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“Unbelievable. This looks like Baghdad or something.”
The shocked voice in the viral flyover video of Lahaina, Hawaii, belongs to helicopter tour pilot Richard Olsten, who attempted on Wednesday to find the words to describe the devastating transformation of the land below. Grass fires that burned on the fringes of the western Maui town early Tuesday, and were initially believed to be contained, have been fanned by powerful winds toward populated areas, fueling a fast-moving conflagration that took both residents and rescue workers by surprise.
Aerial video shows wildfire devastation in Lahaina, Mauiwww.youtube.com
The fires have killed at least 93 people, although authorities caution that the toll could rise as search-and-rescue efforts are ongoing. Here’s what you need to know about the Maui fires.
The cause of the fires is not known, although they appear to have originated as brush fires that did not draw much initial alarm. But high winds that NOAA and the National Weather Service attribute to Hurricane Dora, some 600 miles to the south, knocked out power on the island, grounded firefighting helicopters, and fanned deadly flare-ups that took residents by surprise.
The location of the Maui fires.
NASA/FIRMS
The location of the fires as of August 10 at 12:30 PM ET are above. You can follow the location of the fires using NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) here. There are also a number of small fires burning on Hawaii’s Big Island.
More than 271 structures have been impacted, according to the Maui County website, and “thousands” of acres have burned. More than 11,000 tourists have been evacuated from Maui and some 2,100 residents are reportedly being housed in emergency shelters.
“Local people have lost everything,” Jimmy Tokioka, the director of Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, told the press. “They’ve lost their house. They’ve lost their animals. It’s devastating.”
Lahaina, the former capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii and a place of historic and cultural importance to Native Hawaiians, has been “wiped off the map,” witnesses say. A 150-year-old banyan tree, thought to be the oldest in the state, has been scorched by the fire but appears to still be standing.
With 93 dead, the fires are one of the deadliest natural disasters in Hawaii’s recorded history and one of the deadliest modern U.S. wildfires. Authorities have warned that the death toll could rise.
As of Thursday, helicopters have resumed water drops and at least 100 Maui firefighters are working around the clock to stop the fire.
Horrifying. Survivors said they had little warning before the fire was upon them, with some being so taken by surprise that they had to jump into the ocean to escape the flames.
“While driving through the neighborhood, it looked like a war zone,” one Lahaina resident told USA Today of his escape. “Houses throughout that neighborhood were already on fire. I’m driving through the thickest black smoke, and I don’t know what’s on the other side or what’s in front of me.”
Another evacuee told Maui News she had no time to think through what to pack. “I grabbed some stuff, I put some clothes on, got some dog food. I have a giant tortoise. I couldn’t move him so I opened his gate so he could get out if he needed to,” she said.
“I was the last one off the dock when the firestorm came through the banyan tree and took everything with it,” another survivor recounted to the BBC. “And I just ran out to the beach and I ran south and I just helped everybody I could along the way.”
Hawaii’s brush fires tend to be smaller than the forest fires in the Western United States, but the proliferation of non-native vegetation, which dries out and is particularly fire-prone, has fueled a rise in recent blazes, The Washington Post reports.
There has been a 400% increase in wildfires “over the past several decades” in Hawaii, according to a 2022 report by Hawaii Business Magazine. “From 1904 through the 1980s, [University of Hawaii at Mānoa botanist and fire scientist Clay Trauernicht] estimates that 5,000 acres on average burned each year in Hawaii. In the decades that followed, that number jumped to 20,000 acres burned.”
Though Hawaii is imagined to be lush, wet, and tropical, Maui is experiencing moderate to severe drought, which has dried out the non-native grasses that make particularly good wildfire fuel. And while it is tricky to link Hawaii’s current drought directly to climate change, drought conditions in the Pacific Islands are expected to continue to increase along with warming.
Stronger hurricanes are also more likely due to climate change, and it was the strong winds buffeting Maui that made the fires this week so destructive and fast-moving. “These kinds of climate change-related disasters are really beyond the scope of things that we’re used to dealing with,” University of British Columbia researcher Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz told The Associated Press. “It’s these kind of multiple, interactive challenges that really lead to a disaster.”
The Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority has asked that “visitors who are on non-essential travel … leave Maui, and non-essential travel to Maui is strongly discouraged at this time.” If you have plans to travel to West Maui in the coming weeks, you are “encouraged to consider rescheduling [your] travel plans for a later time.”
This article was last updated on August 13 at 8:32 AM ET.
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“Ifwe actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers.”
It was always going to be the case that the vice presidential debate would have the most substantive climate exchange of the 2024 election cycle. For one (big) thing: Neither candidate was Donald Trump. For another, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance both have, at least at some point, professed concern about “the climate problem.” But a question from the moderators was all but guaranteed after one of the costliest hurricanes in recent U.S. history devastated communities far from the coast the weekend before the debate.
Rather than get just a few meager sentences about “immaculate clean water,” then, Americans who bothered to tune into the debate were treated to a lengthy back-and-forth about clean energy investment and the Inflation Reduction Act by the presidential candidates’ seconds. The exchange touched off when Vance was asked what responsibility the Trump administration would have “to try and reduce the impact of climate change,” especially given the scenes out of Western North Carolina.
“A lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” Vance said to start (though lest we forget, those “crazy weather patterns” just left 100 dead in six U.S. states and are expected to result in 250,000 excess deaths per year by 2050, according to the IPCC). He added that “Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water” but that “one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions — this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change.”
Who had on their Bingo card that Vance would be the first to mention carbon emissions during a debate in 2024? But he quickly turned the moment around to cast doubt on the human causes: “Let’s just say that’s true, for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science,” he added, though he proceeded to structure his remarks as if we live in a world where greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere (what a thought!):
If you believe that, what would you want to do?
The answer is that you want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.
Kamala Harris’ policies actually led to more energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world — when I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output.
So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people.
Of course, what Vance is describing sounds suspiciously like the rationale behind the Inflation Reduction Act, which explicitly aims to build a green economy at home in the U.S. Walz more or less pointed that out in his response: “We’ve seen massive investments — the biggest in global history,” he said. “We’ve seen that the Inflation Reduction Act has created jobs all across the country,” including in manufacturing electric cars and solar panels.
Walz also noted that Trump has called climate change a hoax, which earned Vance a chance to respond. “If the Democrats — in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership — if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America,” he reemphasized, then added: “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We’ve built a nuclear facility — I think one in the past 40 years. Natural gas, we’ve got to invest more in it.”
The ball then returned to Walz. “We’re producing more natural gas than we ever had,” he correctly pointed out (and, though he didn’t mention it, Biden recently signed a big bill advancing nuclear, too). But while Trump hosted oil executives at Mar-a-Lago when he was courting campaign donations, “we can be smarter about that and an all-above energy policy,” the governor went on. “That’s exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current.”
Was it a perfect climate exchange? Not really. It’s easy to see why the oil industry is sweet on Vance and Walz’s citation of an “all-above energy policy” will likely leave some in the more progressive wings of the climate movement feeling cold.
But it will be described as an amicable exchange, particularly for moments like Walz telling Vance, “Well, we got close to an agreement” on recognizing so-called crazy weather patterns. In truth, they also got close to an agreement on a little something called the IRA — yet another case of a Republican trying to have it both ways. It goes to show: Climate jobs and domestic manufacturing are popular ideas with the American public. Just don’t tell your boss, JD.
We didn’t have to wait long for climate to come up during tonight’s vice presidential debate between VP hopefuls Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz — the night’s second question was about the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and fueled by warmer air and waters due to climate pollution.
Vance started off his answer innocuously enough, extending his thoughts and prayers to those affected by the hurricane and then proceeding to some campaign boilerplate. “I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water,” Vance said up top, echoing Trump’s claim that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water and … absolutely clean air,” from the presidential debate back in June. (It’s worth noting, of course, that his policy choices tell a different story.)
Vance then proceeded to hedge the climate change question in a way that wound up backing him right into it. “One of the things that I've noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions, this idea that carbon emissions drives all of the climate change,” Vance said. “Well, let’s just say that's true — just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science. Let’s just say that’s true.”
He then went on to describe an America-first all-of-the-above energy and manufacturing policy that sounded more than a little familiar.
These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground