supposed to go to California for a week where I was going to go. to be working on a story there slash kind of working remotely before I went on vacation, like real vacation for two weeks immediately following. And it was just a situation where there was something connected to a story that I was already working on happening down in California right before I was set to go on vacation. And I asked my editors, hey, since this is happening, would you object to me just leaving working remote? and doing that because it would just make travel a lot easier. It just lines up perfectly.

But it ended up not working out, lining up as perfectly as I thought it would. And why was that? Well, on the night of August 8th, Tuesday night, I was very much off work, off the clock at that point. And I hadn't been following news on Maui. I think I had maybe heard something about some flare-ups of wildest. fires. But later that night, I get a call from my editor saying, hey, Lahaina is on fire. Like, the town is currently burning down as we speak. And we may need to send you over to Maui pretty shortly. And the next day, it was decided, you know, the next day we're waking up to

just this horrible news of the entire town having burned down. And quickly. And, you know, I'm looking at my phone and seeing all the videos of what had happened. And it was quite a shock to, I was bracing myself because I had heard about it the night before, very late. But seeing it was completely different. And within the next day, I was on the ground reporting. Why are you the one that they called? What is it in your background? that makes this something that you'd have the right perspective and experience to cover?

I'm not I'm not 100% sure. I think it is because I have, you know, crisis experience. And this was a crisis situation. I think it's also because I'm one of the younger staffers. And, you know, it's easier for me to go. I don't have kids. I don't have stuff like that in the way. You know, I think that's kind of why they picked me.

They never told me. But you've also covered this topic extensively in other contexts, right? I have. Yeah, I guess I have covered wildfire quite a bit. Just not so much in Hawaii at that point. Other of my colleagues have also covered wildfire. Somebody had to go and they picked me. I don't want to give myself too much credit on either of that.

And I also don't know how much my editors were thinking about that. It was very much about just getting out there and covering as much ground as we could. But your perspective is interesting here. Something that you had told me earlier, let me see if I can get the quote exactly right, is that wildfires are the natural disaster that most resemble. War. Could you elaborate? Yeah, absolutely. I've thought about that a lot since covering, I think, I think 2015 was the first wildfire I would have covered. That was for wars boring back in the day. Spent some time out there in Okinaw, Washington, covering what was at that point the largest wildfire in Washington in Washington state history.

I think I've got the year right on that. We've had, we've had several more larger, largest wildfires in Washington state history since then. Yeah, I think it was America's at War with Fires, the title of the article. Okay. Yeah, you were hanging out with the Forestry Service and some other people. Oh, no. Or is this a different? Well, that was, I think that's the same year. So I think that was the article before I went out into the field. Got you. I think that was the, I think that was the overview of everything that was. going on because they also called up active duty and like it it was a big thing um but it feels like a footnote now given other things that have happened um but but to bring it back to

it is the thing that most resembles war you know most other natural disasters they just kind of sweep through and and that's it um wildfires are different because wildfires can continue to burn. And they move. They don't stay in one place as they're doing that. Not that hurricanes do either, but you're actively trying to fight it because you can't fight a hurricane. You can fight a fire. You can redirect it and there's a front line. You know, you're moving resources. We now often use aircraft to fight fires. So you have your air crews, you have your ground crews. You're trying to manage your resources, move it around and contain it or redirect it so it doesn't hit critical infrastructure or population centers.

And you can be a hurricane will come through and, you know, it'll come and go. You can be battling one wildfire for days, weeks, or even months, depending on its scale, and depending on if it spreads or breaks apart. And, yeah, it's just, it's where you actually do. battle it. That's why we call it firefighting. And the damage it causes is similar to what a war does, right? Or like a prolonged, or at least like

a bombing campaign or were someone to burn down a city? Yeah, I couldn't help but think about that when I actually saw Lahaina in person. It was difficult getting out there because there were lots of roadblocks

and they really, really were not letting people in. They really didn't want people to come in. They were not really jazzed about journalists getting in there either. A few people were able to sneak into, like, Lahaina Town Center itself early on and get past the roadblocks. Me and the photographer I was working with, we didn't get into the city center, but we did instead to get through the roadblocks as we hitched a ride with one of the aid convoys that was going through the town, not down to Front Street necessarily. but making our way to the rich Carlton where they were kind of collecting aid and redistribing it to people who had lost their homes or anybody else who was struggling. Because even if your home miraculously survived, you didn't have electricity.

And within a few days we found out also the water system was pretty much melted and contaminated and it is unusable there. and also in Maui's upcountry happened. We'll get to this, but there were three fires simultaneously going on on the island when this whole thing started. Why didn't they want journalists in? They just don't want, they didn't want a lot of cameras around. Also, you know, there were bodies in there. There was death. We still don't really know entirely the scale that we're still searching the wreckage.

It's like there's around 400 missing, right? I think it's below that. Last I saw, it was somewhere more like like 340, which is thankfully down from the thousand. It was kind of before that. So it'll be,

I don't know what the final death toll is going to be. Early on when I was on the ground, the official death toll was 36. confirmed, but the numbers that I was hearing from people were closer to 200 plus. I'm sure we can look up right now what the current one is as of this recording. North of 100 as of this recording, I believe, yes. Yes, absolutely north of 100. I think the last I saw was 115.

I'm, you know, I'm on vacation right now, but also trying to follow it to the degree that that I can before I go back and get back to work next week. So can you tell me about what your immediate impressions were, what you saw, what you were thinking and feeling as you enter the town?

Yeah. I'd been to Lahaina before. You know, just a little bit of background on the town itself. It's a very old city. You know, we don't, We don't have a lot of remaining towns in Hawaii that have that kind of old Hawaii architecture.

I mean, you can also argue about like how old it is because a lot of it is kind of from from the whaling era and the plantation era. So it's very, it's very westernized or was very westernized, but but it's old. It's it's wooden architecture. It's not it's not, it's not Wikiki. It's not big towering condos. I mean, there's big towering. resorts, but most of that's north of the town and is out of town by design so that people can go in and enjoy the cute little touristy town. You know, there were some reporting early on

from national and international media. I think it's improved, but, you know, talking about how this popular resort town burned down. But Lahaina is not merely a resort town, one, because lots of local people live there. But it used to be the capital. of the Hawaiian Kingdom. It was where the whaling industry was based. It became a major agricultural hub. You know,

the mission, it's kind of the entire history of Hawaii you can kind of look at in one place and how it's changed. The only thing it's missing is a major military installation. That's, that's kind of the only thing it doesn't have, but it's just got this

really unique history and this unique blend of stuff. And as I was coming down the hill looking at it. And I'd kind of seen a few pictures, but it was just really striking to see how gone

it was. It was just husks of ash. There were a handful of buildings that had survived, and even or impartial, but most of it was just flattened, absolutely burnt to a crisp. I covered, you know,

wildfires before, but this, this reminded me much more of like going through Syria. going through towns that had been destroyed during the ISIS campaign. Though I would even say not to downplay what the suffering of the people of Mosul or Raqa, but Mozul is still there. You know, I saw it, they've rebuilt quite a bit of it. You know, it's still early.

We'll see what the rebuilding process in Lahaina looks like. But the destruction in terms of the physical destruction of this town, was just very hard to fathom and very hard for me to communicate with words. People would say, would call it a war zone. And, you know, that's something that you know I hate that comparison. When we compare things that aren't war to war, wholly appropriate to describe this place as looking like a war zone, because I can't think of anything else to compare it to. Yeah, you sent some pictures to the group chat.

I think they were taken by with your phone just from like the, is it like out of the side of a car as you guys were going down the road? One out of a car and then one out of the truck as we were going back after the aid had been delivered. Yeah, just nothingness. It was kind of wild. This fire just completely swallowed up this entire town. How do you, how did they fight this? How do you fight this?

How do you fight a fire like this? What is the mechanism by which you do that? So, all right, there's still some debate about what all went wrong. And what we'll get into that, like right now. There were some unique circumstances. I won't say, I won't say that nobody could have seen any of this coming because there were, this is the first time. I was going to say there's been more wildfires in the area in the past few years,

right? Right. And Lahaina had actually been specifically noted by emergency planners at being at very high risk of exactly this happening. This had been discussed as something that

needed to be looked at. But just kind of a play-by-play of how this went down because I think that's helpful. This started as Hurricane Dora was moving south of Hawaii. You know, we're in the Pacific.

We don't get hit by hurricanes very much. The last major one that hit was Hurricane and Niki, which did quite a bit of damage. But, you know, usually during this time of year, we get high alert, but, you know, a lot of times they just kind of slingshot around us and we watch and they miss. Because we're, as an island chain,

we're kind of a small target, honestly. for hurricanes. But when Hurricane Dora went south, we didn't get hit by the rain or the storm itself, but we got the wind. So we had this very, very strong wind, just kind of howling through the islands. I remember being woken up by it

like very, very early in the morning, like in the pitch black and just hearing, I could hear all the trees around where I live, kind of like swinging around and, you know, it, it was very intense went. Now, what that meant on Maui, and now there's going to be some lawsuits and we're going to find out what really happened here. But on Maui, where there had been drought conditions, and there have been drought conditions throughout the island at, I believe it was 645, a.m. It was reported that a fire had kind of broken out

around Lahaina, pretty kind of, you know, nearby on one of the roads. I think it was Lahaina Luna Road. But, you know, they respond to that fire and there's a few fires going on on the island because of these very dry conditions. And it's been very much widely cited that down power lines probably played a role in a lot. of this. And we'll get into that in a second about,

because there's going to be a interesting aftermath as a lot of finger pointing as to what really happened. But by about 9 a.m. Maui Fire Department declares the Lahaina Wildfire to be 100% contained at that point. And then as a result of that, you know, they didn't say that it was out. They said it was contained.

though in their announcement that it was put out, they warned that the high winds that they were experiencing were still going to be a danger and that people should still be vigilant. But since they felt that that fire had been contained, they started moving more resources to the upcountry fire, which was a larger fire at that point, I think it should be understood. It's up in the hills. It's harder to get resources up there.

A lot of logistics to make that happen. And one of the challenges that they were also having is because the hurricane was still passing through and the wind was still very high, they weren't able to use helicopters and weren't able to use their air assets. So firefighters were fighting these fires only on the ground and they were doing it in these very dry conditions with high wind that was making the fire move faster than it would normally move. this incredible mixture of of circumstances that make this more difficult than a fire would usually beat a fight. Throughout the morning

they're fighting for hours, really focusing on the upcountry fire and then they kind of start telling people in the area that they should really think about getting out of the area if they have the ability to move. Then I think it at about 3.40 p.m., they say the Lahaina fire escaped containment and started moving toward

Lahaina again, with, again, these very high winds, these very dry conditions, and they start trying to kind of recollect. We now have accounts of firefighters who are trying to battle the fire and their hydrants going dry, of them running out of water. We know that, a lot of the pipes because of the heat and because of various things and damage throughout the town as it spread. The water system is lost pressure and a lot of the water is now, the water is considered contaminated. It's not considered clean. So nobody is drinking with it and they've told people not to bathe with it until they can figure out how to fix all of that. And yeah, the fire just kind of spread.

It just continued to, it went into the town. And like I said, it's this old town. It's not so much like the other ones. So much of it is made of wood and it's kind of packed together. Like, think of kind of like an old West town, like kind of like deadwood, but you know, with much more, but with much more colorful painted, you know, facades. But we're talking like stuff that's been retrofitted and upgraded over the years. Some of the stuff is really, really old. and old, beautiful wooden buildings, but now that a fire is coming through, it's exactly the conditions that help something like this spread.

But, yeah, as it collects fire, it gets hot enough and it's moving fast enough that it's also melting steel. Concrete buildings are starting to collapse around the heat. It's just, it's this incredible literal firestorm that is just moving, just moving. moving through the town. And people start trying to flee. You can see, I'm sure by now people have seen the pictures of the cars on the road that were just scorched. People abandoned their cars. Some people were not able to abandon the cars.

We've found bodies and some of those cards. That's, yeah, that's kind of my summary of what happened. There's more specific things about the response that we can get into, but that's kind of how the fires spread. And also, I want to stress, too, that within the following days, the upcountry fire was still a fire that they had to fight. I've seen some criticism that, you know, they devoted too much resources to the upcountry fire when Lahaina was the real danger. you know, we'll see what happens, you know, in these investigations. But the upcountry fire was still a fire when I was there and has continued to be an issue. And flare-ups have continued to be an issue.

And there was recently another evacuation even this week from another area because of another fire. So like these dry conditions are, this is not a thing that happened. This is a thing that is happening. Like 342, they closed. they close that road down between the highway of the bypass and then but two hours later we have video of Main Street burning down or the the front like the front street burning down and like 30 minutes after that people fleeing the town into the ocean itself trying to get away from the fire right I didn't I didn't yeah a lot of people did seek shelter in the ocean

Coast Guard and other various vessels have picked them up. It's been kind of a debate right now about how many people may or may not have died in the ocean. There just aren't really good numbers. I talk to people who swear they saw bodies floating. There are a lot of officials who say, you know, like, no, there were not a lot of dead people in the water. I don't really know what to make of that right now. But I want to acknowledge that both of those things are positions that people have taken. So what is the, now that we kind of know like a timeline of events for the immediate fire,

like what does it look like to battle this thing? Didn't sound like it was going super well. Obviously, there's a lot of infrastructure problems contributing to this. Do we want to talk about that first? Actually, can you tell me about like down to power lines? and a complete loss of water on the island of Hawaii? Yeah. Well, not the islands of Hawaii.

Sorry, yeah. That's okay. That's okay. I'm sure you get that all the time. Yeah, I do. Now, no, we all get to learn a little bit more about the geography of the Hawaii islands. But no, this is good. We get, we get to learn more.

People should, should know. Yeah, I mean, we're still. understanding how some of this happens. But, and yeah, now, the Maui County has now launched a lawsuit against Hawaiian Electric, saying that, you know, this was caused by the down power lines. And though now, they have, they have responded by saying they will be forced to go to court and prove that Maui County is actually the most responsible and that they are not, And we're going to see how that goes. You know, we'll talk, I think, probably right now about how, you know, both, there's going to be so much blame to go around. You know, the head of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, Herman Endaya, was kind of, you know, not visible for several days.

And then he went at a press conference and they asked him why the alarm sirens weren't sounded. And if he has any regrets, and he said no. And he resigned the next day for health reasons. We'll see what people ultimately decide that, you know, there's several investigations going on right now to see what they ultimately decide about Enda's decision there. His explanation, I'll say, is not the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but it certainly didn't go over well. Maui has a very comprehensive, you know, warning system. It is called the all-hazard siren systems. So on the website it says that it is for tsunamis, for hurricanes, for wildfires.

It said that it is for all these sorts of things. But his explanation, and I do understand this because this is sort of true, that they're almost exclusively used for tsunamis. And all the public education is about tsunamis. and he said that if people had heard the siren, they would have responded as if there was a tsunami and they would have moved Malka. So in Hawaiian, we use the words Makai and Malka, because sometimes north and south isn't as helpful.

Mackay means toward the sea and Malka means toward the center of the island. The fire was coming from Malka. So his argument is if people had heard sirens, they would have moved toward the fire. Now, the people who still say that it should have been sounded was most people didn't, so many people didn't get the cell phone notice, so many people didn't get anything. And also, if people had woken up, had they woken up,

they would have seen the fire pretty, they would have known what was going on pretty quickly, and they would have figured it out, or they would have gone on the street and people would have told them where to go. Because one of the problems is, as it moved into the town, at night, there were people who were asleep and were woken up to the sounds or by the smell of smoke.

They just had no idea what had been going on. So a lot of systems clearly failed. I'm not in a position to say whose fault it is because I'm A, not a commentator, but I also really just don't know right now. There's so much here.

Clearly a lot of things went wrong. One thing I will say about the down power lines. So what I saw most recently is that Hawaiian Electric is saying they're admitting that the fire that morning was caused by a down fire, like a down power line. But they're saying that the fire that destroyed Lahaina was actually not even that fire and was perhaps a completely different fire that was started in a completely different way. I'm very curious to see the documentation on that. Could be. I don't know. But I'll tell you what I do know and what I did see when I went upcountry.

I saw a downed power line. I saw all the wires tangled in the branches. And I also saw a section of power line next to a downed pole where it was entangled with a bunch of branches and it looked like the wire itself had been charred. I'm not an expert, but if you were to ask me, I would say that that was probably the point of origin of that particular fire. Stress that I don't know that for a fact, we'll learn more. But what I do also is I talk to neighbors and they heard a loud crash, then saw smoke, then saw fire. I can't say for sure what all that means, but I can't say. suggest what I think it means.

And I've got pictures of it and people can judge for themselves. But I would also urge people to wait for the formal investigation of all this to be concluded because, you know, this is my educated observation, but not not a formal conclusion. Is there a rush to assign blame right now? Absolutely. You're dancing around this so carefully. like you still want to contribute to what is a horrible problem. Right. No, well, I mean, you know, I got to be, I got to be careful.

You know, I'm a reporter. You know, I've got my own take on things. But truly, I don't know what to make of some of the things. Like another thing that happened, and I think this is instructive for kind of how things have gone. And also how things may go in this conversation as it moves forward is the West Maui Land Company. send a letter to the state saying that one of the water managers stopped them from being able to

divert water as the flames were coming. What kind of supposedly happened was that he told them, you know, you need to get permission from the upstream users, which was I think it was from a like a native Hawaiian-owned tarot farm

upstream. Now, this comes into some really thorny things about the history of Hawaii. Forgive my ignorance. What's tarot? Tarot is kind of, it's like a potato, but it's not a potato. It's something that's been grown in Hawaii for a long time. A lovely native yam. Yeah. Yeah. It's crushed up sometimes to make poise, which I, you know, I'm not sure how best to describe that. It's a very Hawaii thing anyway. And they're grown in these kind of watery, not quite like a patty, but, you know, it's just envisioned just kind of a nice, like, watery little. They're pleasant places to visit. It's nice.

And, you know, and you can make really good, you can make really good hash browns out of taro. That's what I like making with it. But you can make all manner of things from taro. I'm very pro tarot personally. Um, but. Sorry. Is it like, oh,

sure. Compare it to sweet potato. Is it like similar to sweep it? Like, what are we talking here? No, it's, it's,

it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot harder. Okay. So more like a normal, like a typical russet potato.

But like, it, like, firmer than a potato. Even firmer than a potato. Okay. Yeah. Um, I, I'm comparing it because it's,

it's definitely in the same like, category of, but it doesn't, it, It's, okay, we can spend a long time. Look, look up tarot, look up tarot farming. It's an interesting thing and there's a lot of interesting things about in Hawaii. But what I was bringing it to, because this is kind of where that becomes an issue is this issue of water rights and who gets to control the water.

Because this goes back to, you know, that was a traditional crop. But the sugar plantations ended up, ended up taking a lot of the water away from tarot farmers and away from that. that sort of thing to really focus irrigation on their crops. And private land, because the Maui land company, you know, it manages a lot of water resources for people, but it's a private entity. It's not a public utility. So there's there's a lot of thorny history here about that. And there have been some new measures passed about making sure that people don't just get water redirected from them. whenever people want.

So, you know, they write this letter saying that this happened, and they by name mention, you know, the guy who they think is responsible. The guy, and the guy has been reassigned by the state. He hasn't been fired, but he's been reassigned. And now there's actually a lawsuit to have him reinstated at that position. Groups like the Sierra Club and some of the other environmental groups and Native Hawaiian groups have said, you know, this seems like, the Maui Land Company is

exploiting a tragedy to blame this guy for, you know, a lack of water because they don't like the new water policies. And it seems like they're trying to blame these water policies on the fire when that's not necessarily what happened.

Because I don't believe that that company actually manages the water that would have gone in and out of the hydrants. Like, you know, that was kind of one of the things like, oh, well, you know, there wasn't enough water available. it sounds more like what happened is, you know, the pipes. Now I say it sounds more like that. We don't know.

You know, I have to caveat a lot of this stuff. We're going to continue learning more. And I don't take a position on who was on the right or wrong here because I don't think there's enough information. I don't know West Maui Land Company is going to make their case. The state's going to make their case. the people who have made the lawsuit to reinstate that guy are going to make their case. We're going to learn more stuff. There's a lot of bureaucratic mess that goes with all of this.

Right. Right. But I bring that up to, A, illustrate that, but also to illustrate the historical baggage that's here. Because that that is a big thing. So something that we can say, and this is something that I can stay with confidence, is that a big problem that was part of this is the invasive grass, that is a by-profile. of the sugar plantations that came to dominate, you know, the islands and reshape what they look like. Because Maui, in Lahaina in particular, used to have, this used to be a wetland. You know, these were wetlands, and that's also why Tara was very popular out there because, you know, people used the water. People used the land. But it looks very different than it did all those years ago.

And if anybody doubts this, like, you know, you can read, like, first of all, there's the oral history of the Hawaiian people who tell you what it looks like. But you can read the early contact, you know, like Captain Vancouver, what the Brits saw, like British Royal Navy. When they first came there, they saw it and they wrote about it. And they wrote about Lahaina is having, like, being lush, being watery and being this very great. very full of water area. They did not describe it as brushlands that would have

easily caught fire necessarily. It's guinea grass, I think, is one of the things that's being blamed. One of the many things that's being blamed, which is like a, just like I think African Yemen, pretty dry grass that easily catches fire.

It's my, in my limited understanding. Okay, so that's kind of, I think that's good background for like the politics and the actual fire itself. What, like, what do you do? So what do you do in this situation if you are a firefighter and you have no water or you have limited water or the complete lack of water pressure and this thing is spreading around? Like, what are you to, what do you do to fight this? at a certain point you have to cut your losses in flee which is what a lot of them were in Lahaina at least they were forced to do once they found out

that they didn't have it they also lost some fire engines in the fire you know it it and you know the a lot of the firefighters that were there they you know they were from the Lahaina you know engine a lot of them lost their homes too you know they they were nobody should suggest they were not invested in putting out that fire because they were

the guys on the ground were 100% invested in fighting that fire and they they had everything to lose just like everyone else and a lot of them have they they've lost the same things and it's been you know i i didn't talk to many of the firefighters but some of you know some of my colleagues in broadcast media we've also colleagues at the paper we've we've written about lots of coverage in Hawaii media about what it was like to fight those fires from the firefighters. But you can tell it's emotionally difficult for them, not only to have lost that, but to have not been able to fight it, to have pointed the hose at it and had nothing come out and to just be completely powerless in the face of something so massive. Well, one thing I will say, this wasn't from a firefighter. This was one of the people who, escaped, told

Cindy, the photographer that I was working with on the ground that, you know, as he was fleeing, that not only the heat, but the sound of this massive fire. He said that it was like running from a dragon. Jesus. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break.

We'll be right back after this. All right, angry planet listeners, welcome back. We're on with Kevin Nodell. All right, so kind of as you tease the beginning of this conversation, you're in the Pacific Northwest, you're on vacation, but you have not escaped wildfires. The smoke from one of them is wafting in, making your life very lovely.

It sure seems like there's been a lot of fires lately, Kevin. Yeah. And why ever would that be? Yeah, you know, it's like I said earlier, it's been, it's been something I've worked on a bunch. It wasn't necessarily something I sought, but it's found me. whether it be covering various military bases or in Iraq and Syria. And it's out there was a little bit sometimes ambiguous, whether it was a wildfire or whether it was a fire set by ISIS.

ISIS took credit for some of that. So I think there was intentional burning of crops. There was that sort of stuff. But I think, and you know, this is where we get into the thing that becomes so politically charged, unfortunately. you know, whether it's there, whether it's anywhere else, the common thread in a lot of these places, whether there's invasive species or not, is more drought, more heat, and less water, you know. It's, there's a thing that we're seeing in a lot of places. There's wildfires right now in Louisiana. There's wildfires across Europe, obviously up in Canada.

that's where a lot of the smoke I'm getting right now is from, but also some smoke. I was told from Spokane. I haven't been following all the wildfires. It's hard to keep track of all of these. It's becoming a bigger issue. It's ubiquitous. They're a part of our life now.

I mean, they've always been kind of living, growing up in the American West, it was always something that was there. but it's not, it's different than it was. How is it different than it was? Is it more frequent, more intense? Both. You know, fire is, and you have to remember that, you know, fire is a phenomenon. It's in its own way, kind of natural.

Prairies, the western forests, lightning strikes can start a fire. Throughout the history of this, of the region that I'm in right now, you know, like Hawaii a little bit different. Though I don't think that we can say that there's never anything natural out there. You know, fire is just a thing that exists. Fire is neither good nor bad. It is not evil. It doesn't have any, it is not malicious.

Even though I compared it to war because it moves and it is more like any other natural disaster, like a war. You have an enemy. But it is not a malicious thing that does not seek to destroy anything in particular. particular. I think something, every summer when I was growing up, my family used to go to the Walla Mountains in eastern Oregon, and we would pass by a mountain range called the Blue Mountains. And I actually looked this up to confirm whether this is true. I can't confirm one way or the other, but, you know, oral history is funny this way, so I'm just going to tell people this with the caveat that maybe this isn't true. But I was always told that this was true. I was told that they were called

the blue mountains because smoke made them look blue, and that's what the indigenous people called them, that smoked from around the area. And I've been thinking about this because eastern Oregon, any time I went out there, the air was always just a little bit smoky. And it was actually a smell that I came to associate with, you know, not bad memories necessarily. You know, people would be barbecuing out there or there would be bonfires or, you know, chimney smoke, you know, there was always just a little bit of smoke in the air and controlled burns in some of the farms, you know, fire can be good for the soil, it revitalizes the soil, it adds nutrients, it fire is just part of the West. It's not inherently good or bad, but there's just a lot more

smoke right now. A lot more fire. I think the Paradise Fire in California was a big wake-up call. The 2018 fire that also burned down in a town, kind of similar to Lahaina, but, you know, Lahaina is now very much eclipsed it, though there are similar debates around that because that one was caused by down fire lines and, you know, led to a massive lawsuit, which I think is something that Hawaiian Electric is really looking at. Everybody's really kind of looking to that fire to kind of look at what the aftermath of this one might look like.

But, you know, like I said, there's also things about it that are not the same. There were no taro farms around there. So it's going to be different and it's going to be, it's going to have its own Hawaii. aspect to it. But fire is becoming a much more prevalent thing all around the world, and it's going to more and more disrupt our infrastructure and disrupt our lives. One might say the climate is changing. One might say that the climate is changing. There's a story I did back in 2019 that I've been kind of revisiting periodically and and especially have been thinking about after what I saw in Maui.

I don't know if everybody remembers when the Trump administration at the time wanted to redirect a lot of defense funding to fund the border wall as part of an emergency move to block off the border. I was asked by crosscut, which is a non-profit news organization out in Seattle-based out in Washington State, to look at programs that were on the cutting block out here. And I was looking at a few of them, you know, and various other reporters reported on what projects were. but one that I looked out at the Yakima Training Center. They had two.

One was a vehicle maintenance facility that they were going to lose out on, and the other one was upgrades to their facility's fire department. And I end up calling the facility, and weirdly enough, I actually just got like the commander of the facility on the line because I don't, small facility, they didn't really have a lot of resources. At the time, I didn't, he, when, when, when, when, when I asked for his name at the end of the conversation, he told me, like, oh, I'm just the guy who runs the entire thing.

But what he told me, you know, I asked, you know, if these were going to be problems for the base. And he said, yeah, especially the fire department. And I was expecting to say the maintenance facility. And I said, okay, you know, why is that? and for people who are not familiar with the Yakima Training Center or the Yakima area, also kind of a dry, deserty area, but like a lot of brush, you know, and surrounded by a lot of ranches and that kind of thing. Soldiers who train there call it Yakistan, and it was, you know, a very, very well-used training area during the Guad years

because it very much resembled the sorts of terrain that they would be going to. It looks a lot like Kandahar. But what the commander told me was, you know, we have perhaps more training-related fires than any other facility that the U.S. military has. That's what he said. I don't know if that's true. But I actually asked a few other people, and they said, yeah, that sounds about right just because of what they have out there. And it was very important for them that they be able to put out fires. and also that their fire department be able to pitch in in neighboring firefighters.

You know, like firefighting resources get spread so thin and everybody needs to pitch in. They had actually had a massive fire that had started on that range called the Range 12 fire. It started out as a result of training, and it spread and jumped, jumped the training area, jump the highway, and started burning down actual farmland. It led to the army being sued

to tune of quite a bit by some of the neighboring ranchers and farmers. And that was a major concern for him, both because, you know, it's bad to have that sort of thing happen. You don't want to burn down your neighbor's stuff.

You know, it's, you don't want to burn critical farmland and infrastructure in the area. But yeah, he also said, you know, any time we even have like a spark, we really got to stop training here. And if we don't have the ability to stop that, you know, it disrupts military readiness, but also fires here. And whether it's training related or not, because there are non-training related things.

It could be a lightning bolt. It could be just sometimes things just get really hot and things just burn. And he said, you know, we need that. We need to have the resources to be able to do that correctly. And if we don't, then this training area becomes borderline not usable for us. And the reason I bring that up is to bring up that, you know, this is stuff that is a national security issue. It really is. Or a global security issue, really, because this is happening all around the globe.

You know, I think when we talk about climate stuff, and historically when we've talked about this or talked about pollution or talked about issues like this, you know, it's always been, you know, like save the whales, which doesn't resonate for a lot of people because they don't see whales that often. They're just not attached. Like, oh, save the polar bears. They're cute and that upset people for a while, but then they kind of lose track of that. Save this random bird somewhere that I've never heard of and don't care about. You know, that's so much of what drives these conversations. But I think what we're starting to see now is that it's not just coming for that stuff. You know, it starts with burning down the forests that people have wanted to hike in.

And, you know, that's very sad. But then it's starting to come for the farms that grow our food. And now it's burning down the towns, people's homes and the people in them. They're coming for the places and the people that we love, not just for animals or stuff like that. It's starting to really, really come here now. One thing that was really interesting to me about actually the response of so many people, one of their first questions was like, is the Banyan tree okay? And for people who don't know, so like there's a very large, very beautiful, big tree. in Lahaina. And I'm not even going to say was because it might actually, it was outwardly charred, you know, blackens, but there's signs that it might actually still be alive. And I don't want to discount this entirely because, you know, we've done some local coverage of it. And, you know, there are some people who said, like, you know, this would be, if it's alive, it would be a powerful symbol for this town if it is able to be rebuilt.

That being said, if you're listening to this, and if you're somebody who listened and you ask me about it, I'm not mad at you individually, but don't ask me about the fucking tree. Don't ask reporters in Hawaii about the fucking tree. Because we still have a pretty big list of missing people. We're still counting dead bodies. The water system is messed up,

and we have all this mess to deal with. it's a lot less important than this tree, which I have to also point out is not a native tree. You know, it was planted. It, you know, it's part of like the whole settler experience. You know, I mean, I'm a settler too, whatever. I'm not, I'm not anti all of that. You know, there's there's a lot of history that was lost, you know, like this. But we really need to be thinking about people right now and also about like repairing the land itself. not this one tree. And it is,

it is, it has, it has, it has, it has, it has been shocking to me, how people just seem to have blurted out that particular one thing. And like,

that was an area of concern. It's the one thing they know about the, it's one thing they know about the place, right? Like, that's, I guess, which is weird, because like,

I, I, I've been to Le Hina and, like, that, that was not one of the things that I, that stuck out to me. I mean,

I guess I kind of remember it, but like, that just was not that big a thing. We have lots of banion trees on also on Hawaii Island and a bunch of them on on Oahu. There's some banion trees near where I live. They're also

big and impressive too. You know, that's just kind of my thought on this, you know? I'm not going to go so far as to say, fuck the tree. I mean, I think I already did say that. You did. You did basically. I did say that. I hope the tree is okay. I hope that it lives. I do.

But it's just, it is not top of of concerns and for a lot of people on Maui it is definitely not a top concern. There's some arborists out there like there are some local people from the area who are monitoring it, you know, some people out there

who are attached to the tree, but even I think they would say that like you know, they they're doing that because that's a specialty of theirs. I think they would not think that it's one of the top priorities in terms of Lahaina's future or like figuring out what happened.

the tree is low on the priority that I don't know we can include this we cannot it's just I'm including it now I'm going to put it up at the top we're going to do it old school

I'm going to put it up I'm going to put this separate up at the top and then the title of this is just going to be fuck that tree fuck that tree and then the intro music and then we'll get into the real episode people will love it

yeah oh yeah that'll make me very popular. But yeah, everybody, yeah, don't waste water. You know, be mindful where you throw your cigarettes.

Don't start fires. We've got enough of them. Kevin Nodell, thank you so much for coming on. Glad to be here. I guess. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet, is me, Matthew Galtz,

Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. thank you to the subscribers. You go to AngryPlanetpod.com or AngryPenet.substack.com and kick us $9 a month to keep us going. I know August was a little bit light. It's a little bit hard to get guests in August because everyone's on vacation.

We are gearing back up into the normal swing of things here. We have some great episodes of plans, some other special stuff coming for you. Again, at Angry Clinicpod.com or AngryPinnett.com or AngryPinnett.com. $9 a month gets you commercial-free versions of all the mainline episodes and bonus episodes. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

Stay safe until then.