Hawaii is still counting its dead after several meteor fires, which reduced a historic city on the island of Maui to ashes and threaten to become the worst natural disaster in the modern history of the American archipelago.
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Here’s what we know about the fire, which surprised many residents.
How did the fires start?
Much of the Hawaiian archipelago was on red alert when multiple fires broke out on Tuesday, but their cause remains unknown.
Major General Kenneth Hara, commander of the US Army in Hawaii, said Wednesday evening that authorities “were unable to determine the cause of the fires.” An investigation has been opened.
The first flames broke out around the historic town of Lahaina, which was almost completely destroyed, at dawn on Tuesday.
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A “brush fire” was reported “at 6:37 a.m.,” according to the county of Maui. It was initially declared “100% control shortly after 9 am”, but in the afternoon it was announced that shooting had resumed.
Then other fires broke out elsewhere in Maui and the flames developed very quickly. Lahaina residents were surprised: One hundred people threw themselves into the sea to escape the fire, according to the Coast Guard.
Poor crisis management?
The Lahaina Fire has killed at least 80 people, making it one of the worst natural disasters the Hawaiian archipelago has seen since the 1960s, and the death toll is likely to rise.
Residents are still stunned by the speed of the disaster.
We saw smoke from afar. And by the time we got home, within a minute or two, black smoke was seeping into the house.” “We had to hurry, we took what we could, the important stuff. We took the car, and saw the neighbors on fire, their house was already on fire.
The former capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii now looks like a field of charred rubble: the city of Lahaina is “80%” destroyed, according to the archipelago’s governor, Josh Green.
Questions began to arise about the management of powers. A spokesperson for the agency responsible for crisis management in Hawaii confirmed to CNN that the sirens that were supposed to sound in the event of a fire were not activated.
How do we explain the speed of fire?
The flames were fueled by a combination of devastating circumstances.
The winds were set in by strong winds in excess of 100 km/h, according to the US Weather Service (NWS). They were particularly fueled by Dora, a category 4 hurricane, which blew several hundred kilometers to the south into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
The topography of Maui, an island with two volcanoes and several mountains in its center, with a fairly flat coastline, also played a role.
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Storms from the ocean turned into “downwinds” that “pushed up the slopes of the island towards the city,” says Thomas Smith, professor of environmental geography at the London School of Economics.
These lower winds are usually “dry and hot,” reducing the moisture of the vegetation and making the fires “severe.”
The area itself was poised to go up in flames for two reasons.
Firstly because of a less rainy year than usual. The western part of Maui, where Lahaina is located, is experiencing “severe” to “moderate” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Observatory.
Next, because of the decline in agriculture on the island since the 1990s, according to Clay Traornecht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii.
The once-manicured fields, which could have slowed the fire, have now been replaced by “vast swaths of abandoned, non-native vegetation,” he tweeted.
Does climate change affect?
While it is always difficult to attribute a specific event to climate change, scientists regularly point out that global warming increases the frequency of extreme events.
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The world just experienced the hottest July on record.
“Climate change is causing the atmosphere to warm everywhere, […] Until the same fire that would have been mild a few decades ago becomes more intense today,” sums up Yadvinder Malhi, Professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Oxford.
