No one thought it would be this bad.
Brianna Sacks of the Washington Post has gotten used to covering climate disasters. But even she has been shocked by what’s happened on Maui over the past couple of weeks.Most everyone—even emergency preparedness and disaster experts—I talked to didn’t think it would be this bad,” she said.
“It’s such a cliché to say ‘It looks like a bomb went off.’ But that is truly what it looks like,” Sacks said. “These palm trees are black and charred. The cars are just left with doors ajar.” The thing Brianna Sacks and others have chronicled over the past week is how often this pattern got repeated all over Maui, seeming to cause one conflagration after another. The details are always the same: a flash, the power going off briefly, and then fire. South of the bird sanctuary, in Lahaina, Sacks met with a woman who saw the same thing hours later.She said, “I woke up at 3 a.m. to this bright light and then went back to sleep. And then the power went out around 5 a.m.
Arson still could happen. But just the way and the times that the fires started and the fact that multiple fires started around a similar time near power lines—again, we don’t know for sure, but it’s the closest we have come to definitively saying that there was this problem with the grid. Something happened to a line, and then a fire started exactly in that spot shortly after.
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