The Deadly Wildfires devastating maui has now killed at least 36 people. Their bodies discovered in the ruins of the raging inferno. Officials held a News Conference just a short time ago. Primary focus is to save lives. Prevent Human Suffering and mitigate property loss. That is what the counties were and are doing. What we do anticipate is additional requests and were already providing support for trying to get the communications back up, water distribution. Were hearing they may need more Law Enforcement official for federal and state Law Enforcement. So were working through that. The damage to the infrastructure, it is not just buildings, i mean these were Small Businesses that invested in maui. These were local residents and we need to figure out a way to help a lot of people in the next several years. School was destroyed. Many of the businesses, a church was destroyed. It will take years. Devastation was most serious in the town of lahaina, a tourist and economic hub with 9,000
You can see the hot spots right here. this is higher terrain across the central portions of maui. and then they just raced down towards the coast impacting historic lahaina. we have wind gusts up to 82 miles per hour for the most part, mid-50s to mid-60s is what we saw for the winds. and so that just caused the wildfires to spread rapidly. so as you mentioned, we had dora to the south and also an area of high pressure to the north. so these were working together to basically funnel very strong winds in between the high and low. and so that is what caused the winds to blow out of control. the high pressure is normal. this is what causes the breeze, the trade winds across portions of hawaii. the storm to the south was not normal. so when you have the two together, that created the scenario. so dora has pushed away. winds are starting to weaken, so