The Patriot Post® · Aloha to Lahaina
More than five months later, the place still looks like a war zone.
If you’d told us back in August, when one of the deadliest wildfires in American history raced across the historic Lahaina section of Maui, that it would still be in ruins more than five months later, we’d have called BS.
And we’d have been wrong. Today, thousands of Lahaina residents are still living in temporary housing, and the community still looks like a seaside version of 1945 Dresden. This is what it looked like approximately a month afterward, and not much progress has been made since.
<A month after deadly #Maui fire 66 people still missing>
— Alberto Allen (@albertoallen) September 9, 2023
Maui wildfires: Drone video shows Lahaina left in smouldering ruins https://t.co/WxCU1jFpBF
As NPR reported last month: “Nearly 6,300 Maui residents who lost their homes are still in temporary housing. For most folks, that means hotel rooms right now. And as local hotels have opened to more tourism, a lot of those fire survivors have been moved around.”
What gives? As PJ Media’s Catherine Salgado writes: “The Biden administration has billions of American taxpayer dollars for Ukraine and the jihad-loving Gazans, but many Maui residents still have almost nothing. Videos and images of a wall papered in children’s art, with the blackened and charred remains of a part of Lahaina, have circulated on social media. It’s difficult to find good information on the situation, partly because most of the media lost all interest in Lahaina months ago and partly because it seems government and mainstream media are quite untrustworthy on the topic.”
It’s a great observation. Imagine if instead of destroying Lahaina, a devastating wildfire had raced across Santa Barbara or Louisville or Tampa. Does anyone doubt that any of these communities would’ve been largely rebuilt by now? So what’s going on with Lahaina? Are Hawaiians American citizens, or are they not?
And whatever happened to that $100 million virtue-signaling Instagram pledge from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his trophy wife-to-be Lauren Sanchez? According to a Bloomberg report, Team Bezos has doled out just $15.5 million of that pledge so far, though local leaders say they haven’t received or heard of any people or places that have benefited from any part of Bezos’s highly publicized pledge.
“Nobody’s heard anything at all,” said Angus McKelvey, the state senator representing West Maui. “Had they simply consulted with the community and myself and other representatives, we would’ve told them, ‘Take your money and put it over here.’”
In fairness to the world’s third-richest man, his spokesman said that the Boys & Girls Clubs of Maui, the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, and the Maui Food Bank were among the recipients of those Bezos bucks. Beyond that, Lahaina residents could be waiting a long time for the remaining $84.5 million, as Bezos promised in his Instagram post that he’d disburse the funds “over the coming years as the continuing needs reveal themselves.”
Perhaps some of this was predictable. As NPR reported just a couple of weeks after the fire: “Maui, and Hawaii in general, already had a severe housing shortage which the disaster has made worse. Now, many fear those left struggling in Lahaina will feel pressured to sell, allowing developers to cater more to the tourists and part-time residents that make up a significant share of the state’s economy.”
Indeed, Lahaina is idyllic, and it’s little wonder that predatory developers were on the scene while the community was still smoldering, poking around for residents willing to sell their property. It became so distasteful that the locals started taking names.
Five months later, Lahaina is still suffering. And no one seems to have any answers.