The Daily Signal - Hawaii Locals 'Universally Angry' About Federal Response to Maui Wildfires

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

The town of Lahaina, Hawaii, looks like it's been "bombed," The Daily Signal's Tony Kinnett says after visiting fire-devastated areas on the island of Maui.  Kinnett, investigative columnist for The Daily Signal, spent five days on the ground in Lahaina and elsewhere on Maui. Where government officials have failed, he says, locals have stepped up to serve the needs of the community.  "The locals are universally angry at the federal response," Kinnett said, and "it's very common for individuals to have already given thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars out of their bank accounts to complete strangers in order to help compensate them for this incredible loss." Kinnett joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss what is known about how the devastating wildfires started on Maui, residents' frustration with government officials' response, and how President Joe Biden was received Monday on the island.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today is Thursday, August 24th, and this is the Daily Sinal Podcast. I'm Virginia Allen. At least 115 people have died from the wildfires in Maui, and hundreds are still missing. Could the Lahaina fire have been prevented and did the government respond to the fire correctly? The Daily Signal's investigative columnist Tony Kinnett just returned from spending quite a number of days on the ground in Hawaii and the city of Lahaina talking to locals to answer those questions. Tony, welcome back to the mainland. It's good to be home. Certainly what we saw there on the ground was incredible. I have never seen a community rally around support for those who have been affected by these wildfires quite like I have seen on the island of Maui. Wow. So talk us through what it does look like right now in Lahaina.

Lahaina, of course, is located on the island of Maui. The population is around 13,000. Describe what this community physically looks like right now. So the island of Maui actually kind of looks like a kind of a fish if the head of the fish is pointed east. And Lahaina is on that smaller tail side shape of the island on the west side. And that entire section of the island has been scorched really badly by these wildfires. dry on the island right now and the town of Lahaina which is a very densely packed town on that western edge is scorched all through the entire town it's blackened a lot of buildings are burned all the

way down to the concrete foundations and aluminum siding which is warped heavily there were several boats that were burned in the harbor because the fire was being pushed by these 80 mile an hour wind gusts that were streaming down the mountain like a stampede of horses and it lifted the fire over roads. It was incredibly hot. People were dying from heat exposure before they died from the flames. And it's killed probably at this point. I've heard from several conflicting sources.

So bear with me as far as the, maybe the softness of this numerical estimate, but it could be a death total of anywhere between 700 and 1,200 people at this point. The government on Maui has been incredibly restrictive. in the information that they release. They're hiding their personnel information officer. That's the officer who talks to the media away from the media.

We traveled all over the island to several different places. It was rumored they would be. We were not allowed to go to the police station. We never got in touch with the PIO. The Maui mayor is refusing to tell people how many children have died. And the reason that's important is children were sent home early the day that the fires swept through the town. and while parents were still at work. So it means that there is a high likelihood

that there is a large number of children, school-aged children that perished in these horrible wildfires. And it has obliterated this town. There's no way that I can describe it to you other than that it looks like war footage. It looks like the town has been bombed. And the National Guard is basically reduced to guarding checkpoints, preventing people

from getting into these areas is because the cadaver dogs, which are the dogs that are supposed to sniff out and locate bodies and likely points of death are still searching the area because not all bodies have been accounted for. I mean, it's just incredibly, you just don't have words for that to think that we have, obviously, the confirmed numbers, but with that, you know, at least 800 people missing, of course, you hope and pray that they're found alive. but every day that passes, I know that that hope dwindles.

As you were traveling the island and trying to find officials to talk to, trying to find those individuals who are supposed to be overseeing, how the island responds to catastrophe, talk through some of the interactions that you had and also some of the interactions you were having with locals. What are they saying about the government's response? Well, first of all, the locals are universally angry at the federal response.

I have not talked to one local on the ground in Maui who was pleased with the federal response. There were a few who were kind of reserving their judgment, kind of waiting to see what would be revealed near the end, but the vast majority heaped quite a bit of scorn on the federal government and the requests for assistance from Governor Green. There were a lot of questions as to whether Pearl Harbor and the U.S. Pacific Fleet could have provided any assistance

while boats were on fire in the harbor. And the reason that's brought up is because ever since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there have been a number of fireboats and emergency craft stationed actively around Pearl Harbor, which you can see the island Pearl Harbor is stationed on from Maui. So it's a lot of struggling there for people. The most common response is a sense of pride in the local community on Maui. It's very common for individuals to have already. given thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars out of their bank accounts to complete strangers

in order to help them compensate for this incredible loss. Rumors are not exactly swirling and circulating as you might expect they are on the island because people are so focused on the day-to-day work that is if you're in Lahaina trying to aid in the recovery and the safety operations there and the supply runs, which are still mainly held by the locals. And then number two, if they're not in Lahaina, their time is mostly spent fretting over the complete lack of tourism. Of course, Jason Mamoa, a major celebrity, and then, of course, Governor Josh Green immediately after the fires happened, got on air and told everyone not to come to Maui to cancel their vacation plans, and that's what people did.

And that may have doomed hundreds, if not thousands of businesses on Maui to closure and bankruptcy. And it is a horrible, horrible thing. Actually, I've told my wife that we're probably going to be redoing our honeymoon as soon as possible in Maui just so that we can go and provide a little bit of business to those local businesses because that's the story that's not being reported. I mean, the island is barren in some parts that is supposed to be a flourishing tourist community, getting ready to go into peak season for tourism in that region, which is September and October. Well, Tony, I really appreciated that in your reporting because that's something that hasn't really been reported that while, Of course, Lahaina is so devastated that the rest of Maui stands to be devastated if tourism comes to a standstill. Explain how interconnected businesses are on Maui.

So there are really only two major industries that exist at all on Maui. Number one would be agriculture, which really doesn't exist anymore. For a long time after the late 1800s, there was sugarcane plantations on the island. And after the sugar markets crashed and there became new and more efficient ways to make sugar, as well as the fructose, corn syrup markets and things like that, sugar became less valuable. A lot of those industries shut down. So industry owners from Canada, venture capitalists from Canada, have recently started planting automatic citrus farms. It's kind of the next era in citrus farming, but they're not really sure how much that money is going to flow into the island or if it's just going to be a mostly export focused market,

which means the only other industry left is tourism. Tourism fuels every single business on that island. As the owner of Smoke Daddy's Barbecue Shop told us, and he's a restaurant owner that's been featured on Guy Fierry's, diners, drive-ins, and dives. He said, if I don't get customers to eat at the restaurant, then I can't pay the guy to fix my air conditioner. If the guy to fix my air conditioner can't get paid,

then he can't pay someone to come fix his roof. he can't pay someone to watch his kids. And so the entire economy of Maui is very dependent on tourism. By the way, so was the taxation from the government. We were also told by a former economics professor from Berkeley who retired to the island that the county government, the state government, and even to a degree, some of the federal government's tourism expenses are competing to see how much they can scrape off the top in like lodging taxes and things like that. So it's a very horrible situation that's going on there. Unfortunately, a lot of the social media rumors, a lot of the influencers that are on the island. There was one situation in which apparently there was some young lady who was an influencer who was out taking photos in her bikini telling people not to come to the island, who was approached by islanders later and basically told, get out of here, if you know what's good for you. Don't ever tell people that again. That's like, wow.

Yeah, yeah. That's how passionate people are about making sure that people. people keep coming to Maui instead of being scared off by those who are posturing for social media attention. So the message is go to Maui, if you can't plan a vacation to Maui. Let's talk a little bit more about the aid response. So you shared a video on the Daily Signalant and your personal Twitter as well of an official in Maui on the day that President Joe Biden visited saying that there had been response from the federal government. His words were that the federal government had met our needs with the federal movement within six hours.

Tony, what kind of aid has the government given? So there's a list of talking points that's been provided by the Biden administration and the White House Press Secretary that I've seen shared around on social media, usually by suburban women on the East Coast who couldn't probably point to Maui on a map or young college men getting out and you're just trying to dunk on Republicans that say that, the government's provided a lot of blankets, and FEMA has poured all of this money into disaster response into the area. But that's not true, number one, and number two, that there is no net effect on the locals that FEMA has made that I would say constitutes anything praiseworthy. We spoke with the individual that's coordinated the local effort to basically put individuals in small boats and traffic supplies from other parts of Hawaii into one singular boat ramp north of Lahaina.

and we spoke with him. He's in a few of our videos. And he was furious that the United States government took them days to get here when they were having people shuttle supplies in via boats within hours, not six hours. There was no federal response within six hours. Biden didn't even make a comment on the issue until four days later. And that was no comment before we went bicycling. And even now, after the president's visited the island, he left the island to go to his vacation in Lake Tahoe. So these are some of the of the things that the Islanders see, there really hasn't been a decent federal aid response. Right now, if you don't have any home insurance, which is next to no one in Lahaina, you are allotted $700 per household, which is one young lady told us, won't even flush a toilet on Hawaii. Now, as we've mentioned, the president was there on Monday. I want to take just a moment to play a clip of the president's remarks from Lahaina. I don't want to compare difficulty. but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it's like to lose a home.

Years ago, now 15 years ago, I was in Washington, do we meet the press? It was a sunny Sunday. And lightning struck at home on a little lake it's outside of our home, and on a lake, a big pond, and hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the heating ducts, the air-conditioning duck. Make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my 67 Corvette, and my cat. So, Tony, how did locals respond to President Biden being there on the island? What did they have to say about that?

I've never been in a room in which individuals were so livid. And I have been in some rooms in which some parents were very upset at school board meetings. Nothing amounted to this, though. there was a man next to me who picked up a chair out of anger. And he got off of his chair and he picked it up. And he looked like he wanted to throw it. That's how upset he was that the president would compare the deaths of children to almost losing his corvette. And goodness gracious, there was a lady next to me who was a former teacher that had taught for a number of years.

It was a very passionate Democrat who basically said that she was probably going to to stop supporting the Democrat Party because of this, which is, I mean, that's unreal. I mean, the idea that this shook these people to the course so much that immediately they were ready to jump ship on the party and just the things that they were saying about him, I'm obviously not going to repeat those words here on the air, but they were swear words in both English as well as I'm assuming Hawaiian, which I've never heard before. but I have yet to see an amount of vitriol. By the way, I think that well deserved that, you know, that response, goodness gracious, what a thing to say.

We were, you know, we were making speculation before he came, if he might tell the islanders something that he told the gold star parents. And he somehow outdid himself and said something even more calloused and cruel than he did earlier this year. How are the folks that you talked with holding up on the island? I mean, I know so many of them, they're jumping in, they're helping each other out. How are they doing? Are they able to stay positive? Are you seeing a lot of despair? I wouldn't say despair.

Virginia, I'm seeing a lot of numbness. A lot of people who have gone through the ringer, to put it colloquially, and have very much, there's an emotional, mental, and spiritual exhaustion to go with the physical. there is a concern that the money is gone and they don't know where things are going. People are selling their vehicles in order to keep things going for a few days longer. And they do think that as time goes on, we are going to see perhaps a bit of that despair. But at the moment, again, there is something indescribably beautiful that has saturated this community from people coming together. It is that Aloha spirit is genuine. It's real.

And I was very skeptical before I went. I mean, it sounds, you know, kind of like a buzzword that the people staple on to an area. And I have never been more thrilled to be wrong and to see just, again, one of the most phenomenal groups of individuals. I used to say that Indiana has the thing called Hoosier hospitality that we like to brag on that if you come to Indiana, we'll treat you right. The Aloha spirit on Maui puts that to shame. That is how powerful the attitude is of the people. it is servant leadership by doing, not by talking. And that's the difference between local and federal officials and the people on the island,

is that they don't even have time to watch the news and watch Biden's latest nonsense posturing and preening because they're busy delivering supplies, diving into their own bank accounts to pay for hotel rooms, for people they've never even met that have been recently made homeless by this incredible disaster. Tony, what do we know about the source of the fire? I know slowly but surely we're learning more information. Do we have definitively this is how it started and this is how it was able to spread so quickly? I discussed this with a construction worker who was, who had lost his home and everything. He'd actually driven around on a small motorcycle taking some photos.

A lot of the stuff is just going to continue coming out as we have time, both Tim Kennedy and I, to sit down and write and discuss what we've seen to look over the footage and kind of double check these things with locals. but first of all, it's important to know that the infrastructure on Maui was left completely rotted, rotted to the core. And I'm specifically talking about the power lines, which were so termite infested that when some of these lines fell over, we have photos. And I have seen these walking around Lahaina that were eaten out by these insects so that basically a light breeze from some of these wildfires when dry enough would topple

them over. So that definitely played a big part of it. We think it's probably an electrical thing going on. And again, when the infrastructure has been set, which is interesting because the taxation is so high on this island, it's one of the most expensive places on earth to live that it's likely there was some kind of an electrical fire that started this. I know I've heard a million and one theories. Most of them on social media, very few of them on the island itself. Most people are less focused on what started it kind of a will deal with that later mentality, but it does seem to be electrical in nature. What's more damning to the officials and others is the response when the fire was initially breaking out that has everyone furious. And what was the response or the lack thereof that we

know of? Well, the director of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, the individual in charge of disaster response had been appointed by the mayor after that individual was his chief of staff for seven years. It was a very cushy appointment, kind of a all appoint you to this position, kind of a thank you. And this individual completely botched the job. That doesn't do justice of the crime. This individual should be tried in federal court for the neglect that he performed. He didn't sound the island-wide warning system, which is independent of the power grid and is touted as the most advanced warning system in the world because he suggested that people, would think it was a tsunami and run into the fires.

That is beyond insulting. And every single person that we asked about that said so. Even individuals who did not want to talk to media who are basically turning away, I asked that question to someone else. And it had people turning around and saying, oh, if you want me to comment about that, and they were like coming back, that's how furious they are with that response. Shutting off water systems worried about state equity farming protocols, which is wild. and of course there was the lack of military support from Pearl Harbor's fire boats while I think around 70-70 boats were burning in the Lahaina Harbor, which is one of the premiered harbors on Maui.

The Daily Signals investigative columnist Tony Kennett. Tony, thank you for your time today. Thanks for your reporting. I want to direct everyone both to the Daily Signal YouTube or Twitter now. and as well as the day signal website, dailysignal.com, to find all of the reporting and just all of your great work, Tony.

Thank you for being willing to be there on the ground to talk to so many locals and really find out what the situation is. Thanks, Virginia. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thank you all so much for joining us on today's podcast again. Be sure to check out today's show notes as well as the Daily Signal website

and the Daily Signal across social media platforms to get the full reporting from Tony, from being there on the ground in Lahaina. And also make sure that you take a moment to leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, wherever you like to listen to the podcast. But thank you again for being with us today. We'll be back around 5 p.m. for our top news edition. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your day. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.