Posted on 08/23/2023 11:42:59 AM PDT by george76
The fire trucks on Front Street were incinerated.
Joe, PLEASE re-read the latest article ten times real slow. Over 100 people dead and over 1,000 people missing and you worry over possible damage to a fire pumper truck???!!!
I run my 225hp Mercury engines in salt water and then wash them off good inside and out by running them in a fresh water lake. The Navy uses pumps to pump saltwater for fires.
A few firetrucks aren’t worth over 1,000 dead people including quite a few children I’m sure.
No excuses for not using it given the dire conditions they were facing, but might explain resasoning.
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Absolutely correct!
> I grew up in New England on an island where the northern half did not have city provided water. Yes, if a house close to the beach caught fire, the volunteer FD would use a pump truck to take water out of Narragansett Bay and pump it up to a portable holding container and other engines would pump out of that. They would rinse out all of the trucks downtown with hydrant water when all was said and done.
Good data point. I think this might have helped somewhat at Lahaina, but for Lahaina, one would need a good plan to do this in advance, plus wider street clearance close to the waterfront, plus the realization that it would probably not be practical for use on a town-wide scale fire such as Lahaina experienced this time.
In california we seem to have a prevalence of hillside water tanks uphill from towns, and where there are towns with no hills, vertical water tanks on stilts. I believe Lahaina has neither. In that case their best bet would be to keep cutting the hillside grass short, but they do not seem to have had a plan in place for doing that either. So they seem to have been to exposed to high fire risk by their leadership which placed priority on woke concerns such as renewable energy (windmills, solar panels, and batteries) over fire prevention considerations.
in passing, i notice that lahaina had a relatively small business tax base while neighboring communities presumably had a much higher business tax base (from resort-style hotels). nevertheless, tourists from the outlying areas enjoyed visiting lahaina. Maybe part of the problem was viewing lahaina fire prevention as a town-local problem which would have precluded lahaina from tapping into the business tax base of outlying areas. i also notice that bissen is billed as the mayor of maui. so there is evidently one large community government that covers the entire island. perhaps the problem is localized to the leadership at this level for essentially diverting outlying area hotel tax dollars away from lahaina safety and into the politically fashionable but (in retrospect) overly expensive renewable energy stuff. if so, the lahaina people got shortchanged by the Maui county government, and from this point forward should be wary of Maui county government trying to hide their own lack of competence by hiding information under the guise of ongoing investigations, footdragging relief efforts, platitudes, personnel shuffling, etc. lahaina can also learn the bitter lesson that political correctness comes at a high cost and sooner or later someone has to pay the bill for that.
It’s kind of like an air traffic controller telling a pilot flying a distressed airliner he’ll have to wait to land because they are mowing the grass near the runway and he will have to find their boss to get them to get out of the way.
It’s amazing the disorder and out right slaughter the Democrats can superintend and never suffer among their voters. These people are crazy. I mean that.
I don’t know how many fire trucks there were or their ability to pump from the ocean.
An obvious solution, clearly.
The water that was denied to them would have gone to hydrants throughout the town.
Even citizens could have used those.
How many Hawaiians, who lost relatives or whose homes were burned by the fires, voted for Demonicrats who control the state kakistocrats?
You would think.
There are several crises in the past few years that would have been small bumps if people on the ground had just said, the heck with the home office, and done what they knew was right.
If you get any push back later you just go public and say, I was on the ground, I made the call, I stand behind it, people's lives are important not what some paper pushing bureaucrat wants to chase their tail over.
And perhaps you didn’t read where I said that the equipment would be junk before you were done using it.
What do you think that means?
It means that you would be in the middle of the friggin fire when it just said NO and stopped working.
All men using and relying on that piece of equipment would be DEAD, along with all the people that they were trying to save.
How about instead of reacting like an uneducated moron, you read slowly and carefully.
This is just beyound belief!
Inland cities have hydrants places at strategic places. Why can’t waterfront cities do the same with pumps for sea water?
We’re on a river and pump that water to our lawn and landscaping. Electricity down? Generators.
Or a stiff neck from looking over his shoulder.
No one ever thought to keep a trash pump in their home.
A ‘’trash’’ pump is something I used to use in construction a lot. Looks like a generator except it has a 2 and a half inch hose. Pull in water from one end and shoot out another hose and viola, you have the equivalent of a fire hose that can shoot water over fifty feet.
> Why did he not divert the water first and ask for permission later?
IIRC according to some timelines, the uphill lahaina fire did not restart until around 3:00 PM. At about 3:30 PM, the local emergency management sends out a shelter-in-place message. At 4:45PM, they close the bypass. In particular, given all of the apparent simultaneous communications problems, they might have been faced with a no-win situation: if they OK’d the use of the water without permission and it worked, then the emergency would have ceased, and they would be open to a lawsuit for stealing culturally significant water resource for no evident bottom line reason. these kinds of problems could have been solved or at least ameliorated by a comprehensive fire emergency plan that covered wind and weather, emergency water usage, power distribution (including emergency power), ground foliage trimming, communication (including siren usage and cell phone coverage), and emergency evacuation. up through the present, i am not aware that such an emergency fire plan exists. it would not surprise me if such a plan was a rarity on other islands (outside of oahu perhaps).
How about if they had had pumps in the ocean and used that water instead to put the fires out?
Very weird.
Complete devastation one one side of the street and the other side looks untouched. One house burned to the ground and one close to it untouched.
Islands of untouched houses in completely burned neighborhoods.
Going north, I think, it looks like the fire just stopped.
Could be accounted for by very high winds, maybe?
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