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Tag: Wildfires

  • Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay?

    Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay?

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    LAHAINA, Hawaii — Ambulance and fire truck sirens wailed outside as Elsie Rosales stripped linens from king-sized mattresses at a beachfront resort in Lahaina.

    She tried to focus on the work, but was beset by dread: Had a wildfire taken the home she scrimped to buy on a housekeeper’s wages?

    It had. And now Rosales, like many other Filipino housekeepers used to cleaning hotels, is living in one with her family, a poignant example of how the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century has afflicted Maui’s heavily Filipino population.

    “All our hard work burned,” Rosales told The Associated Press in an interview conducted in Ilocano, her native language. “There is nothing left.”

    The disaster has prompted fears about what will become of Lahaina’s community and character as it rebuilds.

    Many are concerned residents like Rosales won’t be able to afford to live in Lahaina after the community is rebuilt, and that affluent outsiders seeking a home in the oceanfront town will price them out.

    Will Filipinos, Native Hawaiians and others who have been the backbone of the tourism industry for so long be able to remain here? Will they want to?

    Filipinos began arriving in Hawaii more than a century ago to labor on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. As their descendants and successive generations of immigrants have settled, they have become deeply ingrained in the community’s culture.

    Today, they account for the second-largest ethnic group on Maui, with nearly 48,000 island residents tracing their roots to the Philippines, 5,000 of them in Lahaina, which was about 40% of the town’s population before the fire. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates about one-fourth of Hawaii’s 1.4 million people are of Filipino descent.

    Many of them work in hotels, health care and food service. Filipinos account for about 70% of the members of UNITE HERE Local 5, the union representing workers in those industries, union President Gemma Weinstein said. She is Filipino and a former Honolulu hotel housekeeper.

    “If it wasn’t for the Filipinos having two or three jobs, a lot of the businesses here, including the hotels, would have a hard time operating,” said Rick Nava, a community advocate and Filipino immigrant who lost his own home in the fire.

    A month after the Aug. 8 disaster killed at least 115 people, nearly 6,000 people were staying at two dozen hotels serving as temporary shelters around Maui.

    A number are hotel housekeepers like Rosales, 61, who is staying in a two-bedroom suite with her two sisters, her son, his wife and three grandchildren at the Sands of Kahana resort. Rosales’ 72-year-old sister, Evangeline Balintona, works there as a housekeeper.

    In the sisters’ suite, there is an artificial plant in the corner of the living room, between a window overlooking the ocean and the flat-screen TV, that Balintona has dusted countless times. When she makes the bed, she does it the way she always has done for work, with layers of sheets and a comforter tucked neat and tight under a heavy mattress.

    “I know every corner of this room,” Balintona said.

    She is thinking about returning to Ilocos Norte, the family’s hometown in the Philippines. She hopes her son there has saved enough from the monthly remittances she sent over the years to support her if she returns with nothing.

    Tourists have been told to avoid Lahaina for now, and many hotels are housing federal aid workers. Balintona and others worry about the futures of their jobs.

    Rosales, who said she did not know anyone who died in the fire, immigrated to Hawaii in 1999. After years of renting and saving for a down payment, she bought a five-bedroom home on Lahaina’s Aulike Street in 2014 for $490,000. Her mother and siblings owned homes nearby. Those also are gone now.

    She continues to work at another resort a few miles from where the sisters are staying. On her days off, she sorts out insurance paperwork, including trying to itemize belongings lost in the fire.

    Rosales recalled the night of the fire when she and her co-workers — almost all from the Philippines — were forced to remain in the hotel because roads were blocked. She didn’t learn the fate of her home until the next morning, when her youngest son called.

    “Mom, no more house,” he told her.

    “No, anak ko!” she shrieked, using an Ilocano term meaning “my child.”

    Around her, other housekeepers sobbed as they received similar calls.

    The Rev. Efren Tomas, pastor of Christ the King Church in Kahului, worries about the mental health of survivors. He has been counseling groups of Filipinos staying in hotels, even celebrating Mass in a hotel reception room.

    “For Filipinos, it’s very hard for them to go into one-on-one counseling,” he said. “They want to gather in a group. I think they get strength from each other.”

    Many longtime Lahaina residents, including Native Hawaiians, told the AP they worry that whatever is built from the ashes of Lahaina won’t include Filipinos and other ethnic groups who made it the working class community it was.

    “The new Lahaina should be the old Lahaina,” said Alicia Kalepa, who lives in a Hawaiian homestead where most of the houses survived the fire. “Mixed culture.”

    Gilbert Keith-Agaran, a state senator from Maui who is stepping down to focus on litigation work involving the fires, said he won’t be surprised if many Filipinos leave for places such as Las Vegas, an affordable destination for Hawaii residents who no longer can afford to live here.

    “I think it’s hard to take the Filipinos out of the fabric of our community,” said Keith-Agaran, whose father came from Ilocos Norte in 1946 for plantation work. “We intermarried a lot with others who are here.”

    Melen Magbual Agcolicol was 13 when she arrived on Maui from the Philippines more than four decades ago with her family. Since then, she has become a community advocate and is president of Binhi at Ani, “Seed and Harvest,” which operates Maui’s only Filipino community center.

    Her group unveiled a fund called Tulong for Lahaina, or Help for Lahaina. The idea is to provide grants to Filipinos who lost homes, shops or loved ones.

    “The starting over is so difficult. How are you going to start over? Number one, you don’t have a job,” she said. “Number two, your sanity. Your sanity is not normal until you think that you can accept what happened to you.”

    Rosales’ three sons don’t want her to sell her property, but she is finding it difficult to think about the future. She can’t sleep or eat, can’t stop crying.

    Residents have not been allowed to return to the burned areas. Rosales wants to go back. She wants to comb through the rubble of her American dream, hoping to find a piece of her jewelry collection, a gold bracelet or a watch, luxuries she would never have been able to afford in the Philippines.

    “Even if it’s black,” she said, “I want to take it as a remembrance.”

    She touched the delicate gold hoops dangling from her ears. She put them on the morning she left her house to go to work.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Bobby Caina Calvan contributed.

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  • Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay?

    Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay?

    [ad_1]

    LAHAINA, Hawaii — Ambulance and fire truck sirens wailed outside as Elsie Rosales stripped linens from king-sized mattresses at a beachfront resort in Lahaina.

    She tried to focus on the work, but was beset by dread: Had a wildfire taken the home she scrimped to buy on a housekeeper’s wages?

    It had. And now Rosales, like many other Filipino housekeepers used to cleaning hotels, is living in one with her family, a poignant example of how the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century has afflicted Maui’s heavily Filipino population.

    “All our hard work burned,” Rosales told The Associated Press in an interview conducted in Ilocano, her native language. “There is nothing left.”

    The disaster has prompted fears about what will become of Lahaina’s community and character as it rebuilds.

    Many are concerned residents like Rosales won’t be able to afford to live in Lahaina after the community is rebuilt, and that affluent outsiders seeking a home in the oceanfront town will price them out.

    Will Filipinos, Native Hawaiians and others who have been the backbone of the tourism industry for so long be able to remain here? Will they want to?

    Filipinos began arriving in Hawaii more than a century ago to labor on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. As their descendants and successive generations of immigrants have settled, they have become deeply ingrained in the community’s culture.

    Today, they account for the second-largest ethnic group on Maui, with nearly 48,000 island residents tracing their roots to the Philippines, 5,000 of them in Lahaina, which was about 40% of the town’s population before the fire. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates about one-fourth of Hawaii’s 1.4 million people are of Filipino descent.

    Many of them work in hotels, health care and food service. Filipinos account for about 70% of the members of UNITE HERE Local 5, the union representing workers in those industries, union President Gemma Weinstein said. She is Filipino and a former Honolulu hotel housekeeper.

    “If it wasn’t for the Filipinos having two or three jobs, a lot of the businesses here, including the hotels, would have a hard time operating,” said Rick Nava, a community advocate and Filipino immigrant who lost his own home in the fire.

    A month after the Aug. 8 disaster killed at least 115 people, nearly 6,000 people were staying at two dozen hotels serving as temporary shelters around Maui.

    A number are hotel housekeepers like Rosales, 61, who is staying in a two-bedroom suite with her two sisters, her son, his wife and three grandchildren at the Sands of Kahana resort. Rosales’ 72-year-old sister, Evangeline Balintona, works there as a housekeeper.

    In the sisters’ suite, there is an artificial plant in the corner of the living room, between a window overlooking the ocean and the flat-screen TV, that Balintona has dusted countless times. When she makes the bed, she does it the way she always has done for work, with layers of sheets and a comforter tucked neat and tight under a heavy mattress.

    “I know every corner of this room,” Balintona said.

    She is thinking about returning to Ilocos Norte, the family’s hometown in the Philippines. She hopes her son there has saved enough from the monthly remittances she sent over the years to support her if she returns with nothing.

    Tourists have been told to avoid Lahaina for now, and many hotels are housing federal aid workers. Balintona and others worry about the futures of their jobs.

    Rosales, who said she did not know anyone who died in the fire, immigrated to Hawaii in 1999. After years of renting and saving for a down payment, she bought a five-bedroom home on Lahaina’s Aulike Street in 2014 for $490,000. Her mother and siblings owned homes nearby. Those also are gone now.

    She continues to work at another resort a few miles from where the sisters are staying. On her days off, she sorts out insurance paperwork, including trying to itemize belongings lost in the fire.

    Rosales recalled the night of the fire when she and her co-workers — almost all from the Philippines — were forced to remain in the hotel because roads were blocked. She didn’t learn the fate of her home until the next morning, when her youngest son called.

    “Mom, no more house,” he told her.

    “No, anak ko!” she shrieked, using an Ilocano term meaning “my child.”

    Around her, other housekeepers sobbed as they received similar calls.

    The Rev. Efren Tomas, pastor of Christ the King Church in Kahului, worries about the mental health of survivors. He has been counseling groups of Filipinos staying in hotels, even celebrating Mass in a hotel reception room.

    “For Filipinos, it’s very hard for them to go into one-on-one counseling,” he said. “They want to gather in a group. I think they get strength from each other.”

    Many longtime Lahaina residents, including Native Hawaiians, told the AP they worry that whatever is built from the ashes of Lahaina won’t include Filipinos and other ethnic groups who made it the working class community it was.

    “The new Lahaina should be the old Lahaina,” said Alicia Kalepa, who lives in a Hawaiian homestead where most of the houses survived the fire. “Mixed culture.”

    Gilbert Keith-Agaran, a state senator from Maui who is stepping down to focus on litigation work involving the fires, said he won’t be surprised if many Filipinos leave for places such as Las Vegas, an affordable destination for Hawaii residents who no longer can afford to live here.

    “I think it’s hard to take the Filipinos out of the fabric of our community,” said Keith-Agaran, whose father came from Ilocos Norte in 1946 for plantation work. “We intermarried a lot with others who are here.”

    Melen Magbual Agcolicol was 13 when she arrived on Maui from the Philippines more than four decades ago with her family. Since then, she has become a community advocate and is president of Binhi at Ani, “Seed and Harvest,” which operates Maui’s only Filipino community center.

    Her group unveiled a fund called Tulong for Lahaina, or Help for Lahaina. The idea is to provide grants to Filipinos who lost homes, shops or loved ones.

    “The starting over is so difficult. How are you going to start over? Number one, you don’t have a job,” she said. “Number two, your sanity. Your sanity is not normal until you think that you can accept what happened to you.”

    Rosales’ three sons don’t want her to sell her property, but she is finding it difficult to think about the future. She can’t sleep or eat, can’t stop crying.

    Residents have not been allowed to return to the burned areas. Rosales wants to go back. She wants to comb through the rubble of her American dream, hoping to find a piece of her jewelry collection, a gold bracelet or a watch, luxuries she would never have been able to afford in the Philippines.

    “Even if it’s black,” she said, “I want to take it as a remembrance.”

    She touched the delicate gold hoops dangling from her ears. She put them on the morning she left her house to go to work.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Bobby Caina Calvan contributed.

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  • Most of West Maui will welcome back visitors next month under a new wildfire emergency proclamation

    Most of West Maui will welcome back visitors next month under a new wildfire emergency proclamation

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    Most of West Maui will officially reopen to travelers next month under a new wildfire emergency proclamation signed by Hawaii’s governor

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 9, 2023, 4:12 PM

    FILE – Charred remains of homes are visible following a wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, Aug. 22, 2023. The number of people still missing following wildfires that destroyed the historic community of Lahaina a month ago has dropped, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Friday, Sept. 8, 2023, while the number of confirmed deaths has remained at 115. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

    The Associated Press

    HONOLULU — Most of West Maui will officially reopen to travelers Oct. 8 under a new wildfire emergency proclamation signed on Friday by Hawaii Gov. Josh Green.

    Nonessential travel to much of the island’s western coastline has been strongly discouraged since devastating wildfires killed at least 115 people in the historic town of Lahaina last month.

    State tourism officials initially urged travelers to stay away from Maui so residents and agencies could focus on emergency response efforts and supporting those displaced by the fires. In mid-August, officials began encouraging tourists to return to other parts of Maui, avoiding the burn zone and spending money to help the region recover.

    On Thursday, Green told a meeting of the state Council on Revenues that he expected authorities to reopen most of West Maui to travelers in October, with the exception of the fire-damaged neighborhoods. The area, which includes beach resorts in Kaanapali, north of historic Lahaina, has 11,000 hotel rooms. That’s half Maui’s total.

    In the emergency proclamation signed Friday, the governor said the previous guidance that strongly discouraged nonessential travel to West Maui will be discontinued Oct. 8.

    Tourism is a major economic driver in Hawaii, and the wildfire disaster prompted state officials to lower their 2023 economic growth prediction for the entire state to 1.1%, down from 1.8%.

    The number of visitors arriving on Maui sank about 70% after the Aug. 8 fire, down to 2,000 a day, and only half of the available hotel rooms there are occupied, said Hawaii Lodging & Tourism Association president Mufi Hannemann. Airlines have begun offering steep discounts on flights to Hawaii, and some resorts have slashed room rates by 20% or are offering a fifth night free.

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  • For small biz reliant on summer tourism, extreme weather is the new pandemic — for better or worse

    For small biz reliant on summer tourism, extreme weather is the new pandemic — for better or worse

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    NEW YORK — For small businesses that rely on summer tourism to keep afloat, extreme weather is replacing the pandemic as the determining factor in how well a summer will go.

    The pandemic had its ups and downs for tourism, with a total shutdown followed by a rush of vacations due to pent-up demand. This year, small businesses say vacation cadences are returning to normal. But now, they have extreme weather to deal with — many say it’s hurting business, but more temperate spots are seeing a surge.

    Tourism-related businesses have always been at the mercy of the weather. But with heat waves, fires and storms becoming more frequent and intense, small businesses increasingly see extreme weather as their next long-term challenge.

    For Jared Meyers, owner of Legacy Vacation Resorts, with eight locations, including four in Florida, Hurricane Idalia’s landfall Wednesday as a Category 3 storm led to a loss in revenue as he temporarily closed one resort and and closed another to new guests. It also means a lengthy cleanup period to fix gutter and other damage and beach cleanup, including replanting of sea grass, sea grapes and other plants to protect against the next storm.

    “Even when the hurricane doesn’t hit directly, it wreaks havoc economically, emotionally — to those that have suffered previous losses — and to our way of life,” he said.

    A lifelong Florida resident, he’s used to hurricanes, but fears their intensity is getting worse. In fact, the number of storms that intensify dramatically within 240 miles (385 kilometers) of a coastline across the globe grew to 15 a year in 2020 compared to five a year in 1980, according to a study published in Nature Communications.

    “It does feel like and probably will continue to feel like we’re just hopping from one emergency to another based on climate change,” Meyers said.

    For Steve Silberberg in Saco, Maine, who runs Fitpacking, a company that guides people on wilderness backpacking trips in national and state parks and forests, extreme weather is becoming a serious obstacle. National Park Service Research has shown that national parks are experiencing extreme weather conditions at a higher rate than the rest of the country because of where they’re located.

    Historic snowfall in March at Yosemite — followed by a wildfire — affected one hike Silberberg had planned. Another hike was canceled due to unusually large snowfall rendering the Narrows — part of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park in Utah — impassable due to a high volume of meltwater. He had to cancel a trip to the Los Padres National Forest in California due to wildfires and subsequent flooding, which destroyed trails and made them impassable.

    “We are quickly approaching a crossroads as to how to keep the business viable,” he said. “It seems that almost half of our trips are affected in some way by increasingly extreme weather events.”

    Silberberg is trying to find ways to make climate change work for him, however. He is thinking about starting a company that helps people visit places that may disappear due to climate change, such as Glacier National Park in Montana or the Everglades in Florida, which is threatened by rising sea levels.

    In Southern California this summer, businesses faced sweltering heat, followed by Tropical Storm Hilary, the first tropical storm the region had seen in 84 years.

    “Definitely extreme weather is here to stay,” said Shachi Mehra executive chef and partner at Adya, Indian restaurant in Anaheim, California. The restaurant is located in the Anaheim Packing House, a food hall in a historic 1919 citrus-packing house near Disneyland.

    The restaurant closed for a day proactively during Tropical Storm Hilary, losing a day of sales. Heat has been more of an issue, as business slowed in late July this summer during a surge in temperatures. Mehra said she suspects the heat is behind the slowdown since typically things start to slow in late August or September.

    Media focus on extreme weather can hurt business, too. Dan Dawson, owner of Horizon Divers in Key Largo, Florida, saw business boom during the pandemic. Now it’s back to pre-pandemic levels. But when storms like Idalia close in, tourists flee — even though Dawson’s spot in Key Largo was 300 miles (480 kilometers) from where Idalia hit.

    “Once a storm is coming close we stop diving and once it goes by it can take up to two weeks for tourists to come back, and that is if we don’t have any damage,” he said.

    Still, in some places that offer a respite from the heat and storms, businesses are getting an unexpected bump.

    At Little America Flagstaff, a hotel set in 500 acres (202 hectares) of private forest celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, temperatures in the 90s felt pleasant compared to the record-breaking heat in Phoenix, a two-hour drive to the south, which had temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit-plus (43.4 degrees Celsius) for 31 straight days.

    “When you see temperatures rising to the amount they were in Phoenix you immediately saw, not just with our hotel but all the hotels in the area, our occupancies all went up,” said Fred Reese, the hotel’s general manager.

    Similarly, at Mission Point Resort on Mackinac Island, a historic island in Lake Michigan that doesn’t allow cars, temperatures have hovered in the temperate 70s while other places around the country have seen triple-digit heat. That leaves Michigan tourists often rubbing elbows with visitors from other states.

    “It has been brutally hot in most of the country and it has been very, very nice up here in northern Michigan,” said Liz Ware, sales and marketing executive and part of the family that owns Mission Point. “And so we have seen a lot of people from the Texas, Florida, Georgia area coming up north to northern Michigan because it is so temperate up here.”

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  • For small biz reliant on summer tourism, extreme weather is the new pandemic — for better or worse

    For small biz reliant on summer tourism, extreme weather is the new pandemic — for better or worse

    [ad_1]

    NEW YORK — For small businesses that rely on summer tourism to keep afloat, extreme weather is replacing the pandemic as the determining factor in how well a summer will go.

    The pandemic had its ups and downs for tourism, with a total shutdown followed by a rush of vacations due to pent-up demand. This year, small businesses say vacation cadences are returning to normal. But now, they have extreme weather to deal with — many say it’s hurting business, but more temperate spots are seeing a surge.

    Tourism-related businesses have always been at the mercy of the weather. But with heat waves, fires and storms becoming more frequent and intense, small businesses increasingly see extreme weather as their next long-term challenge.

    For Jared Meyers, owner of Legacy Vacation Resorts, with eight locations, including four in Florida, Hurricane Idalia’s landfall Wednesday as a Category 3 storm led to a loss in revenue as he temporarily closed one resort and and closed another to new guests. It also means a lengthy cleanup period to fix gutter and other damage and beach cleanup, including replanting of sea grass, sea grapes and other plants to protect against the next storm.

    “Even when the hurricane doesn’t hit directly, it wreaks havoc economically, emotionally — to those that have suffered previous losses — and to our way of life,” he said.

    A lifelong Florida resident, he’s used to hurricanes, but fears their intensity is getting worse. In fact, the number of storms that intensify dramatically within 240 miles (385 kilometers) of a coastline across the globe grew to 15 a year in 2020 compared to five a year in 1980, according to a study published in Nature Communications.

    “It does feel like and probably will continue to feel like we’re just hopping from one emergency to another based on climate change,” Meyers said.

    For Steve Silberberg in Saco, Maine, who runs Fitpacking, a company that guides people on wilderness backpacking trips in national and state parks and forests, extreme weather is becoming a serious obstacle. National Park Service Research has shown that national parks are experiencing extreme weather conditions at a higher rate than the rest of the country because of where they’re located.

    Historic snowfall in March at Yosemite — followed by a wildfire — affected one hike Silberberg had planned. Another hike was canceled due to unusually large snowfall rendering the Narrows — part of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park in Utah — impassable due to a high volume of meltwater. He had to cancel a trip to the Los Padres National Forest in California due to wildfires and subsequent flooding, which destroyed trails and made them impassable.

    “We are quickly approaching a crossroads as to how to keep the business viable,” he said. “It seems that almost half of our trips are affected in some way by increasingly extreme weather events.”

    Silberberg is trying to find ways to make climate change work for him, however. He is thinking about starting a company that helps people visit places that may disappear due to climate change, such as Glacier National Park in Montana or the Everglades in Florida, which is threatened by rising sea levels.

    In Southern California this summer, businesses faced sweltering heat, followed by Tropical Storm Hilary, the first tropical storm the region had seen in 84 years.

    “Definitely extreme weather is here to stay,” said Shachi Mehra executive chef and partner at Adya, Indian restaurant in Anaheim, California. The restaurant is located in the Anaheim Packing House, a food hall in a historic 1919 citrus-packing house near Disneyland.

    The restaurant closed for a day proactively during Tropical Storm Hilary, losing a day of sales. Heat has been more of an issue, as business slowed in late July this summer during a surge in temperatures. Mehra said she suspects the heat is behind the slowdown since typically things start to slow in late August or September.

    Media focus on extreme weather can hurt business, too. Dan Dawson, owner of Horizon Divers in Key Largo, Florida, saw business boom during the pandemic. Now it’s back to pre-pandemic levels. But when storms like Idalia close in, tourists flee — even though Dawson’s spot in Key Largo was 300 miles (480 kilometers) from where Idalia hit.

    “Once a storm is coming close we stop diving and once it goes by it can take up to two weeks for tourists to come back, and that is if we don’t have any damage,” he said.

    Still, in some places that offer a respite from the heat and storms, businesses are getting an unexpected bump.

    At Little America Flagstaff, a hotel set in 500 acres (202 hectares) of private forest celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, temperatures in the 90s felt pleasant compared to the record-breaking heat in Phoenix, a two-hour drive to the south, which had temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit-plus (43.4 degrees Celsius) for 31 straight days.

    “When you see temperatures rising to the amount they were in Phoenix you immediately saw, not just with our hotel but all the hotels in the area, our occupancies all went up,” said Fred Reese, the hotel’s general manager.

    Similarly, at Mission Point Resort on Mackinac Island, a historic island in Lake Michigan that doesn’t allow cars, temperatures have hovered in the temperate 70s while other places around the country have seen triple-digit heat. That leaves Michigan tourists often rubbing elbows with visitors from other states.

    “It has been brutally hot in most of the country and it has been very, very nice up here in northern Michigan,” said Liz Ware, sales and marketing executive and part of the family that owns Mission Point. “And so we have seen a lot of people from the Texas, Florida, Georgia area coming up north to northern Michigan because it is so temperate up here.”

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  • Americans have long wanted the perfect endless summer. Jimmy Buffett offered them one

    Americans have long wanted the perfect endless summer. Jimmy Buffett offered them one

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    It seemed wistfully appropriate, somehow, that news of Jimmy Buffett’s death emerged at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, the demarcation point of every American summer’s symbolic end. Because for so many, the 76-year-old Buffett embodied something they held onto ever so tightly as the world grew ever more complex: the promise of an eternal summer of sand, sun, blue salt water and gentle tropical winds.

    He was the man whose studied devil-may-care attitude became a lifestyle and a multimillion-dollar business — a connecting filament between the suburbs and the Florida Keys and, beyond them, the Caribbean. From Margaritaville to the unspecified tropical paradise where he just wanted to eat cheeseburgers (“that American creation on which I feed”), he became a life’s-a-beach avatar for anyone working for the weekend and hoping to unplug — even in the decades before “unplugging” became a thing.

    “It’s important to have as much fun as possible while we’re here. It balances out the times when the minefield of life explodes,” he posted last year.

    The beach has stood in for informality and relaxation in American popular culture for more than a century, propelled by the early Miss America pageants on the Atlantic City boardwalk and the culturally appropriative “tiki” aesthetic that GIs brought back from the South Pacific after World War II. It gained steam with the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello “Beach Blanket Bingo” years, the mainstreaming of surfing and beach-motel culture and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” And it continues unabated — just look to the dubious stylings of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”

    That train arrived at Margaritaville in the 1970s, and Buffett jumped aboard and became the conductor and chief engineer of its gently rebellious counterculture. He was hardly a critical darling, but he was, as he sang, “a pirate, 200 years too late” who believed that latitude directly impacted attitude. That accounted for a lot of the mass appeal.

    These days, for every piece of the culture that made the shoreline or the tropical island a potentially dispiriting place to become unanchored — “The Beach” or “Lost” or even, heaven help us, “Gilligan’s Island” — there is a counterbalancing Buffett song right there to tell you that at the edge of the land you can find peace, or at least a chance at it.

    There was of course “Margaritaville,” the song that launched a “Parrothead” empire, the one that prescribed taking time “watching the sun bake” and invoked “booze in the blender” and shrimp “beginnin’ to boil” (from which you can draw a direct line to the sensibility of seafood restaurant chains like Joe’s Crab Shack).

    There was “Last Mango in Paris,” in which the singer had to “get out of the heat” to meet his hero, who told him to inhale all that life offers, and that even after that, “Jimmy, there’s still so much to be done.” There was “’Bama Breeze,” an ode to a bar along the Gulf Coast where “you’re one of our own” and, says the protagonist, “Good God, I feel at home down there.”

    And there was “Come Monday,” in which a trip to do a gig in San Francisco — on Labor Day weekend, no less — became a meditation on city (“four lonely days in that brown LA haze”) vs. paradise (“that night in Montana”) and which he liked better.

    Here was the funny thing, though: In that song, the unrepentantly inland Montana became his beach, his paradise of the moment. That was part of why he resonated: because the metaphorical Buffett beach could be pretty much anywhere that contained people looking for a bit of peace.

    Just as country music spent decades building “country” from an actual geography into an entire state of mind, Buffett — whose roots were in country and folk — did the same thing with the beach. In his hands, it became an aesthetic as much as a place — the anti-city, where the backbreaking labor and the cubicle blues could be left behind for a realm where real people roamed. That’s been a deeply American trope from the beginning.

    Americans have always romanticized the frontier — the edge of civilization, the place whose exploration defined them. But the frontier was, of course, a lonely and dangerous place. As Buffett rhapsodized, the sand-covered edge of the land that he so adored was also the edge of civilization — but only in the most appealing (and, not coincidentally, mostly apolitical) ways possible. In the universe of his songs, the beach was a safe frontier that you could explore if you wanted to. But you could also sit back in a straw hut and hat, sip a Corona, contemplate your navel and your sins — and be left alone.

    In their 1998 book “The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth,” Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker trace the emergence of the beach as “a narcotic for holiday masses.” They write: “Before it could be transformed into a theater of pleasure, it had to be discovered, claimed and invented as a place apart from the messy business of survival.”

    Buffett and his music — and the empire they begat — became pivotal figures in that claiming and invention. Through them, the off-the-grid sensibility and the loud-shirt aesthetic were vigorously mainstreamed and popularized.

    All of his imagery, beach and beach-adjacent, shouted to us that there was a better, more relaxing way than regular daily life. It said that all those characters and people were waiting there for us with bare, sandy feet and cold beers and a bit of melancholy, and that we could jack into that sunny world and escape the monotony — for a long weekend or forever.

    And therein lies a rub.

    These days, summer ain’t what it used to be. With apologies to Buffett and the Beach Boys, the notion of an “endless summer” has a different, more unsettling connotation after these climate-change-inflected months of dangerous heat and devastating wildfires in places like Maui. Five years ago, even Paradise burned. So “watching the sun bake” has become a statement with multiple layers, and some of them are more rueful than relaxing.

    Jimmy Buffett’s work was big on not reading too much into things. You could say, fairly, that his musical aesthetic was built around a three-word statement: Don’t overthink it. “Never meant to last,” he once sang. But as with most artists who echo resoundingly in the culture, his work — and, not incidentally, the legions of Parrotheads whose lifestyles he inspired — takes on additional dimensions when you pull the lens back and consider the broader shoreline.

    That was true especially when the flip-flop fantasy collided with the reality that most people live. That collision took place at the intersection where Buffett was the most memorable, where the summer of the mind met the reality of the rest of the year. As he put it in “Son of a Son of a Sailor”: “The sea’s in my veins, my tradition remains. I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.”

    ___

    Ted Anthony, the director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him at http://twitter.com/anthonyted

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  • For small biz reliant on summer tourism, extreme weather is the new pandemic — for better or worse

    For small biz reliant on summer tourism, extreme weather is the new pandemic — for better or worse

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    NEW YORK — For small businesses that rely on summer tourism to keep afloat, extreme weather is replacing the pandemic as the determining factor in how well a summer will go.

    The pandemic had its ups and downs for tourism, with a total shutdown followed by a rush of vacations due to pent-up demand. This year, small businesses say vacation cadences are returning to normal. But now, they have extreme weather to deal with — many say it’s hurting business, but more temperate spots are seeing a surge.

    Tourism-related businesses have always been at the mercy of the weather. But with heat waves, fires and storms becoming more frequent and intense, small businesses increasingly see extreme weather as their next long-term challenge.

    For Jared Meyers, owner of Legacy Vacation Resorts, with eight locations, including four in Florida, Hurricane Idalia’s landfall Wednesday as a Category 3 storm led to a loss in revenue as he temporarily closed one resort and and closed another to new guests. It also means a lengthy cleanup period to fix gutter and other damage and beach cleanup, including replanting of sea grass, sea grapes and other plants to protect against the next storm.

    “Even when the hurricane doesn’t hit directly, it wreaks havoc economically, emotionally — to those that have suffered previous losses — and to our way of life,” he said.

    A lifelong Florida resident, he’s used to hurricanes, but fears their intensity is getting worse. In fact, the number of storms that intensify dramatically within 240 miles (385 kilometers) of a coastline across the globe grew to 15 a year in 2020 compared to five a year in 1980, according to a study published in Nature Communications.

    “It does feel like and probably will continue to feel like we’re just hopping from one emergency to another based on climate change,” Meyers said.

    For Steve Silberberg in Saco, Maine, who runs Fitpacking, a company that guides people on wilderness backpacking trips in national and state parks and forests, extreme weather is becoming a serious obstacle. National Park Service Research has shown that national parks are experiencing extreme weather conditions at a higher rate than the rest of the country because of where they’re located.

    Historic snowfall in March at Yosemite — followed by a wildfire — affected one hike Silberberg had planned. Another hike was canceled due to unusually large snowfall rendering the Narrows — part of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park in Utah — impassable due to a high volume of meltwater. He had to cancel a trip to the Los Padres National Forest in California due to wildfires and subsequent flooding, which destroyed trails and made them impassable.

    “We are quickly approaching a crossroads as to how to keep the business viable,” he said. “It seems that almost half of our trips are affected in some way by increasingly extreme weather events.”

    Silberberg is trying to find ways to make climate change work for him, however. He is thinking about starting a company that helps people visit places that may disappear due to climate change, such as Glacier National Park in Montana or the Everglades in Florida, which is threatened by rising sea levels.

    In Southern California this summer, businesses faced sweltering heat, followed by Tropical Storm Hilary, the first tropical storm the region had seen in 84 years.

    “Definitely extreme weather is here to stay,” said Shachi Mehra executive chef and partner at Adya, Indian restaurant in Anaheim, California. The restaurant is located in the Anaheim Packing House, a food hall in a historic 1919 citrus-packing house near Disneyland.

    The restaurant closed for a day proactively during Tropical Storm Hilary, losing a day of sales. Heat has been more of an issue, as business slowed in late July this summer during a surge in temperatures. Mehra said she suspects the heat is behind the slowdown since typically things start to slow in late August or September.

    Media focus on extreme weather can hurt business, too. Dan Dawson, owner of Horizon Divers in Key Largo, Florida, saw business boom during the pandemic. Now it’s back to pre-pandemic levels. But when storms like Idalia close in, tourists flee — even though Dawson’s spot in Key Largo was 300 miles (480 kilometers) from where Idalia hit.

    “Once a storm is coming close we stop diving and once it goes by it can take up to two weeks for tourists to come back, and that is if we don’t have any damage,” he said.

    Still, in some places that offer a respite from the heat and storms, businesses are getting an unexpected bump.

    At Little America Flagstaff, a hotel set in 500 acres (202 hectares) of private forest celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, temperatures in the 90s felt pleasant compared to the record-breaking heat in Phoenix, a two-hour drive to the south, which had temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit-plus (43.4 degrees Celsius) for 31 straight days.

    “When you see temperatures rising to the amount they were in Phoenix you immediately saw, not just with our hotel but all the hotels in the area, our occupancies all went up,” said Fred Reese, the hotel’s general manager.

    Similarly, at Mission Point Resort on Mackinac Island, a historic island in Lake Michigan that doesn’t allow cars, temperatures have hovered in the temperate 70s while other places around the country have seen triple-digit heat. That leaves Michigan tourists often rubbing elbows with visitors from other states.

    “It has been brutally hot in most of the country and it has been very, very nice up here in northern Michigan,” said Liz Ware, sales and marketing executive and part of the family that owns Mission Point. “And so we have seen a lot of people from the Texas, Florida, Georgia area coming up north to northern Michigan because it is so temperate up here.”

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  • Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says number missing from Maui fire could drop from 388 to fewer than 100

    Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says number missing from Maui fire could drop from 388 to fewer than 100

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    HONOLULU — The number of people listed as missing from Maui’s devastating wildfire could drop from nearly 400 to fewer than 100 when authorities provide an update Friday on their efforts to locate them, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said.

    “We think the number has dropped down into the double digits, so thank God,” he said Thursday in a video posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.

    Authorities have said at least 115 people died in the fire, which tore through Lahaina in a matter of hours on Aug. 8 — the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in a century. But initially more than 1,000 people were considered unaccounted for, with family, friends or acquaintances reporting them as missing.

    Officials narrowed that list down to 388 names who were credibly considered missing, but even that list included the names of many who were alive or who were known to have perished. Once authorities published the names, more than 200 people quickly came forward with information about those listed.

    Meanwhile, Green told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday his administration has opened several investigations into people who have allegedly made unsolicited offers for property in the fire-stricken Maui town of Lahaina in violation of a new emergency order.

    Green prohibited such offers by signing an emergency proclamation on Aug. 19 aimed at preventing land in the historic coastal community from flowing into the hands of outside buyers. The order aims to give residents some “breathing room” as they decide what to do next, Green said.

    Even before fire, Lahaina was a rapidly gentrifying town and there’s been widespread concern since that Native Hawaiians and local-born residents who have owned properties in their families for generations might feel pressured to sell.

    The fear is they would leave Lahaina, Maui or the state, and take their culture and traditions with them, contributing to the ongoing exodus of Hawaii’s people to less expensive places to live.

    “We’ve seen that in a lot of different places in our country and in our world where people have lost everything but their land and someone swoops in and buys properties for pennies on the dollar,” Green said. “We want to keep this land in the hands of local people, and we want to give them at least a chance to decide whether they’d like to build back.”

    About 1,800 to 1,900 homes were destroyed in the fire. The town of 12,000 people was home to many who worked in hotels and restaurants in nearby Kaanapali and Lahaina itself.

    About 6,000 people are staying in hotels and vacation rentals while waiting for the toxic waste left by the fire to be cleaned up and rebuilding to begin.

    Earlier this month Green, a Democrat, said he wanted to impose a moratorium on land sales in Lahaina to prevent people from being displaced. But the governor said a blanket ban “may not be doable” and he didn’t want to prevent people who are considering property sales from initiating those conversations.

    The prohibition on unsolicited offers for property was a “de facto” moratorium, he said.

    Authorities have received eight separate complaints about unsolicited offers, said David Day, a spokesperson for Attorney General Anne Lopez. All eight are under investigation, he said. Those found guilty of a violation may be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $5,000.

    Lahaina resident Melody Lukela-Singh said she was disappointed the governor didn’t impose an outright ban as he initially said.

    “Outsiders should not have the opportunity to grab land or properties. Because emotions are running high, so everyone is vulnerable,” Lukela-Singh said.

    She spoke near her temporary lodgings a few miles from the site of her Front Street home, which burned in the fire. Lukela-Singh said she would not sell her land if any offers were made.

    “You know, it’s the only thing that we have left,” said Lukela-Singh, who is Native Hawaiian. She knows of three families, all Filipino, who are selling their homes and want to move away because they can’t handle the stress of seeing Lahaina burned to the ground.

    State Rep. Troy Hashimoto, a Democrat who chairs the House housing committee and represents the central Maui community of Wailuku, said the prohibition on unsolicited offers was a “nuanced” approach.

    “You don’t really want to be bothering a lot of landowners, especially when they’re not in that frame of mind or ready to discuss it,” Hashimoto said. “But I wouldn’t want to stop a landowner if they are proactively wanting to make a move, right?”

    The situation presents two competing interests, said Robert Thomas, the director of property rights litigation at California-based Pacific Legal Foundation. One is the U.S. Supreme Court has found people have a right to decide what to do with their property. The other is the government has an interest in making sure people aren’t preyed upon.

    “It seems to me, and that’s just me observing this, that someone took a deep breath and said: ‘We can accomplish our goals of protecting the property owners here from predatory behavior without taking the drastic and perhaps unconstitutional route of just throwing this blanket ban,’” said Thomas, who practiced property and land law in Hawaii for 35 years.

    Green earlier floated the idea of the state acquiring land in Lahaina to ensure local people weren’t priced out of the rebuilt community, but said Thursday the state would not do so unless the community asked.

    One possibility would be the state forming a land trust to buy properties from families who could repurchase them later.

    He also was open to hearing from Lahaina residents about what they want the state government to do with existing state lands in their town.

    “The state’s not going to make any move or take any initiative to build anything unless it’s what is asked for by the community,” Green said.

    Green said he was considering setting up a “victim assistance fund” similar to the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which would make payments to those who suffered losses. The objective would be to compensate people without the need for large payouts to “middlemen” such as attorneys who often take 30% to 40% of legal settlements, he said.

    It was too early to say who would put money into the project, but such funds often receive money from private, philanthropic and government sources, said Green, who planned to announce details during an address scheduled for Sept. 8.

    ____

    Kelleher reported from Lahaina, Hawaii.

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  • Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson launch fund with $10 million for displaced Maui residents

    Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson launch fund with $10 million for displaced Maui residents

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    Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson have committed $10 million to make direct payments to people on Maui who are unable to return to their homes because of the wildfires, through a new fund they announced Thursday.

    The People’s Fund of Maui will give $1,200 a month to adults who are not able to return to their primary residences because of the recent wildfires, including people who owned and rented their homes, according to the fund’s website. The fund will also seek donations to extend the length of time it can provide the support.

    “How do we help?” the “Young Rock” star said he and Winfrey asked each other during the wildfires, saying in a video released along with the announcement that they grappled with how to best direct their efforts. “You want to take care of the greatest need of the people, and that’s giving them money.”

    They are looking forward to the help of “every person who called me and said, ‘What can I do?’” Winfrey said in the video. “This is what you can do.”

    The pair were inspired by a similar fund set up by Dolly Parton after wildfires swept through Gatlinburg, Tennessee in December 2016, killing 14 people and destroying 2,400 structures.

    Jeff Conyers, president of The Dollywood Foundation, said he consulted with Winfrey’s team multiple times in the past weeks to share the lessons that they’d learned from administrating the fund, which eventually granted $11 million to families who had lost their homes.

    “Dolly’s idea was that, ‘Hey, look, these are my people and I want to take care of them and we trust them to know what recovery looks like for themselves and their families in the days and weeks following this immediate catastrophe here,’” Conyers said.

    Parton’s fund, called My People Fund, worked with first responders and a local utility company and asked residents to help them determine which structures were destroyed and who lived in those homes, Conyers said. Around 1,000 families eventually received assistance from the fund, according to an evaluation from the University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Social Work. That included a final $5,000 lump sum transfer at the end of six months.

    To qualify for the People’s Fund of Maui, applicants must show a government ID and a utility bill in their name for a lost or uninhabitable residence, the fund’s website said.

    Winfrey, who lives on Maui part-time, visited an emergency shelter on Maui in the days after the wildfire hit and worried about effectively getting resources to residents. At least 115 people were killed in the fires, though an unknown number are still missing. The fire that ripped through the historic town of Lahaina on Aug. 8 was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century.

    Forecasters warned Wednesday that gusty winds and low humidity increased the risk that fires could spread rapidly in the western parts of each Hawaiian island, though they were not as powerful as the winds that helped fuel the deadly blaze three weeks ago.

    In the announcement, Winfrey and Johnson said they consulted with “community elders, leaders and residents including Hōkūlani Holt-Padilla, Keali’i Reichel, Archie Kalepa, Ekolu Lindsey, Kimo Falconer, Tiare Lawrence, Kaimana Brummel, Kaleikoa Ka’eo, Brian Keaulana, Kaimi Kaneholani, Henohea Kāne, Paele Kiakona, Ed Suwanjindar, Shep Gordon and Jason Momoa.”

    The Entertainment Industry Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that helps celebrities administer their charitable work, is sponsoring the fund, the announcement said.

    Johnson and Winfrey hope the fund will continue to make transfers to qualifying residents for at least six months, but Winfrey said it would be up to the American public to determine how long the fund extends, based on their support and donations.

    When setting up a direct cash transfer program, it’s important to define the objective, said Holly Welcome Radice, the regional representative for the Americas at CALP Network, a collective of organizations that studies cash assistance programs. In this case, $1,200 should correspond to the price of housing or the living costs for an adult in the area or whatever the need is the fund is seeking to meet, she said.

    “The objective will be difficult to meet if your transfer value is not connected to the reality of the people,” she said, adding the fund should consider if the local economy can respond to the influx of money and map out what other services people may need.

    “If it’s feasible and appropriate, then cash is a very direct way for people to benefit and have agency,” Radice said.

    The fund should also spend time communicating the parameters of the program clearly, she said, “so people understand who qualifies and why they qualify and making sure that there is some type of feedback mechanism where people can place grievances.”

    ___

    This story was first published on August 31, 2023. It was updated on September 1, 2023, to correct the name of nonprofit managing the People’s Fund of Maui. It is the Entertainment Industry Foundation, not the Entertainment Industry Fund.

    ___

    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • After Maui’s wildfires, thousands brace for long process of restoring safe water service

    After Maui’s wildfires, thousands brace for long process of restoring safe water service

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    Maggie T. Sutrov showered, drank treated tap water and watered her garden before she learned that she shouldn’t be using the water in her home on Maui after wildfires devastated the island. Concerned about others making the same mistake, she quickly created a flier on water contamination from guidance she’d found on the county’s website and worked with a pop-up community center to get the word out.

    “Every day, people were showing up there going ‘What, I can’t drink the water? I didn’t know that,’” Sutrov said. Three weeks after the fire, Sutrov and others are anxious to know when the island’s water will be safe.

    “When is this over?” Sutrov wondered.

    So far, tests have found no concerning levels of contaminants in the drinking water. But extensive testing is still needed, with access to most of Lahaina slowed by hazardous conditions and the search for human remains.

    Some areas under the unsafe water advisory could be cleared to use their tap water in a couple of weeks, said John Stufflebean, director of the Maui County Department of Water Supply.

    But experts and history suggest it could take months or years before the worst of the damaged areas have safe water fully restored.

    “We have a way to go before we can say that it’s safe,” Stufflebean said.

    The county first told people in Upper Kula and Lahaina not to use their water on Aug. 11 shortly after fire damaged water pipes as it sped across the land. So far, one water quality test on the northwest edge of Lahaina showed low levels of benzene, a chemical known to cause cancer, but it was within federal safety limits.

    That’s likely a clue to what more testing will find, said Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University professor who studied drinking water contamination following California’s 2018 Camp Fire and Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire.

    “As you move closer to the middle of the water system where structures were destroyed, you’ll likely see higher levels of contamination,” he said.

    Where homes and other structures burned, so did their interior pipes, along with shallow-buried exterior ones that connected them to the public water line, and the water meters, Stufflebean said. The utility’s networks of reservoirs, pumps, wells and treatment plants on Maui weren’t affected, and it’s unlikely that main lines — thick pipes buried more deeply — burned, he said.

    “What other places have found in fires is that the main lines tend not to get damaged because they are buried,” he said.

    That was the case in Paradise, California, the city almost completely destroyed in the Camp Fire. Main lines buried several feet underground were OK, though water utility assistant district manager Mickey Rich said small sections were damaged when lost pressure sucked in smoke and contaminants. Seventeen miles of the town’s 172 miles of main lines were contaminated and await replacement, and the city is still replacing service lines five years after the blaze.

    Kurt Kowar, director of public works and utilities in Louisville, Colorado, said it took just a week to get parts of the water system there back online after the Marshall Fire. But in more severe burn areas, it took months to assess the damage, including where contamination had occurred, and flush it from the system. The city distributed bottled water and set up refill stations to hold residents over.

    “We’re almost approaching our two-year mark. And as we’ve cleaned up the properties and people are starting to rebuild, we are still doing protocols of testing service lines to verify there’s no contamination,” he said.

    Kowar just returned from a trip to Maui alongside others from Louisville and Paradise where they met with the Department of Water Supply to share knowledge about what to test for and how to decontaminate the system.

    “It was very emotional to see all that again,” he said of the damage. “It was kind of healing to be able to give our knowledge back and help them move faster or give them an idea of what’s coming in the future.”

    Stufflebean’s department will soon expand the number of chemicals it’s testing for, he told a room packed with residents in Kula, a mountainside community about 24 miles from Lahaina, last week. The residents were told not to drink or bathe in their water until further testing is completed.

    When Stufflebean mentioned that a map for the water advisory was on the department’s website, some frustration could be heard: “Some people do not have internet,” one person responded.

    The county-run utility is stretched thin trying to restore the water system and doesn’t have a lot of time for outreach, said Chris Shuler, a hydrologist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, who lives on Maui. To try to fill the information gap, he’s part of a team from the university’s Water Resources Research Center that has set up a community tap water monitoring program.

    They offer free testing for 88 compounds to residents within the unsafe water advisory area.

    “People want to know what’s in their water, but at the same time they just want to have information and help them navigate through this difficult time,” he said.

    As with the county, the research center’s first round of results didn’t find concerning levels of contamination, but they’ve only just begun. They have more than 200 requests for sampling. Any significant results would be reported to the county.

    Sutrov was lucky. Her family’s home, where she was born and raised, survived the fire while some of her neighbors’ homes did not. Now, as the island community still reels in the traumatic aftermath, her patience for slow information is waning.

    “Everyone in whatever their role is is doing the best they can, but there are also distinct gaps that have been uncovered in this,” Sutrov said.

    Stufflebean acknowledged as much at the community water meeting she attended.

    “We’re enhancing our communication, which has not been terrific, I admit,” Stufflebean said.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Sam Metz contributed from Salt Lake City.

    ___

    Follow Brittany Peterson on X, formerly Twitter: @brittanykpeterson

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • Residents return to find homes gone, towns devastated in path of Idalia

    Residents return to find homes gone, towns devastated in path of Idalia

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    HORSESHOE BEACH, Fla. — Hurricanes and tropical storms are nothing new in the South, but the sheer magnitude of damage from Idalia shocked Desmond Roberson as he toured what as left of his Georgia neighborhood.

    Roberson took a drive through Valdosta on Thursday with a friend to check out damage after the storm, which first hit Florida as a hurricane and then weakened into a tropical storm as it made its way north, ripped through the town of 55,000.

    On one street, he said, a tree had fallen on nearly every house. Roads remained blocked by tree trunks and downed power lines, and traffic lights were still blacked out at major intersections.

    “It’s a maze,” Roberson said. “I had to turn around three times, just because roads were blocked off.”

    The storm had 90 mph (145 kph) winds when it made a direct hit on Valdosta on Wednesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said.

    “We’re fortunate this storm was a narrow one, and it was fast moving and didn’t sit on us,” Kemp told a news conference Thursday in Atlanta. “But if you were in the path, it was devastating. And we’re responding that way.”

    One Georgia resident was killed when a tree fell on him as he tried to clear another tree from a road.

    The storm first made landfall Wednesday in Florida, where it razed homes and downed power poles. It then swung northeast, slamming Georgia, flooding many of South Carolina’s beaches and sending seawater into the streets of downtown Charleston. In North Carolina it poured more than 9 inches (23 centimeters) of rain on Whiteville, which flooded downtown buildings.

    Thousands of utility linemen rushed to restore power in Florida but nearly 100,000 customers were still without electricity Thursday night.

    The storm had moved away from the U.S. coast early Thursday and spun out into the Atlantic, still packing winds of 65 mph (105 kph). It could hit Bermuda on Saturday, bringing heavy rainfall and potential flash flooding to the island, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

    Meanwhile, residents along the path of destruction returned to pick through piles of rubble that used to be homes.

    James Nobles returned to the tiny town of Horseshoe Beach in Florida’s remote Big Bend to find his home had survived the battering winds and rain but many of his neighbors weren’t as fortunate.

    “The town, I mean, it’s devastated,” Nobles said. “It’s probably 50 or 60 homes here, totally destroyed. I’m a lucky one.”

    Residents, most of whom evacuated inland during the storm, helped each other clear debris or collect belongings — high school trophies, photos, records, china. They frequently stopped to hug amid tears. Six-foot-high (1.8-meter-high) watermarks stained walls still standing, marking the extent of the storm surge.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis toured the area with his wife, Casey, and federal emergency officials.

    “I’ve seen a lot of really heartbreaking damage,” he said, noting a church that had been swamped by more than 4 feet (1.2 meters) of water.

    Tammy Bryan, a member of the severely damaged First Baptist Church, said Horseshoe Beach residents consider themselves a family, one largely anchored by the church.

    “It’s a breath of fresh air here,” Bryan said. “It’s beautiful sunsets, beautiful sunrises. We have all of old Florida right here. And today we feel like it’s been taken away.”

    Florida officials said there was one hurricane-related death in the Gainesville area, but didn’t release any details.

    But unlike previous storms, Idalia didn’t wreak havoc on major urban centers. It provided only glancing blows to Tampa Bay and other more populated areas, DeSantis noted. In contrast, Hurricane Ian last year hit the heavily populated Fort Myers area, leaving 149 dead in the state.

    President Joe Biden spoke to DeSantis and promised whatever federal aid is available. Biden also announced that he will go to Florida on Saturday to see the damage himself.

    The president used a news conference at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters to send a message to Congress, especially those lawmakers who are balking at his request for $12 billion in emergency funding to respond to natural disasters.

    “We need this disaster relief request met and we need it in September” after Congress returns from recess, said Biden, who had pizza delivered to FEMA employees who have been working around the clock on Idalia and the devastating wildfires on Maui, Hawaii.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Daniel Kozin in Horseshoe Beach; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Jeff Amy in Atlanta; Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; Lisa J. Adams Wagner in Evans, Georgia; and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.

    ___

    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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  • Maui officials face questions over wildfires response as search for victims wraps up

    Maui officials face questions over wildfires response as search for victims wraps up

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    As flames ripped through Maui’s historic town of Lahaina on Aug. 8, in what would become the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century, desperation was everywhere.

    Social media showed the fire and people running for their lives, and yet Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen would not say what he was doing as the flames spread. 

    “I’m not going to speak to social media,” he told CBS News. “I wasn’t on social media. We didn’t have time for that.” 

    And yet, Bissen wouldn’t say what he was doing. It was his job to ask the state for emergency backup. But in a tense back-and-forth with CBS News national correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti, he said he did not place a single call in the hours during and long after the fire.

    “Mayor Bissen, you are the highest ranking official here on the island. If the buck stops with your office, how is that possible?” Vigliotti asked.

    “I can’t speak to what — or whose responsibility it was to communicate directly,” Bissen responded. “I can’t say who was responsible for communicating with General Hara.”

    Major General Kenneth Hara, the director of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, said in a recent interview with Hawaii News Now that he was initially unaware of crucial details about the fire. “I thought everyone had gotten out safely,” he said. “It wasn’t until probably the next day I started hearing about fatalities.”

    “I thought everyone had gotten out safely,” he said. “It wasn’t until probably the next day I started hearing about fatalities.”

    But Hara also wouldn’t clarify exactly where he was as the fire was gaining strength, telling CBS News he doesn’t think he “could have done anything about [the deaths].”

    “That fire was so rapid, and by the time everyone had situational awareness, it was too late,” he said.

    But there are renewed questions about if it was too late. Many victims ran into the ocean to escape the flames, and some weren’t rescued until the morning.

    In the days following the firestorm, thousands of people, including tourists and residents, were stranded without power, running water, food or access to medical aid.

    The official death toll as of Wednesday stood at 115, but an unknown number of people were still missing on Maui. The number of unaccounted for reached as high as 1,100, according to an FBI assessment.

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  • Biden warns Idalia still dangerous, says he hasn’t forgotten about the victims of Hawaii’s wildfires

    Biden warns Idalia still dangerous, says he hasn’t forgotten about the victims of Hawaii’s wildfires

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    WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden warned Wednesday that Hurricane Idalia was “still very dangerous” even though the storm had weakened after it came ashore in Florida and said he has not forgotten about the wildfire victims in Hawaii, declaring himself “laser focused” on helping them recover.

    Challenged by back-to-back extreme weather episodes — wildfires that burned a historic town on the island of Maui to the ground and a hurricane that forecasters said could bring catastrophic flooding — the Democratic president who is running for a second term sought to appear in command of the federal government’s response to both events.

    Some Republicans in Congress have threatened to investigate the federal response in Hawaii after some Maui residents complained that the government wasn’t sending enough early help.

    Biden said he had spoken to the governors of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, all states affected by Idalia. He received his second briefing in as many days from Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and directed her to spend Thursday with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to start assessing the hurricane damage and the needs there.

    DeSantis, who is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and Biden have clashed in recent months over the socially conservative governor’s policies. as politicians from opposing parties will do. But Biden said there was no trace of politics in his storm-related conversations with the governor.

    “I know that sounds strange,” Biden said, noting how partisan politics have become. He recalled accompanying DeSantis in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, the last major storm to wallop Florida.

    “I think he trusts my judgment and my desire to help and I trust him to be able to suggest that this is not about politics,” the president said. “This is about taking care of the people of the state.”

    After coming ashore, Idalia made landfall near Keaton Beach at 7:45 a.m. as a high-end Category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained winds near 125 mph (205 kph). It had weakened to a tropical storm with winds of 70 mph (113 kph) by Wednesday afternoon.

    Biden also announced $95 billion in infrastructure funds will be going to Maui to help harden the electrical grid and pay for such things as erecting stronger poles to hold up power lines or bury them underground where possible, and to deploy technology that can send alerts about power disruptions.

    Some people on the island whose homes were burned have complained that authorities have refused to let them return to their properties. Biden appealed for patience, explaining that the hazardous material must be removed before anyone can return.

    “We’re doing everything we can to move heaven and earth to help you recover, rebuild and return to your lives,” he said, adding that the situation will be as “frustrating as the devil for people.”

    “I want to be clear with the people of Maui about what to expect. The work we’re doing is going to take time, in some cases a long time,” he added.

    The federal government is paying to remove the debris, including hazardous material.

    Biden said he understands how painful the situation is, with lives disrupted, including the start of the new school year, and people displaced.

    “I get it. What can I tell you? The one thing I can tell you is we’re going to be with you every step of the way,” the president said.

    He met with his Cabinet on Wednesday to discuss the response in Maui and heard from Bob Fenton, the FEMA official he put in charge of overseeing the island’s long-term recovery.

    “We are going to make sure you are healed and you’re in better shape than before,” Biden said, recalling his visit to Maui on Aug. 21. “I said when I was on the island last week we’re not leaving until the job’s done, and we’ll be there as long as it takes.”

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  • 2 found dead in eastern Washington wildfires identified, more than 350 homes confirmed destroyed

    2 found dead in eastern Washington wildfires identified, more than 350 homes confirmed destroyed

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    SPOKANE, Wash. — The men found dead in two wildfires that ignited in eastern Washington earlier this month have been identified, and the number of homes destroyed has been confirmed at more than 350.

    Carl Grub, 86, died on Aug. 18 near an intersection in Medical Lake west of Spokane in the area of the Gray fire, which started that day, according to a Friday news release from the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office. Grub’s cause and manner of death is still pending.

    Grub, with his brother, founded The Jensen Memorial Youth Ranch, where he taught kids interested in agriculture how to care for and raise livestock, KREM-TV reported. Earlier this year, the Junior Livestock Show of Spokane had been dedicated to Grub.

    “The world needs more people like Carl,” the Junior Livestock Show of Spokane wrote on its Facebook page. “He will be greatly missed.”

    On Aug. 20, Alex Brown died in Elk, Washington, north of Spokane in an area burned by the Oregon fire. Brown, 49 died from thermal and inhalation injuries, and his manner of death listed as accidental.

    The fires sparked on Aug. 18 during critical fire weather conditions. The Gray fire started west of Medical Lake, prompting mandatory evacuations and burning around Interstate 90, closing it in that area for more than two days.

    About 240 homes and 86 other kinds of structures were destroyed in the Gray fire, Lily Mayea, public information officer with Northwest Team 7 on the Gray fire, said Tuesday.

    The human-caused blaze has scorched 15.75 square miles (40.79 square kilometers) and was 85% contained as of Tuesday. Evacuations remain in place for some people, although none as of Tuesday were mandatory.

    The Oregon fire began east of Elk and has burned 16.9 square miles (43.77 square kilometers) with 79% containment as of Tuesday. As of 4 p.m. Tuesday, all evacuation notices connected to the Oregon fire have been lifted, said Bill Queen, public information officer with Pacific Northwest Incident Management Team 3 on the Oregon fire.

    He said 126 primary residences and 258 outbuildings were destroyed in the blaze.

    Gov. Jay Inslee on Aug. 19 declared a statewide emergency because of the two fires and others burning around the state.

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  • Tropical Storm Idalia is nearing Florida. Residents are being urged to wrap up their preparations

    Tropical Storm Idalia is nearing Florida. Residents are being urged to wrap up their preparations

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    TAMPA, Fla. — Florida residents loaded up on sandbags and evacuated from homes in low-lying areas along the Gulf Coast as Tropical Storm Idalia intensified Monday and forecasters predicted it would hit in days as a major hurricane with potentially life-threatening storm surges.

    “You should be wrapping up your preparation for #TropicalStormIdalia tonight and Tues morning at the latest,” the National Weather Service in Tampa Bay said Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter.

    As the state prepared, Idalia thrashed Cuba with heavy rain, especially in the westernmost part of the island, where the tobacco-producing province of Pinar del Rio is still recovering from the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian almost a year ago.

    Authorities in the province issued a state of alert, and residents were evacuated to friends’ and relatives’ homes as authorities monitored the Cuyaguateje river for possible flooding. As much as 10 centimeters (4 inches) of rain fell in Cuba on Sunday, meteorological stations reported.

    Idalia is expected to start affecting Florida with hurricane-force winds as soon as late Tuesday and arrive on the coast by Wednesday. It is the first storm to hit Florida this hurricane season and a potentially big blow to the state, which is also dealing with lingering damage from last year’s Hurricane Ian.

    Idalia is also the latest in a summer of natural disasters, including wildfires in Hawaii, Canada and Greece; the first tropical storm to hit California in 84 years, and devastating flooding in Vermont.

    “Just got to prepare for these things, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst and, you know, hunker down, as they say,” said Derek Hughes as he waited to load up his car with sandbags at a city park in Tampa.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 46 counties, a broad swath that stretches across the northern half of the state from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Coast. The state has mobilized 1,100 National Guard members, who have 2,400 high-water vehicles and 12 aircraft at their disposal for rescue and recovery efforts.

    Tampa International Airport and St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport said they would close on Tuesday, and the Sunrail commuter rail service in Orlando was being suspended.

    DeSantis warned of a “major impact” to the state, noting the potential for Idalia to become a Category 3 hurricane.

    “The property — we can rebuild someone’s home,” DeSantis said during a news conference Monday. “You can’t unring the bell, though, if somebody stays in harm’s way and does battle with Mother Nature.”

    DeSantis said the Florida Department of Transportation would waive tolls on highways in the Tampa area and the Big Bend starting at 4 a.m. Tuesday to help ease any burden on people in the path of the storm.

    Large parts of the western coast of Florida are at risk for storm surges and floods. Evacuation notices have been issued in 21 counties with mandatory orders for some people in eight of those counties. Many of the notices were for people in low-lying and coastal areas, for those living in structures such as mobile and manufactured homes, recreational vehicles and boats, and for people who would be vulnerable in a power outage.

    Pasco and Levy counties, located north of Tampa, both ordered mandatory evacuations for some residents. In Levy County, officials said residents of Cedar Key must be off the island by Tuesday evening because storm surges would make bridges impassable.

    “Once the storm surge comes in, help may not be available to reach you,” the county said in a public advisory.

    The National Hurricane Center in Miami issued a hurricane warning Monday from Longboat Key in the Sarasota area to the Holocene River, up past Tampa Bay.

    Many school districts along the Gulf Coast said they would be closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Several colleges and universities said they would close their campuses on Tuesday, including the University of Florida in Gainesville.

    “They told us that our dorm building, especially, is prone to flooding,” said Erin Amiss, a student at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg.

    MacDill Air Force Base, located on Tampa Bay, is preparing to evacuate several aircraft and began a mandatory evacuation Monday morning for personnel who live in local counties, the Air Force said in a statement.

    Tampa resident Grace Cruz, who has lived in the state for more than 40 years, put away patio furniture, filled her car up with gas and loaded up on sandbags. She worried about the tens of thousands of new residents to Florida who had never before experienced a hurricane, and she had some advice for them.

    “If you’re planning to get away, you start ahead of time because of the traffic,” Cruz said. “No kidding. It’s horrible.”

    As Gulf Coast residents packed up their cars or hauled out generators in case of power outages, state officials warned about potential fuel contamination at dozens of gas stations.

    President Joe Biden spoke to DeSantis on Monday morning, telling the Florida governor that he had approved an emergency declaration for the state, the White House said in a news release. DeSantis is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    Southwest Florida is still recovering from Hurricane Ian, which was responsible last year for almost 150 deaths. The Category 5 hurricane damaged 52,000 structures, nearly 20,000 of which were destroyed or severely damaged.

    At 11 p.m. EDT Monday, Tropical Storm Idalia was about 10 miles (16 kilometers) off the western tip of Cuba, with maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph), the hurricane center said. Idalia was moving north at 8 mph (13 kph). On Tuesday, it was expected to turn northeast at a faster pace, reaching Florida’s western coast as a dangerous major hurricane on Wednesday.

    After moving across Florida, Idalia is forecast to blow through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

    So far this year, the U.S. East Coast has been spared from cyclones. But in the West earlier this month, Tropical Storm Hilary caused widespread flooding, mudslides and road closures in Mexico, California, Nevada and points north.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently said the 2023 hurricane season would be far busier than initially forecast, partly because of extremely warm ocean temperatures. The season runs through Nov. 30, with August and September typically the peak.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Sarah Brumfield in Silver Spring, Maryland; Cristiana Mesquita in Havana; Mike Schneider in St. Louis, Missouri; and Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, contributed to this report.

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  • California state Senate leader says she will step down from leadership post

    California state Senate leader says she will step down from leadership post

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The leader of the California Senate said Monday she will step down from her leadership post, ending an historic run as the first woman and first openly gay person to lead the upper legislative chamber of the nation’s most populous state.

    Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego, said she will step down next year. Sen. Mike McGuire, a Democrat from the state’s North Coast region, will replace Atkins as the Senate’s president pro tempore.

    Atkins made the announcement at a news conference with McGuire and most of the Senate Democratic Caucus standing behind her. The display of unity was in stark contrast to the leadership battle that embroiled the state Assembly last year, when new speaker Robert Rivas replaced former speaker Anthony Rendon.

    Atkins cannot seek re-election because of term limits and must leave the Senate at the end of next year. She said the caucus chose to announce the transition now because “a long, drawn-out successor campaign would not be in the best interest of the Senate nor the people who we were elected to represent.”

    “We have a lot of work to get through in the next few weeks,” Atkins said, referring to the chaotic final days of the Legislative session when lawmakers will vote on hundreds of bills. “This work does not mix well with internal caucus politics being at the top of everyone’s minds.”

    The leader of the California Senate is one of the most powerful positions in state politics, acting as the body’s chief negotiator with the governor and the Assembly speaker on key legislation and the state’s more than $300 billion annual operating budget.

    Atkins is one of only three people in history to hold both top spots in the Legislature. She has led the Senate since 2018. Before that, she was speaker of the state Assembly from 2014 to 2016.

    McGuire was first elected to the Senate in 2014. He has been an outspoken critic of Pacific Gas & Electric, the nation’s largest utility, whose equipment has sparked a number of massive wildfires that have killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes.

    In 2019, McGuire took on former Republican President Donald Trump by authoring a law that required candidates for president to disclose their tax returns as a condition of appearing on the ballot in California. The part of the law that applied to presidential candidates was ultimately struck down by the courts. But the law still applies to candidates for governor.

    McGuire praised Atkins as “a California trailblazer” and pledged to carry on her work, including focusing on climate issues, housing and access to abortion. But McGuire made it clear Atkins was still in charge.

    “There is one leader, one leader at a time. And our leader here in the California state Senate is Toni Atkins,” he said. “The pro tem and I, we are unified in our transition. And we can make this promise to each and every one of you. The next three weeks, getting these bills off the floor and into the governor’s desk is going to be smooth, successful and focused on the success of the Golden State.”

    McGuire is known throughout the state Capitol for his seemingly unending energy, often referred to by his nickname of the “Energizer Bunny,” according to veteran lobbyist Chris Micheli.

    His ascension to the Senate’s top post means the Legislature will have two leaders who represent mostly rural parts of California, a rare occurrence in a state where political power has historically been concentrated in the dense urban areas of Southern California and the San Francisco Bay.

    Rivas, who took over as Assembly speaker earlier this summer, represents a district in the state’s mostly agricultural Central Coast region. McGuire’s district stretches from the northern tip of the San Francisco Bay to the Oregon border.

    “I think these are parts of the state that deserve a little more attention and focus,” said Jennifer Fearing, a longtime lobbyist whose firm — Fearless Advocacy — represents nonprofit organizations. “I look forward to it, what the difference their leadership can make on addressing longstanding disparities.”

    McGuire’s term in office will be a short one. He is required to leave office after 2026 because of term limits.

    Democrats control 32 of the 40 seats in the state Legislature, giving them total control of what bills can pass. State Sen. Brian Jones, the Republican leader, said McGuire has “respect for differing viewpoints.”

    “He has shown a willingness to work in a bipartisan manner and we are excited to continue this cooperation,” Jones said.

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  • Hawaii power utility takes responsibility for first fire on Maui, but faults county firefighters

    Hawaii power utility takes responsibility for first fire on Maui, but faults county firefighters

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    HONOLULU — Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged its power lines started a wildfire on Maui but faulted county firefighters for declaring the blaze contained and leaving the scene, only to have a second wildfire break out nearby and become the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century.

    Hawaiian Electric Company released a statement Sunday night in response to Maui County’s lawsuit blaming the utility for failing to shut off power despite exceptionally high winds and dry conditions. Hawaiian Electric called that complaint “factually and legally irresponsible,” and said its power lines in West Maui had been de-energized for more than six hours when the second blaze started.

    In its statement, the utility addressed the cause for the first time. It said the fire on the morning of Aug. 8 “appears to have been caused by power lines that fell in high winds.” The Associated Press reported Saturday that bare electrical wire that could spark on contact and leaning poles on Maui were the possible cause.

    But Hawaiian Electric appeared to blame Maui County for most of the devastation — the fact that the fire appeared to reignite that afternoon and tore through downtown Lahaina, killing at least 115 people and destroying 2,000 structures.

    Richard Fried, a Honolulu attorney working as co-counsel on Maui County’s lawsuit, countered that if the power company’s lines hadn’t caused the initial fire, “this all would be moot.”

    “That’s the biggest problem,” Fried said Monday. “They can dance around this all they want. But there’s no explanation for that.”

    John Fiske, an attorney at a California firm that’s also representing the county of Maui in the lawsuit, said the ultimate responsibility rests with Hawaiian Electric to properly keep up its equipment, and make sure lines are not live when they’re downed or could be downed. Fiske said that if the utility has information about a second ignition source, it should offer that evidence now.

    Mike Morgan, an Orlando attorney who’s currently on Maui to work on wildfire litigation for his firm, Morgan & Morgan, said he thinks Hawaiian Electric’s statement was an attempt to shift liability and total responsibility.

    “By taking responsibility for causing the first fire, then pointing the finger on a fire that started 75 yards away and saying, ‘That’s not our fault, we started it but they should’ve put it out,’ I’m not sure how that will hold up,” Morgan, who manages complex litigation, said Monday. “It’s also so premature because there are ongoing investigations.”

    Officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who are investigating the cause and origin of the fire, and lawyers involved in the litigation, were at a warehouse Monday to inspect electrical equipment taken from the neighborhood where the fire is thought to have originated. The utility took down the burnt poles and removed fallen wires from the site.

    Videos and images analyzed by AP confirmed that the wires that started the morning fire were among miles of line that the utility left naked to the weather and often-thick foliage, despite a recent push by utilities in other wildfire- and hurricane-prone areas to cover up their lines or bury them.

    Compounding the problem is that many of the utility’s 60,000, mostly wooden power poles, which its own documents described as built to “an obsolete 1960s standard,” were leaning and near the end of their projected lifespan. They were nowhere close to meeting a 2002 national standard that key components of Hawaii’s electrical grid be able to withstand 105 mile per hour winds.

    As Hurricane Dora passed roughly 500 miles (800 kilometers) south of Hawaii Aug. 8, Lahaina resident Shane Treu heard a utility pole snap next to Lahainaluna Road. He saw a downed power line ignite the grass and called 911 at 6:37 a.m. to report the fire. Small brush fires aren’t unusual for Lahaina, and a drought in the region had left plants, including invasive grasses, dangerously dry. The Maui County Fire Department declared that fire 100% contained by 9:55 a.m. Firefighters then left to attend to other calls.

    Hawaiian Electric said its own crews then went to the scene that afternoon to make repairs and did not see fire, smoke or embers. The power to the area was off. Shortly before 3 p.m., those crews saw a small fire in a nearby field and called 911, the utility said.

    Residents said the embers from the morning fire had reignited and the fire raced toward downtown Lahaina. Treu’s neighbor Robert Arconado recorded video of it spreading at 3:06 p.m., as large plumes of smoke rise near Lahainaluna Road and are carried downtown by the wind.

    Hawaiian Electric is a for-profit, investor-owned, publicly traded utility that serves 95% of Hawaii’s electric customers. CEO Shelee Kimura said there are important lessons to be learned from this tragedy, and resolved to “figure out what we need to do to keep our communities safe as climate issues rapidly intensify here and around the globe.”

    The utility faces a spate of new lawsuits that seek to hold it responsible. Wailuku attorney Paul Starita, lead counsel on three lawsuits by Singleton Schreiber, called it a “preventable tragedy of epic proportions,” and said the fire department’s response does not absolve Hawaiian Electric of liability.

    ___

    McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

    ___

    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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  • To stop wildfires, residents in some Greek suburbs put their own money toward early warning drones

    To stop wildfires, residents in some Greek suburbs put their own money toward early warning drones

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    ATHENS, Greece — The nightmare repeats itself every year: A towering wall of flames devours forests, farmland and homes, forcing animals and people to flee for their lives.

    With their hot, dry summers, Greece and its southern European neighbors experience hundreds of devastating wildfires each year. Last week alone, wildfires killed 21 people in Greece. The country’s deadliest, in 2018, cost more than 100 lives. And experts warn climate change is likely to exacerbate extreme weather, fueling more wildfires.

    This summer, a group of residents in a leafy suburb of the Greek capital united in determination to prevent the nightmare from reaching their homes.

    In less than a week in early August, an initial group of three people with a shared concern grew to an online community of about 320 offering donations to hire a company using long-range drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras as a sophisticated early warning system to catch wildfires before they can spread.

    It’s a tried and tested system. Designed and set up with the help of Grigoris Konstantellos, a commercial airline pilot and mayor of the southern Athens seaside suburbs of Vari, Voula and Vouliagmeni, the drones began operating there last year.

    “We didn’t discover it, we created it,” Kontantellos said of the program. “We said, ‘Why shouldn’t this capability exist?’”

    The system seemed the perfect solution for the concerned residents in the northern suburbs of Kifissia, Ekali and Nea Erithrea.

    “We’re all worried, we’re all anxious,” said Melina Throuvala, a psychologist and one of the initial group of three. “We don’t want to mourn victims, or to see our environment and our forests burning or our homes threatened. That was the main incentive.”

    And with wildfires, prevention is key.

    Operated by drone pilots with advanced training to fly beyond the visual line of sight and with permission from civil aviation authorities, the drones provide live images and detect changes in temperature, alerting their handlers in the critical early stages before a fire spreads. The drones run 24/7, with pilots working in six-hour shifts.

    “The first few minutes are the most crucial for a fire,” said Giorgos Dertilis, who heads the local volunteer firefighting unit. “At the start it’s easier to put out the fire. The more the minutes go by, the harder our job becomes.”

    Volunteer units are integrated into Greece’s Civil Protection system, working closely with professional fire departments. With no fire station in the wider Kifissia area, volunteers often can get to local blazes faster.

    The drone company operates from the volunteer firefighters’ headquarters, so they can react immediately at any signs of a fire.

    The drone program’s value was quickly apparent. In the first couple of days, it picked up the start of a fire near a shuttered hotel, “so when we were on our way … we knew, we were prepared to see a fire,” Dertilis said. They quickly extinguished the blaze. “It’s very important to know what to expect.”

    The system’s innovation, said Emmanouil Angelakis, managing director of the company operating the drones, is that it includes specialized personnel, software, servers and satellite antenna so “drones, day and night, can scan all the forest areas with thermal cameras and sensors and give live images and coordinates of where a fire starts.”

    The idea for the system came in June 2022, after a wind-whipped wildfire descended on Konstantellos’ municipality from a mountain ridge. As they coordinated the response, authorities realized they had a problem.

    “We were chasing the fire,” the mayor said. With the flames moving rapidly, keeping track of where water trucks were needed was a challenge. “We couldn’t see basic things on the ground. We’d see them with a delay, because we weren’t right in front of them.”

    An extensive review of the emergency response followed. “We saw that what was missing is for us to not chase the fire, but to be able to have a live image of the fire, of where our assets are and where the threat is,” Konstantellos said. They thought of drones.

    The fire department already uses drones during an active blaze, covering a small area. What was needed was to see a fire when it starts, and stop it in its tracks.

    Getting in touch with the drone company, the fire prevention program was born. In the year and a half it’s been operational, it’s given early warnings for fires 12 times, Konstantellos said.

    “We’ve caught fires at 3:30 in the morning,” the mayor said. “When we sent the Civil Protection, they couldn’t even find the fire. We could see it on the drone.”

    Then on Saturday, 270 lighting strikes sparked six blazes, starting at 5:30 a.m.. The drones saw them immediately, Konstantellos said Monday. With live drone images relayed to his cellphone, “we had amazing coordination, and in less than 40 minutes we had put out six fires in hard-to-reach places.”

    The drones have a range of 15 kilometers (nearly 10 miles) and are equipped with loudspeakers and searchlights to warn off people doing banned outdoor work on high fire-risk days — or to frighten off potential arsonists. The municipality is even running a pilot program to prevent drownings, whereby drones can drop lifejackets to swimmers in distress.

    The municipality pays 13,000-14,000 euros ($14,000-15,000) per month for 24/7 coverage. “For a municipality, it’s a viable number to have peace of mind from the fires,” Konstantellos said.

    The drone company’s Angelakis said the Kifissia residents’ privately funded initiative “was the first time this happened on a volunteer basis and not by a state body.”

    Kifissia’s nearby municipality of Dionysos followed, with its privately funded operation working out of the town hall.

    Residents of less affluent areas would be less able to afford private funding. But other municipal and regional authorities are interested, said Konstantellos, who noted the system can be used to coordinate responses to other events such as floods, earthquakes or traffic accidents.

    “As we say in aviation, ‘A well-trained pilot is the best safety device’,” he said. “We convert this to the civil protection and we say: ‘A well-prepared city is the best defense of a city against crisis’.”

    ___

    Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/wildfires

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  • To stop wildfires, residents in some Greek suburbs put their own money toward early warning drones

    To stop wildfires, residents in some Greek suburbs put their own money toward early warning drones

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    ATHENS, Greece — The nightmare repeats itself every year: A towering wall of flames devours forests, farmland and homes, forcing animals and people to flee for their lives.

    With their hot, dry summers, Greece and its southern European neighbors experience hundreds of devastating wildfires each year. Last week alone, wildfires killed 21 people in Greece. The country’s deadliest, in 2018, cost more than 100 lives. And experts warn that climate change is likely to exacerbate extreme weather, fueling more wildfires.

    This summer, a group of residents in a leafy suburb of the Greek capital united in determination to prevent the nightmare from reaching their homes.

    In less than a week in early August, an initial group of three people with a shared concern grew to an online community of about 320 offering donations to hire a company using long-range drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras as a sophisticated early warning system to catch wildfires before they can spread.

    “We’re all worried, we’re all anxious,” said Melina Throuvala, a psychologist and one of the three residents who started the project for drone patrols in the northern Athens suburbs of Kifissia, Ekali and Nea Erithrea. “We don’t want to mourn victims, or to see our environment and our forests burning or our homes threatened. That was the main incentive.”

    And with wildfires, prevention is key.

    Operated by drone pilots with advanced training to fly beyond the visual line of sight and with permission from civil aviation authorities, the drones provide live images and detect changes in temperature, alerting their handlers in the critical early stages before a fire spreads. The drones run 24/7, with pilots working in six-hour shifts.

    “The first few minutes are the most crucial for a fire,” said Giorgos Dertilis, who heads the local volunteer firefighting unit. “At the start it’s easier to put out the fire. The more the minutes go by, the harder our job becomes.”

    Volunteer units are integrated into Greece’s Civil Protection system, working closely with professional fire departments. With no fire station in the wider Kifissia area, volunteers often can get to local blazes faster.

    The drone company operates from the volunteer firefighters’ headquarters, so they can react immediately at any signs of a fire.

    Right from the start, the drone program’s value was apparent. In the first couple of days after the drone system was installed, a fire broke out near a shuttered hotel in the area, Dertilis said.

    “The (drone) handler called us, we saw the smoke, so when we were on our way … we knew, we were prepared to see a fire,” he said. They quickly extinguished the blaze. “It’s very important to know what to expect.”

    The system’s innovation, said Emmanouil Angelakis, managing director of the company operating the drones, is that it includes specialized personnel, software, servers and satellite antenna so that “drones, day and night, can scan all the forest areas with thermal cameras and sensors and give live images and coordinates of where a fire starts.”

    It’s a tried and tested operation. Designed and set up with the help of Grigoris Konstantellos, a commercial airline pilot and mayor of the southern Athens seaside suburbs of Vari, Voula and Vouliagmeni, it began operating there last year.

    “We didn’t discover it, we created it,” Kontantellos said of the program. “We said, ‘Why shouldn’t this capability exist?’”

    The idea came in June 2022, after a wind-whipped wildfire descended on his municipality from a mountain ridge. As they coordinated the emergency response, authorities realized they had a problem.

    “We were chasing the fire,” the mayor said. With the flames moving rapidly, keeping track of where water trucks were needed was a challenge. “We couldn’t see basic things on the ground. We’d see them with a delay, because we weren’t right in front of them.”

    An extensive review of the emergency response followed. “We saw that what was missing is for us to not chase the fire, but to be able to have a live image of the fire, of where our assets are and where the threat is,” Konstantellos said. They thought of drones.

    The fire department already uses drones during an active blaze, covering a small area. What was needed was to see a fire right at the start, and stop it in its tracks.

    Getting in touch with the drone company, the fire prevention program was born. In the year and a half it’s been operational, it’s given early warnings for fires 12 times, Konstantellos said.

    “We’ve caught fires at 3:30 in the morning,” the mayor said. “When we sent the Civil Protection, they couldn’t even find the fire. We could see it on the drone.” Last week, when 270 lighting strikes sparked six blazes in the area during a storm, emergency services got there before the fires could spread.

    The drones have a range of 15 kilometers (nearly 10 miles) and are equipped with loudspeakers and searchlights to warn off people doing banned outdoor work on high fire-risk days — or to frighten off potential arsonists. The municipality is even running a pilot program to prevent drownings, whereby drones can drop lifejackets to swimmers in distress.

    The municipality pays 13,000-14,000 euros ($14,000-15,000) per month for 24/7 coverage. “For a municipality, it’s a viable number to have peace of mind from the fires,” Konstantellos said.

    Angelakis, the drone company’s managing director, said the Kifissia residents’ privately funded initiative “was the first time this happened on a volunteer basis and not by a state body.”

    Kifissia’s nearby municipality of Dionysos followed, with its privately funded operation working out of the town hall.

    Residents of less affluent areas would be less able to afford private funding. But other municipal and regional authorities are interested, said Konstantellos, who noted the drone system can be used to coordinate responses to other events such as floods, earthquakes or major traffic accidents.

    “As we say in aviation, ‘A well-trained pilot is the best safety device’,” he said. “We convert this to the civil protection and we say: ‘A well-prepared city is the best defense of a city against crisis’.”

    ___

    Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/wildfires

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  • Bare electrical wire, leaning poles were a possible cause of deadly Maui fires

    Bare electrical wire, leaning poles were a possible cause of deadly Maui fires

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    In the first moments of the Maui fires, when high winds brought down power poles, slapping electrified wires to the dry grass below, there was a reason the flames erupted all at once in long, neat rows — those wires were bare, uninsulated metal that could spark on contact.

    Videos and images analyzed by The Associated Press confirmed those wires were among miles of line that Hawaiian Electric left naked to the weather and often-thick foliage, despite a recent push by utilities in other wildfire- and hurricane-prone areas to cover up their lines or bury them.

    Compounding the problem is that many of the utility’s 60,000, mostly wooden power poles, which its own documents described as built to “an obsolete 1960s standard,” were leaning and near the end of their projected lifespan. They were nowhere close to meeting a 2002 national standard that key components of Hawaii’s electrical grid be able to withstand 105-mile-per-hour winds. A 2019 filing said it had fallen behind in replacing the old wooden poles because of other priorities and warned of a “serious public hazard” if they “failed.”

    It’s “very unlikely” a fully insulated cable would have sparked and caused a fire in dry vegetation, said Michael Ahern, who retired this month as director of power systems at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

    Experts who watched videos showing downed power lines agreed wire that was insulated would not have arced and sparked, igniting a line of flame.

    Hawaiian Electric said in a statement that it has “long recognized the unique threats” from climate change and has spent millions of dollars in response, but did not say whether specific power lines that collapsed in the early moments of the fire were bare.

    “We’ve been executing on a resilience strategy to meet these challenges, and since 2018, we have spent approximately $950 million to strengthen and harden our grid and approximately $110 million on vegetation management efforts,” the company said. “This work included replacing more than 12,500 poles and structures since 2018 and trimming and removing trees along approximately 2,500 line miles every year on average.”

    But a former member of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission confirmed many of Maui’s wooden power poles were in poor condition. Jennifer Potter lives in Lahaina and until the end of last year was on the commission, which regulates Hawaiian Electric.

    “Even tourists that drive around the island are like, ‘What is that?’ They’re leaning quite significantly because the winds over time literally just pushed them over,” she said. “That obviously is not going to withstand 60, 70 mile per hour winds. So the infrastructure was just not strong enough for this kind of windstorm … The infrastructure itself is just compromised.”

    John Morgan, a personal injury and trial attorney in Florida who lives part-time on Maui noticed the same thing. “I could look at the power poles. They were skinny, bending, bowing. The power went out all the time.”

    Morgan’s firm is suing Hawaiian Electric on behalf of one person and talking to many more about their rights. The fire came 500 yards from his house.

    Sixty percent of the utility poles on West Maui were still down on Aug. 14, according to Hawaiian Electric CEO Shelee Kimura at a media conference — 450 of the 750 poles.

    Hawaiian Electric is facing a spate of new lawsuits that seek to hold it responsible for the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. The number of confirmed dead stands at 115, and the county expects that to rise.

    Lawyers plan to inspect some electrical equipment from a neighborhood where the fire is thought to have originated as soon as next week, per a court order, but they will be doing that in a warehouse. The utility took down the burnt poles and removed fallen wires from the site.

    This was a “preventable tragedy of epic proportions,” said attorney Paul Starita, lead counsel on three of the lawsuits.

    “It all comes back to money,” said Starita, of the California firm Singleton Schreiber. “They might say, oh, well, it takes a long time to get the permitting process done or whatever. OK, start sooner. I mean, people’s lives are on the line. You’re responsible. Spend the money, do your job.”

    Hawaiian Electric also faces criticism for not shutting off the power amid high wind warnings and keeping it on even as dozens of poles began to topple. Maui County sued Hawaiian Electric on Thursday over this issue.

    Michael Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that with power lines causing so many fires in the United States: “We definitely have a new pattern, we just don’t have a new safety regime to go with it.”

    Insulating an electrical wire prevents arcing and sparking, and dissipates heat.

    Other utilities have been addressing the issue of bare wire. Pacific Gas & Electric was found responsible for the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California that killed 85 people. The disaster was caused by downed power lines.

    Its program to eliminate uninsulated wire in fire zones has covered more than 1,200 miles of line so far.

    PG&E also announced in 2021 it would bury 10,000 miles of electrical line. It buried 180 miles in 2022 and is on pace to do 350 miles this year.

    Another major California utility, Southern California Edison, expects to have replaced more than 7,200 miles, or about 75% of its overhead distribution lines, with covered wire in high fire risk areas by the end of 2025. It, too, is burying line in areas at severe risk.

    Hawaiian Electric said in a filing last year that it had looked to the wildfire plans of utilities in California.

    Some don’t fault Hawaiian Electric for its comparative lack of action because it has not faced the threat of wildfires for as long. And the utility is not at all alone in continuing to use bare metal conductors high up on power poles.

    The same is true for public safety power shutoffs. It’s been only a few years that utilities have been willing to preemptively shut off people’s power to prevent fire and the disruptive practice is not yet widespread.

    But Mark Toney called wildfires caused by utilities absolutely preventable. He is executive director of the ratepayer group The Utility Reform Network in California. It is pushing PG&E to insulate its lines in high-risk areas.

    “We have to stop utility-caused wildfires. We have to stop them and the quickest, cheapest way to do it is to insulate the overhead lines,” he said.

    As for the poles, in a 2019 Hawaiian Electric regulatory document, the company said its 60,000 poles, nearly all wood, were vulnerable because they were already old and Hawaii is in a “severe wood decay hazard zone.” The company said it had fallen behind in replacing wood poles because of other priorities and warned of a “serious public hazard” if the poles “failed.”

    The document said many of the company’s poles were built to withstand 56 mph (90 kph), when a Category 1 Hurricane has winds of at least 74 mph.

    In 2002, the National Electric Safety Code was updated to require utility poles like those on Maui to withstand 105-mile-per-hour winds.

    The U.S. electrical grid was designed and built for last century’s climate, said Joshua Rhodes, an energy systems research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Utilities would be smart to better prepare for protracted droughts and high winds, he added.

    “Everyone considers Hawaii to be a tropical paradise, but it got dry and it burned,” he said Thursday. “It may look expensive if you’re doing work to stave off starting wildfires or the impact of wildfires, but it’s much cheaper than actually starting one and burning down so many people’s homes and causing so many people’s deaths.”

    Tony Takitani, an attorney born and raised on Maui, is working with Morgan on the litigation.

    Takitani said in his 68 years there, it’s getting drier and drier. He said what happened on the island is so horrific it’s hard to talk about. But he does think it will force improvements to the grid.

    “When the poles go down, it’s kindling,” he said. “The combination of what’s going on with our Earth and people not being properly prepared for it, I think caused this. From living here, from the videos I’ve seen of poles going down and fires igniting, it seems kind of obvious.”

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