During the last 100 years, the deadliest wildfires in the country have occurred in California, but Hawaii’s disaster makes ranks among some of the worst blazes of all time.
weather. why were the fires able to take such hold? you think of california in a drought with all the dry brush. yeah, so i live maui actually has a win ward and leeward side. we have a wet side of the island and a dry side, separated by a 10,000 foot volcano, so the dry side had been in a drought. everybody thinks of the rain forest and east maui, but the dry side of the island had been in a drought for quite some time. up where i live on the volcano, it has been incredibly dry. they were telling us to limit water before this happened, and then this hurricane dora came south of us, and the winds just churned up, you know, the fires and made everything just so much more intense. what will you do now? well, right now we don t have water, so we re just trying to get by without having water.
take me through what you and your neighbors have been going through. yes. thank you for having me on. it s really important to get the word out. and we really do need help here. back when i was directly impacted, we didn t know that it would come to this. at 1:00 a.m. i smelled smoke, and as a meteorologist i report on this all the time, we have red flag warnings pretty regularly. so we knew that there would be really, really high winds. we knew that there was low humidity and lots of dry brush. we had no way of anticipating this. at 1:00 a.m. when i smelled the smoke, it was alarming but not a panic. 1:30, woke my husband up again, 2:00, again. he kept saying, it s probably far away. we re going to be fine. at 3:00 a.m. we got a call from our neighbors that said get out. looked out the window, and the sky was red. so ran downstairs, woke up all of the kids, threw them into the