All posts tagged "Hawaii Fires"

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat. You can sign up for Civil Beat's newsletter here and support the nonprofit newsroom here.

The power was already out in West Maui at 5 a.m. on Aug. 8 and it could have stayed that way had Hawaiian Electric decided not to re-energize its lines.

Instead, the company rebooted a tripped transmission line so that it could provide electricity to some of its customers in Lahaina despite an ongoing windstorm and repeated warnings of extreme fire danger....

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat. You can sign up for Civil Beat's newsletter here and support the nonprofit newsroom here.

Maui County officials are preparing to allow property owners and tenants who lost homes in the Aug. 8 blaze to re-enter the burn zone later this month.

Darryl Oliveira, interim administrator of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, said at a press conference on Thursday that residents should be able to apply for passes starting on Sept. 22. Passes will grant them access to the disaster area, initially on supervised visits to begin Sept. 25....

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat. You can sign up for Civil Beat's newsletter here and support the nonprofit newsroom here.

Donated food, clothes, toiletries, bedding and other supplies flooded into Maui to help thousands of people who were uprooted from their homes or left facing major damage due to fast-spreading fires earlier this week.

But an enduring telecommunications blackout hampered government and grassroots efforts to distribute those supplies in the worst-affected neighborhoods, especially for an unknown number of survivors waiting out the aftermath in the few buildings still standing in the historic town of Lahaina and neighborhoods on the outskirts....