It’s an old rule of mine. I always tell folks who live in or near wooded or range grassy areas to always have a ladder handy that is long enough to get on your roof. Then have a garden hose handy that can reach the whole roof. Then have a sprinkler handy that can really blow water. Protecting the roof, no matter what it’s made of, even metal, and any wooden outside decks is the greatest step anyone can take to protect from outside fires.
Most folks can’t work up the nerve to build in an outside sprinkler so the hose is next best.
Some years ago we had a forest fire on the edge of town and the wind was blowing embers right at us. First, I bolted a sprinkler on my own roof then noticed a couple of neighbors were gone. So I used their own hoses and sprinklers to keep their roofs wet. Took a few minutes to explain what happened to their stuff when they got home. But no damage. The next development over got wiped out. Not a sprinkler in the ‘hood.
On Maui, I wonder if the sugar bizness shutting down has led to a bunch of un-kempt over growth? In the older days burning the cane fields helped keep the place cleaned up. On Oahu I remember Waialua, Aiea, and Ewa beach turned into krap piles after they quit growing cane. But they cleaned up most of that by building krap houses where the cane had been?
Interesting observations. With a 60-80 MPH wind driven fire, few measures will do any good. DH was a firefighter for around 10 years, he knows how to make our property as fire safe as possible, and if there is a wildfire (we live very close to very ill-managed BLM vast forestland), he knows how to fight it here. We have two huge tanks, about 4000 gallons total, filled with water.
But a lot of people are stupid...
So... the attorney that crafted the sweetheart deal and colluded with the defense attorney to try to pull one over on the judge is now Special Prosecutor to 'aggressively prosecute' Hunter? That guy? Yup! Mmmkay.... Garland put a stooge in there to block the House in their investigations....hold on a minute....
Just wait! If the House asks the FBI or DoJ ANYTHING about Hunter, they will close ranks, clam up, and block the House (and Senators Grassley and Johnson) from access to anything. John Solomon suggested Kevin McCarthy put together a J6-like select committee just to investigate the Brandon Crime Family as a precursor to any impeachment exploratory committee. This would pierce the blockage Wray and Garland would put in their way.
That's why they no longer call it "independent counsel", it is "special counsel" and this one is very special and designed to block the truth. Very special and far from independent.
It turns out that Garland is supposed to grab a special counsel from OUTSIDE the US government. Garland could be impeached for not following the rules. We'll see....
Ya think?
Hawaii had to end agriculture to accommodate tourism. Cane haul trucks on the roads slow tour bus and rental car traffic to "Attractions". Smoke from pre-harvest cane burns prevented tourists from visiting the "North Shore" on Oahu and was generally annoying to those who bring money. Pineapple canneries stink like hot vomit. Plantation and mill workers don't wear grass skirts or dance hula for the visitors. Something had to be done.
Solution: eliminate agriculture, embrace tourism and convert all those plantation, mill and cannery workers into waiters, dishwashers, hotel maids and tour bus drivers. Problem solved.... but those unwashed, unphotogenic locals. They didn't want to convert to lower paying jobs and they are [were] still there. As luck would have it, Maui has been having a problem with arson lately. A "Firebug". Someone who just likes to start fires, I am told. The perfect conditions were created, a cynic might say, by design.
I expect a BIG NEW and highly profitable resort complex to spring up where the old Whaling/plantation town was. And, just as in the past, a new wave of immigrant workers will join the Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese that were imported as cheap labor in the 19th century. Call me cynical, but I lived there for thirty years and I watched it happening.