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Tag: Wildfires

  • Woman who fled the Maui wildfire on foot has died after weeks in a hospital burn unit

    Woman who fled the Maui wildfire on foot has died after weeks in a hospital burn unit

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    HONOLULU — A woman who escaped Hawaii’s Lahaina wildfire by running through a flaming field has died after spending more than seven weeks in a hospital burn unit.

    Laurie Allen died Friday at Straub Medical Center in Honolulu, according to a gofundme page set up for her and her husband, Perry Allen.

    “Laurie slipped away peacefully. Her heart was tired, and she was ready,” her sister-in-law, Penny Allen Hood, wrote on the website.

    Allen’s husband, two brothers, a sister and other relatives were at her side.

    Allen was among at least 98 people killed by the fire Aug. 8 that devastated historic Lahaina on the west coast of Maui. The fire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century and destroyed 2,200 buildings, most of them homes.

    The fire began when strong winds appeared to cause a Hawaiian Electric power line to fall and ignite dry brush and grass. After being declared contained, the fire flared up and raced through the town.

    Perry Allen, an artist, lost a lifetime of work when their home burned, according to Hood. He was working 15 miles (24 kilometers) away when the fire hit.

    Laurie Allen, a physical therapist’s administrative assistant who worked from home, was home when the fire erupted. She fled with others in a vehicle, but a fallen, flaming tree blocked their way.

    Allen got out of the car and fled 100 yards (91 meters) across a field of burning grass. A policeman and fireman met her, and she was taken to an emergency shelter.

    At the hospital, Allen endured infections and a series of operations, including skin grafts, and was brought into and out of consciousness. She had difficulty communicating but at one point raised hopes by being able to wiggle her toes when asked.

    Her prognosis worsened in recent days, however, and Hood posted Thursday that “the battle to repair and rebuild Laurie’s earthly body” would soon be over. Allen was taken off life support Friday.

    “This ordeal touched numerous lives. For me, it was realizing how many shared concerns for Laurie — people from her childhood, her family, work colleagues, church friends, and clients at the PT Clinic she worked at,” Hood wrote Friday. “This is a reminder that we never know how much our smile or even a simple greeting can leave an impression on others.”

    Some Lahaina residents whose homes burned began returning to the devastated town last week. Authorities urged them not to sift through the ashes for belongings out of concern they could stir up dust containing asbestos, lead, arsenic or other toxins.

    Returnees were given water, shade, washing stations, portable toilets, medical and mental health care, and transportation help. Nonprofit groups also were offering personal protective equipment, including masks and coveralls.

    Nearly 8,000 displaced residents are living in hotels and other accommodations around Maui. Economists have warned that, without zoning and other changes, housing costs in already expensive Lahaina could be prohibitively costly for many after rebuilding.

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  • Native Hawaiian neighborhood survived Maui fire. Lahaina locals praise its cultural significance

    Native Hawaiian neighborhood survived Maui fire. Lahaina locals praise its cultural significance

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    LAHAINA, Hawaii — Shaun “Buge” Saribay felt like giving up. Hours of makeshift firefighting with garden hoses and buckets of water across Lahaina didn’t stop flames from consuming his house, his rental properties and thousands of other structures in his beloved hometown.

    Drained, dirty and delirious, he continued anyway, pedaling a bicycle he found during the apocalyptic night of Aug. 8 to one Lahaina neighborhood he was determined to save as a symbol of enduring Hawaiian heritage.

    Although Native Hawaiians including Saribay live throughout Lahaina, the Villages of Leiali’i is the only community in West Maui exclusively for Hawaiians. Part of a program Congress passed in 1921 to give Hawaii’s Indigenous people land to live on, Leiali’i and other so-called homestead communities have become not just key to economic self-sufficiency, but reserves of Hawaiian culture and traditions as well.

    Just two of the neighborhood’s 104 homes were lost to the fire, an immense relief amid a disaster that destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and killed at least 97 people. Many of the homesteaders have taken in friends and relatives who lost homes nearby. Some homes suffered smoke damage. Water in the neighborhood, like much of Lahaina, remains unsafe to cook with or drink.

    “So much of Lahaina went burn,” Saribay said in Hawaii Pidgin. “We no need lose Hawaiian homes.”

    Homestead communities across the state, which also are referred to as Hawaiian Homes, represent one of the most valuable benefits available to those with Hawaiian ancestry: land at almost no cost.

    Those with at least 50% Hawaiian blood can apply for a 99-year lease for $1 a year. There are about 29,000 people on a waitlist for 99-year residential or agricultural land leases.

    Knowing that many Hawaiians have died waiting for a lease motivated Saribay to try to save Leiali’i.

    “How long Hawaiians was waiting for Hawaiian Homes? Choke years,” the lifelong Lahaina resident said. “Many years.”

    The fire that swept through Lahaina was mostly out by midmorning on Aug. 9. But it still threatened houses in Leiali’i when Saribay and a group of his tenants arrived at the 16-year-old Lahaina homestead community.

    Most residents had evacuated as wind-whipped fire spread from the hillsides and surrounded the neighborhood, which is one of the newer subdivisions developed by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands.

    Saribay, who livestreamed his actions for hours on Instagram, focused on flames taking down a house just outside Leiali’i. His group connected garden hoses and he broke down a homesteader’s fence to keep the fire out of the community, he said.

    It’s not clear how much the efforts of Saribay and others contributed to the neighborhood’s survival.

    Some residents have credited it to a combination of factors. Among them are the willingness of locals such as Saribay to risk their lives fighting the flames; the use of newer, more fire-resistant construction materials, such as composite siding, than was used in older parts of Lahaina; underground utility lines, which did not snap and spark in the high winds as above-ground utility poles did; and the grace of “akua,” which is Hawaiian for a divine or spiritual force.

    Keola Beamer, a famous slack key guitarist who lives in Leiali’i, found significance in the neighborhood’s name. “Lei” can mean garland in Hawaiian and “alii” refers to chiefs or royalty.

    “We think that our ancestors joined hands and formed a lei of alii around our homes, protecting us from the ensuing flames,” Beamer said. “It jumped over us.”

    The home Saribay helped protect by knocking down a fence belongs to Archie Kalepa, a well-known surfer, lifeguard, Polynesian voyager and proponent of traditional Hawaiian canoe surfing. In the ensuing days, the home became a hub for distributing donated relief supplies, including generators, cleaning products and canned food.

    Workers with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands erected a temporary black screen to protect Kalepa’s house from any potentially toxic dust that might blow over from a house that burned just outside the homestead’s boundary.

    The tragedy would have been compounded if the homestead burned, too, Kalepa said.

    “If Hawaiian Homes didn’t exist, all these families — who, most of them, are nine, 10, 12, 15 generations from Lahaina — would have been gone,” he said. “Their genealogy … their children, their grandchildren. They’re all here. And that would have been lost.”

    Archie Kalepa’s wife, Alicia, was on the other side of Maui when the fire struck. She initially heard the homestead had burned: “Me and my daughter just started screaming and crying.”

    For hours until the morning, they alternated between fits of tears and restless sleep while parked on the roadside, stuck in traffic. Unable to get into Lahaina, Alicia Kalepa sent her 17-year-old twin daughters by boat to check on the family’s property. It wasn’t until the girls returned by driving a winding and narrow road north of Lahaina that she got confirmation that the vast majority of Leiali’i was unscathed.

    “I was so relieved, but at the same time I was so sad for a lot of my friends,” she said. “My hula sisters that lost their houses.”

    Some residents are wrestling with feelings of guilt.

    “Those of us that survived with our houses, you know, we feel a little survivor’s guilt thing going on,” Beamer said. “Why us?”

    The two leaseholders who lost their homes are talking about rebuilding, said Randy Awo, the Hawaiian Homes commissioner for Maui.

    Soon after the fire, concern spread that Lahaina will be rebuilt into a tropical haven for affluent outsiders, pricing out Hawaiians and other longtime locals.

    Archie Kalepa sees the survival of Leiali’i as a testament to the resilience of the Hawaiian people — “the root and soul of this place” — and the need to find ways for Hawaiians to prosper despite Hawaii’s crushingly high cost of living.

    “Because when you really think about it, Hawaii was never, ever for sale,” Kalepa said. “Hawaiian Homes is a perfect example. You don’t own this land.”

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  • Native Hawaiian neighborhood survived Maui fire. Lahaina locals praise its cultural significance

    Native Hawaiian neighborhood survived Maui fire. Lahaina locals praise its cultural significance

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    LAHAINA, Hawaii — Shaun “Buge” Saribay felt like giving up. Hours of makeshift firefighting with garden hoses and buckets of water across Lahaina didn’t stop flames from consuming his house, his rental properties and thousands of other structures in his beloved hometown.

    Drained, dirty and delirious, he continued anyway, pedaling a bicycle he found during the apocalyptic night of Aug. 8 to one Lahaina neighborhood he was determined to save as a symbol of enduring Hawaiian heritage.

    Although Native Hawaiians including Saribay live throughout Lahaina, the Villages of Leiali’i is the only community in West Maui exclusively for Hawaiians. Part of a program Congress passed in 1921 to give Hawaii’s Indigenous people land to live on, Leiali’i and other so-called homestead communities have become not just key to economic self-sufficiency, but reserves of Hawaiian culture and traditions as well.

    Just two of the neighborhood’s 104 homes were lost to the fire, an immense relief amid a disaster that destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and killed at least 97 people. Many of the homesteaders have taken in friends and relatives who lost homes nearby. Some homes suffered smoke damage. Water in the neighborhood, like much of Lahaina, remains unsafe to cook with or drink.

    “So much of Lahaina went burn,” Saribay said in Hawaii Pidgin. “We no need lose Hawaiian homes.”

    Homestead communities across the state, which also are referred to as Hawaiian Homes, represent one of the most valuable benefits available to those with Hawaiian ancestry: land at almost no cost.

    Those with at least 50% Hawaiian blood can apply for a 99-year lease for $1 a year. There are about 29,000 people on a waitlist for 99-year residential or agricultural land leases.

    Knowing that many Hawaiians have died waiting for a lease motivated Saribay to try to save Leiali’i.

    “How long Hawaiians was waiting for Hawaiian Homes? Choke years,” the lifelong Lahaina resident said. “Many years.”

    The fire that swept through Lahaina was mostly out by midmorning on Aug. 9. But it still threatened houses in Leiali’i when Saribay and a group of his tenants arrived at the 16-year-old Lahaina homestead community.

    Most residents had evacuated as wind-whipped fire spread from the hillsides and surrounded the neighborhood, which is one of the newer subdivisions developed by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands.

    Saribay, who livestreamed his actions for hours on Instagram, focused on flames taking down a house just outside Leiali’i. His group connected garden hoses and he broke down a homesteader’s fence to keep the fire out of the community, he said.

    It’s not clear how much the efforts of Saribay and others contributed to the neighborhood’s survival.

    Some residents have credited it to a combination of factors. Among them are the willingness of locals such as Saribay to risk their lives fighting the flames; the use of newer, more fire-resistant construction materials, such as composite siding, than was used in older parts of Lahaina; underground utility lines, which did not snap and spark in the high winds as above-ground utility poles did; and the grace of “akua,” which is Hawaiian for a divine or spiritual force.

    Keola Beamer, a famous slack key guitarist who lives in Leiali’i, found significance in the neighborhood’s name. “Lei” can mean garland in Hawaiian and “alii” refers to chiefs or royalty.

    “We think that our ancestors joined hands and formed a lei of alii around our homes, protecting us from the ensuing flames,” Beamer said. “It jumped over us.”

    The home Saribay helped protect by knocking down a fence belongs to Archie Kalepa, a well-known surfer, lifeguard, Polynesian voyager and proponent of traditional Hawaiian canoe surfing. In the ensuing days, the home became a hub for distributing donated relief supplies, including generators, cleaning products and canned food.

    Workers with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands erected a temporary black screen to protect Kalepa’s house from any potentially toxic dust that might blow over from a house that burned just outside the homestead’s boundary.

    The tragedy would have been compounded if the homestead burned, too, Kalepa said.

    “If Hawaiian Homes didn’t exist, all these families — who, most of them, are nine, 10, 12, 15 generations from Lahaina — would have been gone,” he said. “Their genealogy … their children, their grandchildren. They’re all here. And that would have been lost.”

    Archie Kalepa’s wife, Alicia, was on the other side of Maui when the fire struck. She initially heard the homestead had burned: “Me and my daughter just started screaming and crying.”

    For hours until the morning, they alternated between fits of tears and restless sleep while parked on the roadside, stuck in traffic. Unable to get into Lahaina, Alicia Kalepa sent her 17-year-old twin daughters by boat to check on the family’s property. It wasn’t until the girls returned by driving a winding and narrow road north of Lahaina that she got confirmation that the vast majority of Leiali’i was unscathed.

    “I was so relieved, but at the same time I was so sad for a lot of my friends,” she said. “My hula sisters that lost their houses.”

    Some residents are wrestling with feelings of guilt.

    “Those of us that survived with our houses, you know, we feel a little survivor’s guilt thing going on,” Beamer said. “Why us?”

    The two leaseholders who lost their homes are talking about rebuilding, said Randy Awo, the Hawaiian Homes commissioner for Maui.

    Soon after the fire, concern spread that Lahaina will be rebuilt into a tropical haven for affluent outsiders, pricing out Hawaiians and other longtime locals.

    Archie Kalepa sees the survival of Leiali’i as a testament to the resilience of the Hawaiian people — “the root and soul of this place” — and the need to find ways for Hawaiians to prosper despite Hawaii’s crushingly high cost of living.

    “Because when you really think about it, Hawaii was never, ever for sale,” Kalepa said. “Hawaiian Homes is a perfect example. You don’t own this land.”

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  • Inside scientists’ mission to save America’s wine industry from climate change

    Inside scientists’ mission to save America’s wine industry from climate change

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    ALPINE, Ore. — The U.S. West Coast produces over 90% of America’s wine, but the region is also prone to wildfires — a combustible combination that spelled disaster for the industry in 2020 and one that scientists are scrambling to neutralize.

    Sample a good wine and you might get notes of oak or red fruit. But sip on wine made from grapes that were penetrated by smoke, and it could taste like someone dumped the contents of an ashtray into your glass.

    Wine experts from three West Coast universities are working together to meet the threat, including developing spray coatings to protect grapes, pinpointing the elusive compounds that create that nasty ashy taste, and deploying smoke sensors to vineyards to better understand smoke behavior.

    The U.S. government is funding their research with millions of dollars. Wineries are also taking steps to protect their product and brand.

    The risk to America’s premier wine-making regions — where wildfires caused billions of dollars in losses in 2020 — is growing, with climate change deepening drought and overgrown forests becoming tinderboxes. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, grapes are the highest-value crop in the United States, with 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of grape-bearing land, 96% of it on the West Coast.

    Winemakers around the world are already adapting to climate change, including by moving their vineyards to cooler zones and planting varieties that do better in drought and heat. Wildfires pose an additional and more immediate risk being tackled by scientists from Oregon State University, Washington State University and the University of California, Davis.

    “What’s at stake is the ability to continue to make wine in areas where smoke exposures might be more common,” said Tom Collins, a wine scientist at Washington State University.

    Researcher Cole Cerrato recently stood in Oregon State University’s vineyard, nestled below forested hills near the village of Alpine, as he turned on a fan to push smoke from a Weber grill through a dryer vent hose. The smoke emerged onto a row of grapes enclosed in a quasi greenhouse made of taped-together plastic sheets.

    Previously, grapes exposed to smoke in the MacGyvered setup were made into wine by Elizabeth Tomasino, an associate professor leading Oregon State’s efforts, and her researchers.

    They found sulfur-containing compounds, thiophenols, in the smoke-impacted wine and determined they contributed to the ashy flavor, along with “volatile phenols,” which Australian researchers identified as factors more than a decade ago. Bush fires have long impacted Australia’s wine industry. Up in Washington state, Collins confirmed that the sulfur compounds were found in the wine that had been exposed to smoke in the Oregon vineyard but weren’t in samples that had no smoke exposure.

    The scientists want to find out how thiophenols, which aren’t detectable in wildfire smoke, appear in smoke-impacted wine, and learn how to eliminate them.

    “There’s still a lot of very interesting chemistry and very interesting research, to start looking more into these new compounds,” Cerrato said. “We just don’t have the answers yet.”

    Wine made with tainted grapes can be so awful that it can’t be marketed. If it does go on shelves, a winemaker’s reputation could be ruined — a risk that few are willing to take.

    When record wildfires in 2020 blanketed the West Coast in brown smoke, some California wineries refused to accept grapes unless they had been tested. But most growers couldn’t find places to analyze their grapes because the laboratories were overwhelmed.

    The damage to the industry in California alone was $3.7 billion, according to an analysis that Jon Moramarco of the consulting firm bw166 conducted for industry groups. The losses stemmed mostly from wineries having to forego future wine sales.

    “But really what drove it was, you know, a lot of the impact was in Napa (Valley), an area of some of the highest priced grapes, highest priced wines in the U.S.,” Moramarco said, adding that if a ton of cabernet sauvignon grapes is ruined, “you lose probably 720 bottles of wine. If it is worth $100 a bottle, it adds up very quickly.”

    Between 165,000 to 325,000 tons of California wine grapes were left to wither on the vine in 2020 due to actual or perceived wildfire smoke exposure, said Natalie Collins, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers.

    She said she hasn’t heard of any growers quitting the business due to wildfire impacts, but that: “Many of our members are having an extremely difficult time securing insurance due to the fire risk in their region, and if they are able to secure insurance, the rate is astronomically high.”

    Some winemakers are trying techniques to reduce smoke impact, such as passing the wine through a membrane or treating it with carbon, but that can also rob a wine of its appealing nuances. Blending impacted grapes with other grapes is another option. Limiting skin contact by making rosé wine instead of red can lower the concentration of smoke flavor compounds.

    Collins, over at Washington State University, has been experimenting with spraying fine-powdered kaolin or bentonite, which are clays, mixed with water onto wine grapes so it absorbs materials that are in smoke. The substance would then be washed off before harvest. Oregon State University is developing a spray-on coating.

    Meanwhile, dozens of smoke sensors have been installed in vineyards in the three states, financed in part by a $7.65 million USDA grant.

    “The instruments will be used to measure for smoke marker compounds,” said Anita Oberholster, leader of UC Davis’ efforts. She said such measurements are essential to develop mitigation strategies and determine smoke exposure risk.

    Greg Jones, who runs his family’s Abacela winery in southern Oregon’s Umpqua Valley and is a director of the Oregon Wine Board, applauds the scientists’ efforts.

    “This research has really gone a long way to help us try to find: are there ways in which we can take fruit from the vineyard and quickly find out if it has the potential compounds that would lead to smoke-impacted wine,” Jones said.

    Collins predicts success.

    “I think it’s increasingly clear that we’re not likely to find a magic bullet,” he said. “But we will find a set of strategies.”

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  • First congressional hearing on Maui wildfire to focus on island’s electric provider

    First congressional hearing on Maui wildfire to focus on island’s electric provider

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    Hawaii’s top public utility officials and the president of Hawaiian Electric are expected to testify Thursday in a congressional hearing about the role the electrical grid played in last month’s deadly Maui wildfire.

    Members of a U.S. House Energy and Commerce subcommittee are expected to question the utility officials about how the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century began — and whether the electrical grid in Lahaina was safe and properly maintained.

    The fire killed at least 97 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, mostly homes. It first erupted at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 8, when strong winds appeared to cause a Hawaiian Electric powerline to fall, igniting dry brush and grass near a large subdivision.

    Among those expected to testify are Hawaiian Electric CEO Shelee Kimura, Hawaii Public Utilities Commission Chair Leodoloff Asuncion Jr. and Hawaii Chief Energy Officer Mark Glick.

    Energy and Commerce Committee chair Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers; Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee chair Rep. Morgan Griffith; and Energy, Climate and Grid Security Subcommittee chair Rep. Jeff Duncan — all Republicans — questioned Kimura, Asuncion and Glick about the cause of the fire in a letter sent Aug. 30.

    The letter included 10 questions about the sequence of events on the day of the fire, efforts to mitigate fire risks posed by the electrical grid, the fire investigation and other issues. The lawmakers said that a complete understanding of how the fire started is needed to ensure it doesn’t happen again anywhere in the U.S.

    “Information is also coming to light about actions taken — or not taken — by implicated entities in hardening and modernizing the electric grid of Maui,” they wrote in the letter.

    In written testimony provided to the committee before the hearing, Kimura focused on the challenges of providing electricity on an isolated island chain, and her feelings of responsibility and connection with the people of Hawaii. She did not discuss any fire mitigation efforts the utility has taken or provide new details about the events surrounding the fire.

    “It was difficult to leave my island home this week when the disaster response efforts are still ongoing. It feels like leaving your family in their time of need. But I hope that as I carry out my kuleana here, it helps you carry out your important kuleana,” Kimura wrote, using a Hawaiian word that she said loosely translates to having a deep sense of responsibility that is both an obligation and a privilege.

    She also wrote that running the utility requires a complex and consequential balance of pursuing safe, reliable power at a reasonable cost.

    Hawaiian Electric serves about 70,000 customers on Maui and nearly half a million customers statewide, including the Department of Defense, which is its largest customer.

    “We all want to learn about what happened on August 8 so that it never happens again,” Kimura wrote.

    Kimura has acknowledged that Hawaiian Electric’s downed lines caused the initial fire, but she wrote that the fire department said it extinguished that blaze and that the lines had been de-energized for more than six hours when the fire flared up in the same area again. She called the 3 p.m. blaze the “Afternoon Fire,” implying it was separate from the morning blaze.

    “The cause of this Afternoon Fire that devastated Lahaina has not been determined,” she wrote. “We are working tirelessly to figure out what happened, and we are cooperating fully with federal and state investigators.”

    Whether the lines were fully de-energized — meaning they were not transmitting any electrical voltage — might still be in question, however. At least one Lahaina resident told the Associated Press that their power came back on around 2 p.m., and Maui Police Chief John Pelletier has said that his officers were trying to keep people from driving over live power lines later that afternoon as residents fled the burning town.

    Asuncion Jr., the chair of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, said in written testimony that the PUC began tying Hawaiian Electric’s power rates in part to its performance in 2021, moving away from a traditional method of setting rates based on the cost of providing service.

    The switch was designed to help the utility commission to determine whether it was functioning as intended by creating “stringent oversight mechanisms,” and allowed the commission to penalize Hawaiian Electric for poor reliability. It also was intended to give Hawaiian Electric more flexibility to manage funds in the way the company thinks will best meet objectives, Asuncion wrote.

    Asuncion said the PUC is working with Hawaiian Electric to identify and implement any needed operating changes for high-wind days, and is reviewing the company’s approach to whether power lines should be built above or below ground.

    “The devastation of the August wildfires should never happen again,” Asuncion wrote. “In thinking about this priority, the Commission aims to ensure to the greatest extent possible that electric utility operations, infrastructure, and equipment in Hawaii are safe, reliable, and resilient to natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding.”

    Hawaii has only two electric utilities: Hawaiian Electric, which is the sole provider for Maui, and Kauai Island Utility Cooperative.

    Residential electricity in Maui costs about 43 cents per kilowatt-hour — that’s three times the national average, he said, with the average monthly bill reaching about $216 in 2022. The utility’s financial integrity is related to its ability to provide the level of maintenance and upgrades that are critical for a safe electrical grid, he said.

    Glick, the chief energy officer for Hawaii’s State Energy Office, also submitted written testimony detailing some efforts to identify the risk of wildfires and other natural disasters to the energy grid, and plans to eventually create a microgrid system, where small portions of the electrical grid could be shut off for safety reasons while keeping the rest of the system operational.

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  • New storms batter central Greece as government prioritizes adapting to effects of climate change

    New storms batter central Greece as government prioritizes adapting to effects of climate change

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    New floods following torrential rain have swept across swathes of central Greece already battered by deadly storms weeks earlier

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 27, 2023, 9:17 AM

    FILE – Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis addresses the media at the Presidential Palace in Nicosia, Cyprus, on Monday, July 31, 2023. Torrential rain sweeping across central Greece has damaged roads, flooded homes and caused power outages on the island of Evia. “I will restate the obvious: The frequency of (weather) assaults due to the climate crisis is something that requires us to integrate civil protection (in our response),” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Sept. 27. (Yiannis Kourtoglou Pool via AP)

    The Associated Press

    ATHENS, Greece — New floods following torrential rain swept Wednesday across swathes of central Greece already battered by deadly storms weeks earlier, once again damaging roads, flooding homes and causing power outages in the city of Volos and the island of Evia.

    At least eight villages were ordered evacuated late Wednesday as floodwaters rose, and road traffic was banned in Volos — a coastal city of about 140,000 — with residents urged to stay indoors.

    The fire service received hundreds of calls for assistance in Volos and dozens of people were evacuated from flooded homes, but there were no reports of deaths or people missing. State-run ERT television said the basement of the Volos hospital was inundated, although services were not affected.

    The new heavy storms follow deadly wildfires that caused record destruction in the summer, and earlier Wednesday the government declared that adapting to climate change has become a national priority.

    Volos, the nearby Mount Pilion area and other parts of central Greece are still recovering from the floods earlier this month that caused 16 deaths, destroyed homes and infrastructure, wrecked crops and drowned tens of thousands of livestock in the key farming area of Thessaly. Some of these areas still lack drinking water as a result of the previous storms.

    In the northern part of Evia island, army and municipal crews cleared debris from the roads near the flood-hit towns of Limni and Mantoudi, where the Fire Service reported receiving dozens of calls Wednesday from flooded households for assistance.

    Authorities had been placed on alert in central Greece and nearby islands following the storm forecast.

    The government said the initial estimate of the damage from the storm earlier this month exceeded 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion), with infrastructure repair alone expected to cost nearly 700 million euros ($735 million).

    Greece has been promised emergency funding from the European Union and is renegotiating details of existing aid packages to target more funds to cope with the damage caused by wildfires and floods.

    “I will restate the obvious: The frequency of (weather) assaults due to the climate crisis is something that requires us to integrate civil protection (in our response),” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told a Cabinet meeting Wednesday. “Adaptation to the climate crisis is a fundamental priority in all our policies.”

    The weather is expected to improve Friday. ___ Follow full AP coverage of the climate and environment: https://apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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  • Flood-hit central Greece braces for new storm as military crews help bolster flood defenses

    Flood-hit central Greece braces for new storm as military crews help bolster flood defenses

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    Emergency services in central Greece are on alert as another storm system heads toward areas hit by massive floods this month

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 26, 2023, 6:44 AM

    ATHENS, Greece — Emergency services in central Greece were on alert Tuesday as storms headed toward areas hit by massive floods this month.

    Municipal and military crews using excavators reinforced flood defenses along rivers near the central cities of Larissa and Trikala. Flooding from Storm Daniel killed 16 people in the region and caused widespread damage to property, farms and infrastructure.

    As it headed eastward, the latest storm — named “Elias” — caused landslides early Tuesday and prompted authorities to close sections of a highway between Athens and the western port city of Patras.

    The bad weather is expected to worsen through Thursday, affecting central Greece, the island of Evia, east of Athens, and islands in the central Aegean Sea.

    Storm Daniel swept across the eastern Mediterranean in early September. It flooded 720 square kilometers (280 square miles) across Greece’s farming heartland and caused damage in neighboring Bulgaria and Turkey before reaching Libya, where two dams collapsed, and killed thousands.

    Scientists say climate change is making storms like Daniel more frequent and more dangerous. Flooding in Greece was worsened by wildfires, loss of vegetation, and loose soils.

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  • After summer’s extreme weather, more Americans see climate change as a culprit, AP-NORC poll shows

    After summer’s extreme weather, more Americans see climate change as a culprit, AP-NORC poll shows

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    Kathleen Maxwell has lived in Phoenix for more than 20 years, but this summer was the first time she felt fear, as daily high temperatures soared to 110 degrees or hotter and kept it up for a record-shattering 31 consecutive days.

    “It’s always been really hot here, but nothing like this past summer,” said Maxwell, 50, who last week opened her windows for the first time since March and walked her dog outdoors for the first time since May. “I was seriously scared. Like, what if this doesn’t end and this is how it’s going to be?”

    Maxwell blames climate change, and she’s not alone.

    New polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicates that extreme weather, including a summer that brought dangerous heat for much of the United States, is bolstering Americans’ belief that they’ve personally felt the impact of climate change.

    About 9 in 10 Americans (87%) say they have experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years — including drought, extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires or flooding — up from 79% who said that just a few months ago in April. And about three-quarters of those believe climate change is at least partly to blame.

    In total, 64% of U.S. adults say both that they’ve recently experienced extreme weather and that they believe it was caused at least partially by climate change, up from 54% in April. And about 65% say climate change will have or already has had a major impact in their lifetime.

    This summer’s heat might be a big factor: About three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they’ve been affected by extremely hot weather or extreme heat waves in the last five years, up from 55% in April — and of those, 92% said they’ve had that experience just in the past few months.

    This summer was the hottest ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the European climate service Copernicus.

    Millions of Americans also were affected by the worst wildfire season in Canada’s history, which sent choking smoke into parts of the U.S. About six in 10 U.S. adults say haze or smoke from the wildfires affected them “a lot” (15%) or “a little” (48%) in recent months.

    And around the world, extreme heat, storms, flooding and wildfires have affected tens of millions of people this year, with scientists saying climate change has made such events more likely and intense.

    Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said researchers there have conducted twice-yearly surveys of Americans for 15 years, but it wasn’t until 2016 that they saw an indication that people’s experience with extreme weather was affecting their views about climate change. “And the signal has been getting stronger and stronger year by year as these conditions continue to get worse and worse,” he said.

    But he also believes that media coverage of climate change has changed dramatically, and that the public is interpreting information in a more scientific way than they did even a decade ago.

    Seventy-six-year-old Bruce Alvord, of Hagerstown, Maryland, said it wasn’t unusual to experience days with a 112-degree heat index this summer, and health conditions mean that “heat really bothers me because it’s restricted what I can do.”

    Even so, the retired government worker doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change; he recalls stories from his grandparents about bad weather, and thinks the climate is fluctuating on its own.

    “The way the way I look at it is I think it’s a bunch of powerful politicians and lobbying groups that … have their agenda,” said Alvord, a Republican who sees no need to change his own habits or for the government to do more. “I drive a Chrysler 300 (with a V8 engine). I use premium gas. I get 15 miles a gallon. I don’t give a damn.”

    The AP-NORC poll found significant differences between Democrats and Republicans. Among those who have experienced extreme weather, Democrats (93%) are more certain that climate change was a cause, compared to just half of Republicans (48%).

    About 9 in 10 Democrats say climate change is happening, with nearly all of the remaining Democrats being unsure about whether climate change is happening (5%), rather than outright rejecting it. Republicans are split: 49% say climate change is happening, but 26% say it’s not and an additional 25% are unsure. Overall, 74% of Americans say climate change is happening, largely unchanged from April.

    Republican Ronald Livingston, 70, of Clute, Texas, said he’s not sure if human activity is causing climate change, “but I know something is going on because we have been sweating our butts off.”

    The retired history teacher said it didn’t rain for several months this year, killing his grass and drying up a slough on his property where he sometimes fishes. It was so hot — with 45 days of 100 degrees or more — that he could barely go outside, and he struggled to grow a garden. He also believes that hurricanes are getting stronger.

    And after this summer, he’s keeping an open mind about climate change.

    “It worries me to the extent that I don’t think we can go two or three more years of this,” Livingston said.

    Jeremiah Bohr, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who studies climate change communication, said scientific evidence “is not going to change the minds that haven’t already been changed.” But people might be swayed if people or institutions they already trust become convinced and spread the word, Bohr said.

    After a brutal summer, Maxwell, the Phoenix resident, said she hopes more Americans will accept that climate change is happening and that people are making it worse, and support measures to slow it.

    “It seems very, very obvious to me, with all of the extreme weather and the hurricanes and flooding,” said Maxwell. “I just can’t imagine that people wouldn’t.”

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ___

    The poll of 1,146 adults was conducted Sept. 7-11, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

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  • The threat of wildfires is rising. So is new artificial intelligence solutions to fight them

    The threat of wildfires is rising. So is new artificial intelligence solutions to fight them

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    LONDON — Wildfires fueled by climate change have ravaged communities from Maui to the Mediterranean this summer, killing many people, exhausting firefighters and fueling demand for new solutions. Enter artificial intelligence.

    Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to scan the horizon for signs of smoke. A German company is building a constellation of satellites to detect fires from space. And Microsoft is using AI models to predict where the next blaze could be sparked.

    With wildfires becoming larger and more intense as the world warms, firefighters, utilities and governments are scrambling to get ahead of the flames by tapping into the latest AI technology — which has stirred both fear and excitement for its potential to transform life. While increasingly stretched first responders hope AI offers them a leg up, humans are still needed to check that the tech is accurate.

    California’s main firefighting agency this summer started testing an AI system that looks for smoke from more than 1,000 mountaintop camera feeds and is now expanding it statewide.

    The system is designed to find “abnormalities” and alert emergency command centers, where staffers will confirm whether it’s indeed smoke or something else in the air.

    “The beauty of this is that it immediately pops up on the screen and those dispatchers or call takers are able to interrogate that screen” and determine whether to send a crew, said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

    The cameras, part of a network that workers previously had to watch, provide billions of bytes of data for the AI system to digest. While humans still need to confirm any smoke sightings, the system helps reduce fatigue among staffers typically monitoring multiple screens and cameras, alerting them to look only when there’s possible fire or smoke, SeLegue said.

    It’s already helped. A battalion chief got a smoke alert in the middle of the night, confirmed it on his cellphone and called a command center in San Diego to scramble first responders to the remote area.

    The dispatchers said that if they hadn’t been alerted, the fire would have been much larger because it likely wouldn’t have been noticed until the next morning, SeLegue said.

    San Francisco startup Pano AI takes a similar approach, mounting cameras on cell towers that scan for smoke and alert customers, including fire departments, utility companies and ski resorts.

    The cameras use computer vision machine learning, a type of AI.

    “They’re trained very specifically to detect smoke or not, and we train them with images of smoke and images of not smoke,” CEO Sonia Kastner said.

    The images are combined with feeds from government weather satellites that scan for hotspots, along with other data sources, such as social media posts.

    The technology gets around one of the main problems in the traditional way of detecting wildfires — relying on 911 calls from passers-by that need confirmation from staffers before crews and water-dropping planes can be deployed.

    “Generally, only one in 20 of these 911 calls are actually a wildfire. Even during fire season, it might be a cloud or fog or a barbecue,” Kastner said.

    Pano AI’s systems do still rely on final confirmation, with managers playing a time lapse of the camera feed to ensure it’s smoke rising.

    For fighting forest fires, “technology is becoming really essential,” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president of energy delivery at Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility and a Pano AI customer.

    Utility companies sometimes play a role in sparking wildfires, when their power lines are knocked down by wind or struck by falling trees. Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started a devastating blaze in Maui this summer after apparently being downed by high winds.

    PGE, which provides electricity to 51 cities in Oregon, has deployed 26 Pano AI cameras, and Bekkedahl said they have helped speed up response and coordination with emergency services.

    Previously, fire departments were “running around looking for stuff and not even really knowing exactly where it’s at,” he said. The cameras help detect fires quicker and get teams on the ground faster, shaving up to two hours off response times.

    “That’s significant in terms of how fast that fire can can spread and grow,” Bekkedahl said.

    Using AI to detect smoke from fires “is relatively easy,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft.

    “What is not easy is to have enough cameras that cover enough places,” he said, pointing to vast, remote areas in northern Canada that have burned this summer.

    Ferres’ team at Microsoft has been developing AI models to predict where fires are likely to start. They have fed the model with maps of areas that burned previously, along with climate and geospatial data.

    The system has its limitations — it can’t predict random events like a lightning strike. But it can sift through historical weather and climate data to identify patterns, such as areas that are typically drier. Even a road, which indicates people are nearby, is a risk factor, Ferres said.

    “It’s not going to get it all perfectly right,” he said. “But what it can do is it can build a probability map (based on) what happened in the past.”

    The technology, which Microsoft plans to offer as an open source tool, can help first responders trying to figure out where to focus their limited resources, Ferres said.

    Another company is looking to the heavens for a solution. German startup OroraTech analyzes satellite images with artificial intelligence.

    Taking advantage of advances in camera, satellite and AI technology, OroraTech has launched two mini satellites about the size of a shoebox into low orbit, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth’s surface. The Munich-based company has ambitions to send up eight more next year and eventually put 100 into space.

    As wildfires swept central Chile this year, OroraTech said it provided thermal images at night when aerial drones are used less frequently.

    Weeks after OroraTech launched its second satellite, it detected a fire near the community of Keg River in northern Alberta, where flames burned remote stretches of boreal forest repeatedly this summer.

    “There are algorithms on the satellite, very efficient ones to detect fires even faster,” CEO Thomas Gruebler said.

    The AI also takes into account vegetation and humidity levels to identify flare-ups that could spawn devastating megafires. The technology could help thinly stretched firefighting agencies direct resources to blazes with the potential to cause the most damage.

    “Because we know exactly where the fires are, we can see how the fires will propagate,” Gruebler said. “So, which fire will be the big fire in one day and which will stop on their own.”

    ___

    AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed.

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  • The threat of wildfires is rising. So is new artificial intelligence solutions to fight them

    The threat of wildfires is rising. So is new artificial intelligence solutions to fight them

    [ad_1]

    LONDON — Wildfires fueled by climate change have ravaged communities from Maui to the Mediterranean this summer, killing many people, exhausting firefighters and fueling demand for new solutions. Enter artificial intelligence.

    Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to scan the horizon for signs of smoke. A German company is building a constellation of satellites to detect fires from space. And Microsoft is using AI models to predict where the next blaze could be sparked.

    With wildfires becoming larger and more intense as the world warms, firefighters, utilities and governments are scrambling to get ahead of the flames by tapping into the latest AI technology — which has stirred both fear and excitement for its potential to transform life. While increasingly stretched first responders hope AI offers them a leg up, humans are still needed to check that the tech is accurate.

    California’s main firefighting agency this summer started testing an AI system that looks for smoke from more than 1,000 mountaintop camera feeds and is now expanding it statewide.

    The system is designed to find “abnormalities” and alert emergency command centers, where staffers will confirm whether it’s indeed smoke or something else in the air.

    “The beauty of this is that it immediately pops up on the screen and those dispatchers or call takers are able to interrogate that screen” and determine whether to send a crew, said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

    The cameras, part of a network that workers previously had to watch, provide billions of bytes of data for the AI system to digest. While humans still need to confirm any smoke sightings, the system helps reduce fatigue among staffers typically monitoring multiple screens and cameras, alerting them to look only when there’s possible fire or smoke, SeLegue said.

    It’s already helped. A battalion chief got a smoke alert in the middle of the night, confirmed it on his cellphone and called a command center in San Diego to scramble first responders to the remote area.

    The dispatchers said that if they hadn’t been alerted, the fire would have been much larger because it likely wouldn’t have been noticed until the next morning, SeLegue said.

    San Francisco startup Pano AI takes a similar approach, mounting cameras on cell towers that scan for smoke and alert customers, including fire departments, utility companies and ski resorts.

    The cameras use computer vision machine learning, a type of AI.

    “They’re trained very specifically to detect smoke or not, and we train them with images of smoke and images of not smoke,” CEO Sonia Kastner said.

    The images are combined with feeds from government weather satellites that scan for hotspots, along with other data sources, such as social media posts.

    The technology gets around one of the main problems in the traditional way of detecting wildfires — relying on 911 calls from passers-by that need confirmation from staffers before crews and water-dropping planes can be deployed.

    “Generally, only one in 20 of these 911 calls are actually a wildfire. Even during fire season, it might be a cloud or fog or a barbecue,” Kastner said.

    Pano AI’s systems do still rely on final confirmation, with managers playing a time lapse of the camera feed to ensure it’s smoke rising.

    For fighting forest fires, “technology is becoming really essential,” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president of energy delivery at Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility and a Pano AI customer.

    Utility companies sometimes play a role in sparking wildfires, when their power lines are knocked down by wind or struck by falling trees. Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started a devastating blaze in Maui this summer after apparently being downed by high winds.

    PGE, which provides electricity to 51 cities in Oregon, has deployed 26 Pano AI cameras, and Bekkedahl said they have helped speed up response and coordination with emergency services.

    Previously, fire departments were “running around looking for stuff and not even really knowing exactly where it’s at,” he said. The cameras help detect fires quicker and get teams on the ground faster, shaving up to two hours off response times.

    “That’s significant in terms of how fast that fire can can spread and grow,” Bekkedahl said.

    Using AI to detect smoke from fires “is relatively easy,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft.

    “What is not easy is to have enough cameras that cover enough places,” he said, pointing to vast, remote areas in northern Canada that have burned this summer.

    Ferres’ team at Microsoft has been developing AI models to predict where fires are likely to start. They have fed the model with maps of areas that burned previously, along with climate and geospatial data.

    The system has its limitations — it can’t predict random events like a lightning strike. But it can sift through historical weather and climate data to identify patterns, such as areas that are typically drier. Even a road, which indicates people are nearby, is a risk factor, Ferres said.

    “It’s not going to get it all perfectly right,” he said. “But what it can do is it can build a probability map (based on) what happened in the past.”

    The technology, which Microsoft plans to offer as an open source tool, can help first responders trying to figure out where to focus their limited resources, Ferres said.

    Another company is looking to the heavens for a solution. German startup OroraTech analyzes satellite images with artificial intelligence.

    Taking advantage of advances in camera, satellite and AI technology, OroraTech has launched two mini satellites about the size of a shoebox into low orbit, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth’s surface. The Munich-based company has ambitions to send up eight more next year and eventually put 100 into space.

    As wildfires swept central Chile this year, OroraTech said it provided thermal images at night when aerial drones are used less frequently.

    Weeks after OroraTech launched its second satellite, it detected a fire near the community of Keg River in northern Alberta, where flames burned remote stretches of boreal forest repeatedly this summer.

    “There are algorithms on the satellite, very efficient ones to detect fires even faster,” CEO Thomas Gruebler said.

    The AI also takes into account vegetation and humidity levels to identify flare-ups that could spawn devastating megafires. The technology could help thinly stretched firefighting agencies direct resources to blazes with the potential to cause the most damage.

    “Because we know exactly where the fires are, we can see how the fires will propagate,” Gruebler said. “So, which fire will be the big fire in one day and which will stop on their own.”

    ___

    AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed.

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  • White House preparing for government shutdown as House Republicans lack a viable endgame for funding

    White House preparing for government shutdown as House Republicans lack a viable endgame for funding

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    WASHINGTON — The White House is preparing Friday to direct federal agencies to get ready for a shutdown after House Republicans left town for the weekend with no viable plan to keep the government funded and avert politically and economically costly disruption of federal services.

    A federal shutdown after Sept. 30 seems all but certain unless Speaker Kevin McCarthy can persuade his rebellious hard-right flank of Republicans to allow Congress to approve a temporary funding measure to prevent closures as talks continue. Instead, he’s launched a much more ambitious plan to try to start passing multiple funding bills once the House returns Tuesday, with just five days to resolve the standoff.

    “We got members working, and hopefully we’ll be able to move forward on Tuesday to pass these bills,” McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters at the Capitol.

    McCarthy signaled his preference for avoiding a closure, but a hard-right flank of his House majority has effectively seized control. “I still believe if you shut down you’re in a weaker position,” he said.

    The standoff with House Republicans over government funding puts at risk a range of activities — including pay for the military and law enforcement personnel, food safety and food aid programs, air travel and passport processing — and could wreck havoc with the U.S. economy.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that if federal workers go unpaid it would be Republicans’ fault. “Our message is: This doesn’t have to happen,” she said. “They can do their job and keep these vital programs continuing, keeping the government open.”

    With the Oct. 1 start of a new fiscal year and no funding in place, the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget is preparing to advise federal agencies to review and update their shutdown plans, according to an OMB official. The start of this process suggests that federal employees could be informed next week if they’re to be furloughed.

    President Joe Biden has been quick to blame the likely shutdown on House Republicans, who are intent on spending cuts beyond those laid out in a June deal that also suspended the legal cap on the government borrowing’s authority until early 2025.

    “They’re back at it again, breaking their commitment, threatening more cuts and threatening to shut down government again,” Biden during a recent speech in suburban Maryland.

    McCarthy faces immense pressure for severe spending cuts from a handful of hard-right conservatives in his caucus, essentially halting his ability to lead the chamber. Many on the right flank are aligned with Donald Trump — the Republican front-runner to challenge Biden in the 2024 election. They opposed the budget deal the speaker reached with Biden earlier this year and are trying to dismantle it.

    Trump has urged the House Republicans on, pushing them to hold the line against federal spending.

    Led by Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., the right flank has all but commandeered control of the House debate in a public rebuke to the speaker.

    Late Thursday, the hard-right faction pushed McCarthy to consider their idea to shelve plans for a stopgap funding measure, called a continuing resolution, or CR, and instead start bringing up the 12 individual bills needed to fund the government.

    The House GOP leadership then announced just that — it would begin processing a package of four bills to fund Defense, Homeland Security, State and Foreign Operations and Agricultural departments, setting up voting for Tuesday when lawmakers return. Work on some bills had been held up by the same conservatives demanding passage now.

    “Any progress we are making is in spite of, not due to McCarthy,” Gaetz posted on social media, deriding the speaker for having sent lawmakers home for the weekend. “Pathetic.”

    Gaetz and his allies say they want to see the House engage in the hard work of legislating — even if it pushes the country into a shutdown — as they pursue sizable reductions and cuts.

    The House Rules Committee was holding a Friday afternoon session to begin preparing those bills, which historically require weeks of floor debate, with hundreds of amendments, but now are slated to be rushed to the floor for next week’s votes. The panel was expected to wrap up its work Saturday.

    It’s a capstone to a difficult week for McCarthy who tried, unsuccessfully, to advance a typically popular defense spending bill that was twice defeated in embarrassing floor votes. The speaker seemed to blame the defeat of the bill on fellow lawmakers “who just want to burn the whole place down.”

    McCarthy’s top allies, including Rep. Garrett Graves, R-La., insisted Friday they were still working toward both ends — passing annual spending bills and pushing for the most conservative stopgap CR with border security provisions — in time to prevent a shutdown.

    Shutdowns happen when Congress and the president fail to complete a set of 12 spending bills, or fail to approve a temporary measure to keep the government operating. As a result, federal agencies are required to stop all actions deemed non-essential. Since 1976, there have been 22 funding gaps, with 10 of them leading to workers being furloughed.

    The last and longest shutdown on record was for 35 days during Trump’s administration, between 2018 and 2019, as he insisted on funding to build a wall along the U.S. southern border that Democrats and some Republicans refused.

    Because some agencies already had approved funding, it was a partial closure. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it came at a cost of $3 billion to the U.S. economy. While $3 billion is a lot of money, it was equal to just 0.02% of U.S. economic activity in 2019.

    There could be costs to parts of the economy and difficulties for individuals.

    Military and law enforcement officials would go unpaid during the shutdown. The disaster relief fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency could be depleted, hurting the victims of wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding.

    Clinical trials on new prescription drugs could be delayed. Ten thousand children could lose access to care through Head Start, while environmental and food safety inspections would get backlogged.

    Food aid for Americans through the Women, Infants and Children program could be cut off for nearly 7 million pregnant women, mothers, infants and children.

    Brian Gardner, chief Washington strategist at the investment bank Stifel, said that air traffic controllers largely continued to work without pay during the previous shutdown. He noted that visa and passport applications would not be processed if the government is closed.

    The U.S. Travel Industry Association estimates that the travel sector could lose $140 million daily in a shutdown.

    But in a sign of how little damage that 35-day shutdown did to the overall economy, the S&P 500 stock index climbed 11.6% during the last government closure.

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  • US ambassador to Japan calls Chinese ban on Japanese seafood ‘economic coercion’

    US ambassador to Japan calls Chinese ban on Japanese seafood ‘economic coercion’

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    TOKYO — U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel accused China on Friday of using “economic coercion” against Japan by banning imports of Japanese seafood in response to the release of treated wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, while Chinese boats continue to fish off Japan’s coasts.

    “Economic coercion is the most persistent and pernicious tool in their economic toolbox,” Emanuel said in a speech Friday in Tokyo, calling China’s ban on Japanese seafood the latest example.

    China is the biggest market for Japanese seafood, and the ban has badly hurt Japan’s fishing industry.

    “China is engaged right now in fishing in Japan’s economic waters while they are simultaneously engaged in the unilateral embargo on Japan’s fish,” Emanuel said. He said China’s intention is to isolate Japan.

    Japan began gradually releasing treated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima plant into the sea on Aug. 24. The water has accumulated at the plant since it was crippled by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011. China immediately banned imports of Japanese seafood, accusing Tokyo of dumping “radiation contaminated water” into the ocean.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency has said the release, if carried out as planned, will have a negligible impact on the environment, marine life and human health.

    Emanuel posted four photos on X, formerly called Twitter, on Friday that he said showed “Chinese vessels fishing off Japan’s coast on Sept. 15, post China’s seafood embargo from the same waters. #Fukushima.”

    Emanuel has also posted other comments about China that have been interpreted as critical, including one on Sept. 15 about Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who has not appeared in public for weeks, speculating he might have been placed under house arrest.

    On Aug. 8, Emanuel posted that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Cabinet lineup was “resembling Agatha Christies’s novel ‘And Then There Were None,’” noting the disappearances of Li, Foreign Minister Qin Gang, and commanders of China’s rocket force.

    Four days later, he accused China of using AI to spread false claims that U.S. “weather weapons” had caused the wildfires in Maui and that the U.S. Army had introduced COVID-19 to China.

    “I think you can have a mature relationship, have dialogue, conversation, but when somebody is offsides … I think the most important thing you have to do is to be able to have veracity and call disinformation disinformation,” he said Friday.

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  • Wildfire-prone California to consider new rules for property insurance pricing

    Wildfire-prone California to consider new rules for property insurance pricing

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will let insurance companies consider climate change when setting their prices, the state’s chief regulator announced Thursday, a move aimed at preventing insurers from fleeing the state over fears of massive losses from wildfires and other natural disasters.

    Unlike other states, California does not let insurance companies consider current or future risks when deciding how much to charge for an insurance policy. Instead, they can only consider what’s happened on a property in the past to set the price.

    At a time when climate change is making wildfires, floods and windstorms more common, insurers say that restriction makes it difficult to truly price the risk on properties. It’s one reason why, in the past year, seven of the top 12 insurance companies doing business in California have either paused or restricted new business in the state.

    On Thursday, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said the state will write new rules to let insurers look to the future when setting their rates. But companies will only get to do this if they agree to write more policies for homeowners who live in areas with the most risk — including communities threatened by wildfires.

    “Modernizing our insurance market is not going to be easy or happen overnight. We are in really unchartered territory and we must make difficult choices when the world is changing rapidly,” Lara said at a news conference.

    The rule change could mean higher rates for homeowners who are already seeing dramatic increases. Eight insurance companies doing business in California have requested rate increases of at least 20% or higher this year, according to the California Department of Insurance.

    Harvey Rosenfield, founder of the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and author of a 1988 ballot proposition that regulates insurance rates, said Lara’s announcement “will dramatically increase homeowner and renter insurance bills by hundreds or even thousands of dollars.”

    But Lara said looking to the future to set rates doesn’t have to always be pessimistic. Insurers can also consider the billions of dollars the state has spent to better manage forests and the improvements homeowners have made to their homes to make them resistant to wildfires — all things insurers aren’t allowed to consider when setting rates under the current rules.

    “Insurers have advanced a very powerful argument that the past is not as good a predictor of the future as it used to be,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a national insurance consumer organization. “I think the (Insurance) department did what it needed to do to try to restore a viable market. We don’t have a viable market right now in this state in a lot of areas.”

    California isn’t the only state that’s struggled to keep home insurance companies amid natural disasters. Officials in Florida and Louisiana, which deal with hurricanes and flooding, have fought to keep companies writing policies. A recent report from First Street Foundation said about one-quarter of all homes in the nation are underpriced for climate risk in insurance. Florida allows insurers to consider climate risk with restrictions. States with less regulated insurance markets have insurers who build current and future events into their models.

    Wildfires have always been part of life in California, where it only rains for a few months out of the year. But as the climate has gotten hotter and dryer, it has made those fires much larger and more intense. Of the top 20 most destructive wildfires in state history, 14 have occurred since 2015, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

    Insurance companies have responded by not renewing coverage for many homeowners who live in areas threatened by wildfires. When that happens, homeowners have to purchase fire insurance from the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan. All insurance companies doing business in California must pay into a fund to provide coverage from the FAIR plan.

    The number of people on California’s FAIR plan nearly doubled in the five years leading up to 2021, and that number has almost certainly increased even more in the past two years.

    Lara said his plan is to require insurance companies to write policies for no less than 85% of their statewide market share in areas at risk for wildfires. That means if a company writes policies for 20 homes, it must write 17 new policies for homeowners in wildfire-distressed areas — moving those people off of the FAIR Plan.

    “This is a historic agreement between the department and insurance companies,” Lara said.

    The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, which represents insurers, called Lara’s actions “the first steps of many needed to address the deterioration” of the market.

    “California’s 35-year-old regulatory system is outdated, cumbersome and fails to reflect the increasing catastrophic losses consumers and businesses are facing from inflation, climate change, extreme weather and more residents living in wildfire prone areas,” Denni Ritter, vice president for state government relations, said in a statement.

    Jeremy Porter, a co-author of the Front Street Foundation report on climate risk, said allowing insurers to consider climate change in their pricing might lead to more competition in the state’s insurance market.

    “If this is implemented correctly, this would definitely allow insurers to come back into the market in California,” he said.

    Some consumer groups, including Consumer Watchdog, say they are not opposed to insurance companies using a model to look to the future to set their rates. But they want to see what is in that model. It’s not clear if California’s new rules will allow that. State regulators will spend much of the next year deciding what the rule will be.

    Lara said he’s committed to making those models public.

    “The department will be able to verify these models to make sure they’re accurate,” he said.

    —-

    Associated Press writer Ken Sweet contributed from New York.

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  • California wants to let insurers consider climate risk in pricing in exchange for insuring homes in wildfire-prone areas

    California wants to let insurers consider climate risk in pricing in exchange for insuring homes in wildfire-prone areas

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    California wants to let insurers consider climate risk in pricing in exchange for insuring homes in wildfire-prone areas

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 21, 2023, 6:32 PM

    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California wants to let insurers consider climate risk in pricing in exchange for insuring homes in wildfire-prone areas.

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  • Sydney Marathon runners hospitalized as Australia swelters in unusual spring heat wave | CNN

    Sydney Marathon runners hospitalized as Australia swelters in unusual spring heat wave | CNN

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    Reuters
     — 

    A sweltering heat wave in Australia took its toll on runners in the Sydney Marathon on Sunday, with 26 people taken to the hospital and about 40 treated for heat exhaustion by emergency services.

    Large parts of Australia’s southeast, including Sydney, are experiencing a spring heat wave, the national weather bureau said, with temperatures Monday expected to peak at up to 16 degrees Celsius (60 Fahrenheit) above the September average.

    The rising heat wave has been building in the country’s outback interior over the weekend and is likely to last until Wednesday across the states of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.

    The Bureau of Meteorology said it expected several early spring records to be broken over the next few days, calling the heat “very uncommon for September.”

    “A reprieve from the heat is not expected until Wednesday onwards, as a stronger cold front crosses the southeastern states,” the weather bureau said in a Facebook post on Sunday.

    Temperatures in Sydney’s west are expected to hit 36 degrees Celsius (96.8 Fahrenheit) on Monday before dropping to about 22 degrees Celsius (71 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, the weather bureau forecasts showed.

    The heat wave has also elevated the risks of fires, with several regions given “high” fire danger ratings, and authorities urging residents to prepare for bushfires. About 50 grass or bushfires are burning across New South Wales but all have been brought under control.

    Australia is bracing for a hotter southern hemisphere spring and summer this year after the possibility of an El Niño strengthened, and the weather forecaster said the weather event could likely develop between September and November.

    El Niño can prompt extreme weather events from wildfires to cyclones and droughts in Australia, with authorities already warning of heightened bushfire risks this summer.

    A thick smoke haze shrouded Sydney for several days last week as firefighters carried out hazard reduction burns to prepare for the looming bushfire season.

    Australia’s hot spring follows a winter with temperatures well above average. Scientists warn that extreme weather events like heat waves are only going to become more common and more intense unless the world stops burning planet-heating fossil fuels.

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  • Thousands march to kick off climate summit, demanding an end to fossil fuels

    Thousands march to kick off climate summit, demanding an end to fossil fuels

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    NEW YORK — Yelling that the future and their lives depend on ending fossil fuels, tens of thousands of protesters on Sunday kicked off a week where leaders will try once again to curb climate change primarily caused by coal, oil and natural gas.

    But protesters say it’s not going to be enough. And they aimed their wrath directly at U.S. President Joe Biden, urging him to stop approving new oil and gas projects, phase out current ones and declare a climate emergency with larger executive powers.

    “We hold the power of the people, the power you need to win this election,” said 17-year-old Emma Buretta of Brooklyn of the youth protest group Fridays for Future. “If you want to win in 2024, if you do not want the blood of my generation to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”

    The March to End Fossil Fuels featured such politicians as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and actors Susan Sarandon, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, Kyra Sedgewick and Kevin Bacon. But the real action on Broadway was where protesters crowded the street, pleading for a better but not-so-hot future. It was the opening salvo to New York’s Climate Week, where world leaders in business, politics and the arts gather to try to save the planet, highlighted by a new special United Nations summit Wednesday.

    Many of the leaders of countries that cause the most heat-trapping carbon pollution will not be in attendance. And they won’t speak at the summit organized by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a way that only countries that promise new concrete action are invited to speak.

    Organizers estimated 75,000 people marched Sunday.

    “We have people all across the world in the streets, showing up, demanding a cessation of what is killing us,” Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd. “We have to send a message that some of us are going to be living on, on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we will not take no for an answer.”

    This protest was far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches. Sunday’s rally attracted a large chunk, 15%, of first-time protesters and was overwhelmingly female, said American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies environmental movements and was surveying march participants.

    Of the people Fisher talked to, 86% had experienced extreme heat recently, 21% floods and 18% severe drought, she said. They mostly reported feeling sad and angry. Earth has just gone through the hottest summer on record.

    Among the marchers was 8-year-old Athena Wilson from Boca Raton, Florida. She and her mother Maleah, flew from Florida for Sunday’s protest.

    “Because we care about our planet,” Athena said. “I really want the Earth to feel better.”

    People in the South, especially where the oil industry is, and the global south, “have not felt heard,” said 23-year-old Alexandria Gordon, originally from Houston. “It is frustrating.”

    Protest organizers emphasized how let down they felt that Biden, who many of them supported in 2020, has overseen increased drilling for oil and fossil fuels.

    “President Biden, our lives depend on your actions today,” said Louisiana environmental activist Sharon Lavigne. “If you don’t stop fossil fuels our blood is on your hands.”

    Nearly one-third of the world’s planned drilling for oil and gas between now and 2050 is by U.S. interests, environmental activists calculate. Over the past 100 years, the United States has put more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any other country, though China now emits more carbon pollution on an annual basis.

    “You need to phase out fossil fuels to survive our planet,” said Jean Su, a march organizer and energy justice director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

    Marchers and speakers spoke of increasing urgency and fear of the future. The actress known as V, formerly Eve Ensler, premiered the anthem “Panic” from her new climate change oriented musical scheduled for next year. The chorus goes: “We want you to panic. We want you to act. You stole our future and we want it back.”

    Signs included “Even Santa Knows Coal is Bad” and “Fossil fuels are killing us” and “I want a fossil free future” and “keep it in the ground.”

    That’s because leaders don’t want to acknowledge “the elephant in the room,” said Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. “The elephant is that fossil fuels are responsible for the crisis. We can’t eat coal. We can’t drink oil, and we can’t have any new fossil fuel investments.”

    But oil and gas industry officials said their products are vital to the economy.

    “We share the urgency of confronting climate change together without delay; yet doing so by eliminating America’s energy options is the wrong approach and would leave American families and businesses beholden to unstable foreign regions for higher cost and far less reliable energy,” said American Petroleum Institute Senior Vice President Megan Bloomgren.

    Activists weren’t having any of that.

    “The fossil fuel industry is choosing to rule and conquer and take and take and take without limit,” Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Congregation Beth Elohim of Brooklyn said. “And so waters are rising and the skies are turning orange (from wildfire smoke) and the heat is taking lives. But you Mr. President can choose the other path, to be a protector of this Earth.”

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    Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

    ___

    Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • California lawsuit says oil giants deceived public on climate, seeks funds for storm damage

    California lawsuit says oil giants deceived public on climate, seeks funds for storm damage

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    LOS ANGELES — The state of California filed a lawsuit against some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, claiming they deceived the public about the risks of fossil fuels now faulted for climate change-related storms and wildfires that caused billions of dollars in damage, officials said Saturday.

    The civil lawsuit filed in state Superior Court in San Francisco also seeks creation of a fund — financed by the companies — to pay for recovery efforts following devastating storms and fires. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement the companies named in the lawsuit — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — should be held accountable.

    “For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us — covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet,” Newsom said. “California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for billions of dollars in damages — wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells.”

    The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group also named in the lawsuit, said climate policy should be debated in Congress, not the courtroom.

    “This ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers is nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of California taxpayer resources,” institute senior vice president Ryan Meyers said in a statement.

    That was echoed in a statement from Shell, which said the courtroom is not the proper venue to address global warming.

    “Addressing climate change requires a collaborative, society-wide approach,” the energy giant said. “We agree that action is needed now on climate change, and we fully support the need for society to transition to a lower-carbon future.”

    California’s legal action joins similar lawsuits filed by states and municipalities in recent years.

    “California’s suit adds to the growing momentum to hold Big Oil accountable for its decades of deception, and secure access to justice for people and communities suffering from fossil-fueled extreme weather and slow onset disasters such as sea level rise,” Kathy Mulvey of the Union of Concerned Scientists said in an email.

    The 135-page complaint argues that the companies have known since at least the 1960s that the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet and change the climate, but they downplayed the looming threat in public statements and marketing.

    It said the companies’ scientists knew as far back as the 1950s that the climate impacts would be catastrophic, and that there was only a narrow window of time in which communities and governments could respond.

    Instead, the lawsuit said, the companies mounted a disinformation campaign beginning at least as early as the 1970s to discredit a growing scientific consensus on climate change, and disputed climate change-related risks.

    State Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that the companies “have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.”

    Allegations in the lawsuit include faulting the companies for creating or contributing to climate change in California, false advertising, damage to natural resources and unlawful business practices for deceiving the public about climate change.

    Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement that “California’s decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies. … Californians have been living in a climate emergency caused by the fossil fuel industry, and now the state is taking decisive action to make those polluters pay.”

    Heavily Democratic California is the birthplace of the modern environmental movement, and the Newsom administration is pushing to expand solar power and other clean energy as the state aims to cut emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. While the state is considered a leader in addressing climate change, Newsom has not always lined up with the environmental advocacy wing.

    There have been tensions over updates the state’s aging water delivery system, clashes over new permits for oil and gas wells and what to do with water from rivers swollen by powerful storms, with activists alarmed that diverting too much water would be a death sentence for salmon and other threatened fish species.

    Newsom was once a leading voice to shutter the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant — the state’s last — but changed course last year and helped pave the way for a potentially longer operating run beyond what had been a planned closing by 2025, leading to criticism from leading environmental groups that has sought its closure.

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    Associated Press writer Adam Beam in Sacramento contributed.

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  • In wildfire-decimated Lahaina, residents and business owners to start getting looks at their properties

    In wildfire-decimated Lahaina, residents and business owners to start getting looks at their properties

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    Wailuku, Hawaii — Maui authorities said Thursday they’re planning to start letting residents and business owners make escorted visits to their properties in the restricted Lahaina Wildfire Disaster area later this month.

    It’s been nearly five weeks since the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century devastated the historic town of Lahaina, killing 115 people and with dozens still listed as missing.

    FILE PHOTO: Maui children face grief, destruction as schools start up after wildfire
    Views from the air show Lahaina on August 10, 2023 after wildfires driven by high winds burned across most of the town on the island of Maui in Hawaii several days earlier.

    MARCO GARCIA / REUTERS


    Darryl Oliveira, Maui Emergency Management Agency interim administrator, said in a news conference that officials plan to allow people in certain zones to start entering the restricted area Sept. 25. He said the goal and purpose of the supervised visits is for them to see their homes and properties safely and to get some closure.

    “I really want to appreciate, or extend my appreciation to the community for being so patient and understanding, because I know that this has been long-awaited,” Oliveira said.

    How process will work  

    The process will involve applying for a pass and meeting with officials before the escorted visits. Oliveira said they will be offered by zones depending on where the Environmental Protection Agency has finished hazardous materials removal work.

    The first zones will be announced Monday and officials will start contacting people to let them know and walk them through the process, he said.

    “It is just overwhelming to see the devastation, so part of our process is to support people and prepare them for what to experience,” he said. “We don’t want to traumatize or hurt anyone more than they’ve been hurt to date.”

    Oliveira said people will be provided with protective gear, including respirators and special suits, and instructed on how to properly sift through debris while limiting exposure to toxic ash, according to CBS Honolulu affiliate KGMB-TV. “We don’t want to hurt anyone any more than they’ve already been hurt,” he said.  

    Water, shade and portable toilets will be available during the visits, Oliveira added. Health care providers will be available, and there will be guidance for salvaging any items at the properties.

    US-POLITICS-FIRE-MAUI-BIDEN
    Fire damage is seen from President Biden’s motorcade in Lahaina, Hawaii, on August 21, 2023. 

    MANDEL NGAN / AFP via Getty Images


    “We don’t want people stirring up toxic dust so will give guidance on gently moving through to search for anything,” he said.

    People who didn’t live or have businesses in the restricted area won’t be allowed to visit.

    “It is not a safe environment for people to be in,” he said, adding much work remains to be done.

    What’s ahead  

    “At some point, the Army Corps of Engineers will start removing debris, but not until people have time to get in and get their closure,” he said.

    Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter, that people displaced by the fire are being moved into more permanent housing “the best that we can,” including longer-term rentals and extended Airbnb rentals with a goal of getting people into 18 months of housing.

    He said some may stay in hotels and another goal is to consolidate the number of hotels so services can more easily be provided.

    The Aug. 8 fire started in the hills above the historic oceanfront town. Within hours it spread through homes and apartment buildings, art galleries and restaurants, destroying more than 2,000 structures and causing an estimated $5.5 billion in damage.

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  • Sydney blanketed by smoke for a 4th day due to hazard reduction burning

    Sydney blanketed by smoke for a 4th day due to hazard reduction burning

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    Sydney is blanketed under thick wood smoke for a fourth consecutive day due to hazard reduction burns in preparation for the wildfire season

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 14, 2023, 1:32 AM

    A thick a blanket of smoke hangs over parts of the Sydney following New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) hazard reduction burns in the past week, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. The NSW Rural Fire Service and National Parks and Wildlife Service are burning over 600 hectares around Sydney before an expected hot weekend that will begin a run of high temperatures and increased fire risk. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

    The Associated Press

    SYDNEY — Sydney was blanketed under thick wood smoke for a fourth consecutive day on Thursday due to hazard reduction burns in preparation for the wildfire season.

    Australia’s most populous city after Melbourne has recorded some of the world’s worst air quality readings since the controlled burning of fuel loads in the surrounding landscapes began on Sunday.

    Fire authorities have only carried out 14% of planned hazard reduction burns across New South Wales state as of this week and are attempting to catch up before what is forecast to be a hot and dry Southern Hemisphere summer.

    New South Wales Rural Fire Service Inspector Ben Shepherd said the burns were suspended on Thursday and Friday because of excessive pollution levels and that Sydney’s air was expected to clear soon.

    “It’s mostly due to the smoke,” Shepherd said of the postponements.

    “For the next 48 hours, we’ll give this smoke a chance to clear without fire agencies adding additional smoke to it,” Shepherd added.

    Rain had prevented burning last week and an increased fire danger due to rising temperatures and windy conditions was expected to prevent burning late next week.

    The coming wildfire season across southeast Australia is expected to be the most destructive since the catastrophic Black Summer wildfires of 2019-20.

    The fires killed at least 33 people including 10 firefighters, destroyed more than 3,000 hones, razed 19 million hectares (47 million acres) and displaced thousands of residents.

    Medical authorities estimated more than 400 people were killed by the smoke, which enveloped major cities.

    Since then, three successive La Lina weather events have brought unusually wet and mild summers.

    The rain has also created larger fuel loads and frustrated authorities’ hazard reduction plans. Only a quarter of the hazard reduction target was achieved through controlled burning across New South Wales last fiscal year.

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  • Australian authorities protect Outback town against huge wildfire

    Australian authorities protect Outback town against huge wildfire

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    Emergency crews are working to protect the Outback Australian town of Tennant Creek with containment lines as a huge wildfire threatens the remote community of 3,000

    ByROD MCGUIRK Associated Press

    September 13, 2023, 3:31 AM

    In this photo released by Bushfires NT, a large bushfire burns in the Outback of Australia near Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. Emergency crews were working to protect the Outback Australian town of Tennant Creek with containment lines on Wednesday as a huge wildfire threatened the remote community of 3,000. (Bushfires NT via AP)

    The Associated Press

    CANBERRA, Australia — Emergency crews were working to protect the Outback Australian town of Tennant Creek with containment lines on Wednesday as a huge wildfire threatened the remote community of 3,000.

    The fire has scorched 10,000 square kilometers (3,900 square miles) of grass and scrubland in the Northern Territory east of Tennant Creek, a former gold mining town.

    Police Acting Commander James Gray-Spence said authorities had worked through the night to burn protective containment lines east and south of the town.

    “There is a high level of confidence that those containment lines are in place, planned and prepared,” Gray-Spence told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

    Wildfires are common across Australia’s northern tropical region during the current dry season that will end when the monsoons arrive during the Southern Hemisphere summer.

    Because water is in short supply across the region, fire fighting largely involves excavating fire breaks with earthmoving equipment.

    But teams were also using water bombers and strategic backburning against the fire near Tennant Creek which began last week.

    Charles Darwin University wildfire researcher Rohan Fisher said the fire was unusual in its large size and that it was encroaching on a community. Fires rarely threaten communities in Australia’s sparsely populated north.

    “It is one of the largest events that we’ve seen for a while,” Fisher said.

    “Fires of around this scale are not that uncommon in really remote parts of Australia, although they’re usually not reported on,” Fisher added.

    Unusually abundant rain in recent years meant there was more fuel in the landscape than usual, he said.

    The Northern Territory government on Tuesday declared an emergency situation in Tennant Creek and the surrounding Barkly region, which gives police emergency powers to move people and assets.

    Police Commissioner Michael Murphy said he was confident the town would not need to be evacuated and the emergency declaration was a precautionary measure for public safety.

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