America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Saturday, August 26, 2023
JOE BIDEN - THE SOCIOPATH BRIBES SUCKER IN THE WHITE HOUSE - Applying Joe Biden’s approach to the Maui fire to other American disasters
Applying Joe Biden’s approach to the Maui fire to other American disasters
In between his two vacations, Joe Biden managed to find a few hours to visit Maui to see the devastation in the historic town of Lahaina. Standing in front of burnt-out buildings and cars, Biden said, “Jill and I have a sense of what it’s like to lose a home.”
Then the Big Guy had the audacity to tell people who might have lost loved ones along with all their worldly belongings that he knows what they are going through. Joey proceeded to tell againhis story about the time when, in 2004, lightning struck his home, and he had a 20-minute contained kitchen fire.
Joey closed with, “I almost lost my ’67 Corvette and my cat.”
Before you can respond, “No comment,” let’s think about what Joe Biden said to the Maui residents. They have family and friends who are dead or still missing. Their home or apartment and every possession they owned is burnt to a crisp. The business that employed them was also burned in the fire. They can see into the future as long as it’s only five minutes. And some guy who is in between beach vacations says he understands their pain because, many years ago, a 20-minute kitchen fire almost caused him to lose his car!
This made me think about what Joe Biden would have said if he had been president following these tragedies.
Great Chicago Fire (1871): I once had the fireplace going, and embers flew around. I almost lost my tie.
San Francisco Earthquake (1906): I once lost my balance. I almost lost the pen in my coat pocket.
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911) – I once put on a new shirt while standing too close to the stove. I almost lost a button.
Titanic sinks (1912): I was once in a swimming pool when my inflatable float sprung a leak. I almost got wet.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1945): I once was on a harbor boat ride when the motor bombed out. I almost had to row back to shore.
Eastern seaboard blackout (1965): I once forgot to pay the bill and we lost electricity for several hours. I almost missed my favorite TV show.
Challenger Space Shuttle explodes upon takeoff (1986): I once had a Bunsen burner explode during science class. I almost lost my paperwork.
September 11 (2001): I once had a toy plane that broke apart. I almost lost the battery.
Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She can be reached at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com.
THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN LONG BUSTED HER CORRUPT ASS OR HER BIGGEST PAYMASTER (CHINA DOESN'T COUNT AS THOSE BRIBES WERE ILLEGAL) PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC - GOOGLE IT!
THIS IS HARDLY PG & E ONLY CRIME!
The case appears similar to that of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company in California, whose transmission network has been blamed for sparking several massive wildfires in recent years during periods of high wind. There, too, the political left has blamed climate change, though conservatives have pointed out that poor forest management and environmental policies have allowed brush to grow in forests and around infrastructure, creating more fuel for fires.
Remembering Lahaina | Before The Tragic Fire | Tribute to The Victims and Family of Lahaina
And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30.
One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their 4-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.
But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety.
Wildfires burn over the town of Lahaina as seen in the neighboring Kaanapali Alii resort, on August 08, 2023, in Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii (Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images)
Fire and smoke fills the sky from wildfires on the intersection at Hokiokio Place and Lahaina Bypass in Maui, Hawaii on Aug. 8, 2023. (Zeke Kalua/County of Maui via AP)
“I could see from the bypass that people were stuck on the balconies, so I went down and checked it out,” said Kekoa Lansford, who made several trips into town to look for survivors. What he found was horrible, Lansford said, with dead bodies and flames like a hellish movie scene. “And I could see that people were on fire, that the fire was just being stoked by the wind, and being pushed toward the homes.”
The road closures — some because of the fire, some because of downed power lines — contributed to making historic Lahaina the site of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. But there were many problems that day, and in some ways the disaster began long before the fires started.
A flash drought in the region provided plenty of kindling, and Hurricane Dora brought strong winds to Maui as it passed roughly 500 miles (800 kilometers) south of the Hawaii island chain. Those winds downed at least 30 power poles in West Maui, and Hawaiian Electric had no procedure in place for turning off the grid — a common practice in other fire-prone states. Video shot by a Lahaina resident shows a downed powerline setting dry grasses alight, possibly revealing the start of the larger fire.
During a news conference Tuesday, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said police officers drove up and down streets, knocking on doors and using loudspeakers to tell people to leave, but he didn’t say exactly where and what time those efforts occurred. The Associated Press has filed public records requests for location reports and other documentation including video and internal communications to clarify the details of the police and fire response, but Maui County has not yet released that information.
Wildfire wreckage is shown on Aug. 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
A team of Associated Press journalists documented the first hours of the deadly wildfire by interviewing dozens of survivors and public officials, examining public documents and analyzing citizen videos, satellite images and publicly available data. The timeline reveals the chaos that overtook the town.
Shane Treu wakes early on Aug. 8, and is in his backyard when he hears a utility pole snap next to Lahainaluna Road. He sees the downed powerline ignite the grass, and calls 911 at 6:37 a.m. to report the fire.
Small brush fires aren’t unusual for Lahaina, and the fire department declares this one 100% contained by 9:55 a.m. The assurance puts many residents at ease; the high winds have prompted the closure of some public schools for the day, and others have not yet started. That means many of Lahaina’s 3,000 public school students are home alone while their parents work.
Contained is not controlled, however, and the town is being battered by high winds. While many of Maui County’s fire crews work to extinguish the Upcountry fire on the eastern half of the island, the wind is toppling power poles and scattering embers like seeds in Lahaina.
Treu’s neighbor Robert Arconado said the fire reignites around 2 p.m. He records video of it spreading at 3:06 p.m., as large plumes of smoke rise near Lahainaluna Road and are carried downtown by the wind.
Around 3:20 p.m., Lahaina resident Kevin Eliason is watching the black smoke from a vantage point closer to downtown when passersby tell him a power pole has been knocked onto the tar roof of a gas station two blocks away, creating fireballs that are being blown in the wind, he said.
Eliason said the fire knocked the power out in the area soon after.
Ten minutes later, Hawaiian Electric sends a news release asking Maui residents to prepare for extended outages. The utility says more than 30 power poles are down in West Maui, including along the Honoapiilani Highway at the south end of Lahaina. At the same time, the fire department closes the Lahaina Bypass road because of the fire.
The closures block the only route out of Lahaina to the south. Two weeks later, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier says during a news conference that officers never stopped people from leaving Lahaina that day but did try to prevent them from driving over live power lines.
Back in the subdivision near Lahainaluna Road, the first sign of trouble for Nate Baird and Courtney Stapleton comes at 3:40 p.m., when their 9- and 10-year-old sons say they can smell s’mores.
By the time the family piles into the car with their dog and Baird’s mother and joins a caravan of evacuating residents, parts of the subdivision are beginning to burn. A telephone pole falls behind their car, causing an accident and blocking a side street.
Meanwhile, police officers knock down a fence to help others escape, the police chief says later. Firefighters in the area nearly become trapped themselves, losing a truck to the flames, Pelletier says.
When Baird and his family turn south to drive out of town, the way is blocked by cones and a crew working on downed electric poles. The workers were motioning for everyone to turn back toward Lahaina.
They decide they don’t care what the crew wants, swerving around the cones and heading south. They make it to a neighboring town by 4:18 p.m. and begin texting people to see who else has made it out.
“Nobody realized how little time we really had,” Baird said. “Like even us being from the heart of the fire, we did not comprehend. Like we literally had minutes and one wrong turn. We would all be dead right now.”
Jonelle Santos said her daughter, Ronelle Santos-Adrian, managed to escape her Lahaina affordable housing apartment with her 3-year-old daughter and partner by turning their four-wheel-drive vehicle away from the standstill traffic and onto a dirt road, eventually finding their way to a friend’s house in Napili. Some of the other people who lived in the apartment complex didn’t have cars, Santos said, and her daughter thinks some of them didn’t make it out.
Kim Cuevas-Reyes narrowly escapes with her 12- and 15-year-old by ignoring instructions to turn right on Front Street toward Lahaina’s Civic Center, which earlier in the day had been turned into a shelter for refugees. Instead, she takes a left, driving in the wrong lane to pass a stack of cars heading in the other direction.
“The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came,” said Cuevas-Reyes, 38. “I would have had to tell my children to jump into the ocean as well and be boiled alive by the flames or we would have just died from smoke inhalation and roasted in the car.”
At 5:20 p.m., Maui County shares another update on Facebook. The road leading south out of Lahaina has been cleared and is open for traffic, the county says.
But by then, some on Front Street have already died, according to survivor accounts. Others have jumped over the seawall and are treading water, dodging flaming debris and breathing overheated black smoke.
At some point, police begin directing people away from Front Street, Pelletier says, “because it had already gotten too late.” He does not say exactly when that that point is reached.
A private ambulance company calls the U.S. Coast Guard at about 5:45 p.m., asking for help transporting 10 injured people from Lahaina to Maalaea because a fire is blocking road access to Lahaina. It is the Coast Guard’s first notification of the fire.
People in the water and on boat moorings use flashlights and phones to guide the boats through the thick smoke. The Coast Guard rescues nearly 40 people from the shore, and pulls 17 people from the water while civilians help pull more from the ocean. The rescue efforts stretch into the early morning hours.
An aerial image shows a U.S. Coast Guard vessel docking in the harbor near a destroyed building in the historic Lahaina Town in the aftermath of wildfires in western Maui in Lahaina, Hawaii, on August 10, 2023. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Kekoa Lansford is among the rescuers. Earlier, he had climbed a hill behind the town and watched as the city burned, trying to gauge when it would be safe to return. Lansford said he knew people would need help “because the roads are small, and it’s pretty tight down there.”
Over the next several hours, Lansford makes repeated trips into the still-burning downtown, often using back roads to travel safely.
“I seen one girl and her legs was all burned up, and then I helped her,” Lansford said. “And then something just clicked in my head, like, everybody’s going to be burned up. So I just kept going back down.”
Lansford focuses his effort on Front Street, getting as many people as he can out of the fire.
“Pulling them off behind the seawall, you know, and walking them back to my truck,” he said.
He takes each person to a place that seems safe from fire where they can be picked up by others. And then he goes back to find more.
“Just getting them out of the fire, make sure they don’t die of smoke inhalation. Some of them will die after anyway,” he recounted.
The houses and buildings are too hot to enter, he said, and a popular spot for watching the sunset has become a death zone.
An aerial image taken on August 10, 2023 shows destroyed homes and buildings on the waterfront burned to the ground in Lahaina in the aftermath of wildfires in western Maui, Hawaii. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Wildfire damage is shown, Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
A general view shows the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Aug. 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
When the sun rises on Wednesday, the town that was once home to about 13,000 people has become an ashen wasteland frozen in its final moments of panic.
Many of the survivors are angry, and haunted by the thought that a just few minutes of notice could have saved many lives.
Baird’s neighborhood near Lahainaluna Road was filled with kids who were home alone when the flames hit, he said.
“We needed like 10 more minutes, and we could have saved a lot of kids,” he said, choking back tears. “If we’d just had like a 10- or 15-minute warning.”
The family ventured out to a Kahului mall recently, looking for a moment of normalcy in the aftermath of the tragedy. They ran into a playmate of their son.
“The kids just don’t have a filter. So their son ran up and was just telling our son, you know, ‘This kid is dead. This kid is dead.’ And it’s like, all my son’s friends that they come to our house every day,” he said. “And their parents were at work, and they were home alone. And nobody had a warning. Nobody, nobody, nobody knew.”
Maui County Sues Hawaiian Electric for Causing Wildfire Through Negligence
Maui County, the local government of the Hawaiian island that suffered a devastating wildfire earlier this month, sued the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) on Thursday, alleging it caused the blaze though negligence.
President Joe Biden’s administration has explicitly blamed climate change for the blaze, with senior “clean energy” adviser John Podesta going further and touting Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as the solution. But it turns out that the spread of alien, invasive grass species on abandoned farmland was a major factor in providing fuel for the blaze that destroyed the town of Lahaina, and local authorities are placing immediate blame on the local power company.
Maui County filed a lawsuit … in state Second Circuit Court in Hawaii against Hawaiian Electric and its subsidiaries on Maui, alleging the company failed to maintain the electrical system and power grid during a windstorm that lashed the island, resulting in three different fires that erupted on Aug. 8.
…
The lawsuit claims that the utility, known as HECO, acted negligently by not pre-emptively cutting power despite a warning the prior day from the National Weather Service of high winds and temperatures, along with low humidity—prime conditions for a wildfire. It also says HECO’s failure to maintain its system led to energized, downed power lines causing the fires.
The utility has also been faulted for spending money on “green” energy alternatives rather than in improving the safety of its transmission network, which had been identified as a potential source of wildfire risk in the recent past.
The case appears similar to that of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company in California, whose transmission network has been blamed for sparking several massive wildfires in recent years during periods of high wind. There, too, the political left has blamed climate change, though conservatives have pointed out that poor forest management and environmental policies have allowed brush to grow in forests and around infrastructure, creating more fuel for fires.
Several power companies in California now cut power during periods of high wind, such as Santa Ana winds in Southern California, due to the risk of power lines toppling and sparking devastating wildfires as a result.
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DAY AFTER FIRE FOOTAGE: 4K Drone Lahaina Maui Fire - Longest & Most Detailed Aerial View
U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees received an agency email on Tuesday honoring “National Breast/Chestfeeding Month.” However, employees say they have yet to receive any significant message regarding the department’s relief/recovery efforts in the deadly Maui wildfire.
According to a source within CBP, the Biden Administration has thus far focused more on tailoring traditional messaging to accommodate the woke left while failing to order the U.S. flag lowered to half-staff in honor of those who perished or remain missing in Maui.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
The source says the message received by employees may seem benign to some as the agency has supported lactation services for mothers returning to work after delivery for years. However, DHS has added “chestfeeding” to the annual messaging campaign to appease the left. The term accommodates mostly transgender males who prefer the word chest over the traditional vernacular. The source says that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, focuses on woke efforts to rename awareness campaigns, but he is keeping employees in the dark on the agency’s efforts regarding the relief and mobilization to the Lahaina wildfire.
“We can get the messaging on ‘Breast/Chestfeeding Awareness Month,’ we can get policy editing that refers to pregnant employees and migrants as ‘pregnant persons,’ what we don’t get is a flag action notification to honor the more than 100 people, and perhaps hundreds more that perished in this tragedy,” the source told Breitbart Texas. The source offered no explanation regarding why the awareness month’s name was changed to add “chestfeeding” by the agency.
“Certainly, it was not changed by the United States Breastfeeding Committee,” the source stated. “It’s all just symbolism and a distraction from the mission.”
The source told Breitbart Texas the agency has historically provided robust messaging to leaders and the rank and file during significant weather events, mass shootings, and rescue/relief operations involving DHS/CBP. The Maui wildfire response has not received the same attention, according to the source.
To remain informed, employees resorted to outside media organizations for details about Lahaina’s relief/recovery operations. In past incidents where the loss of life involved fewer American citizens than those lost on Maui, the administration has been quick to initiate a nationwide federal flag action honoring the victims.
SOURCE: The White House
In May, President Biden issued an order to lower flags to half-staff in honor of the eight people killed and seven injured in a mass shooting event in Allen, Texas. Two other presidential orders this year — in January and March — honored victims in Nashville, Tennessee and Monterey Park, California. President Biden has signed no such order for the Maui tragedy, the White House website reveals.
As reported by Breitbart, the FBI has put the death toll in Lahaina at 115 and has said 1,100 remain missing. As it stands now, the Maui wildfire, which started on August 8, is the fifth deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.
“It never fails. When this administration has the opportunity to motivate the workforce with mission-related information, all the employees get is political messaging designed to demonstrate how woke they can go,” the source lamented. “The lowest morale in history shows the workforce is growing tired of it; the lack of action on lowering the flag for Lahaina lets the people know where the administration’s priorities are. It’s sad.”
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.
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