The Weekly Flail
The trends being beaten to death in our media
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by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ August 18, 2023
Lahaina, Maui
Things are not going well, but they are becoming more realistic. People are organizing and figuring out everything we should have known would cause a disaster but were all ignored. Hawaiian Electric has been sued, and that is no surprise.
The state disaster management failed Lahaina, which is also not surprising. While our state disaster alert is known as the tsunami warning system, it is also used for storms and should work for brush fires, but the thinking on that was not well done. The resignation of the emergency official responsible for Lahaina, who had a feeble justification for not sounding the sirens, promptly resigned.
I see several years of legal and political squabbling that may or may not improve things. We need to get beyond this, as I have suggested here.
Keeping track of the climate disasters beyond Hawaii is difficult. Here is a synopsis:
What’s Burning?
Canada again? No, still burning, only more now.
About 20,000 residents in [Northwestern Territories capital} Yellowknife are being urged to get out of the way of fast-moving flames as more than 230 fires char the territory and smoke creeps south. . . [source]
The Canary Islands are now burning.
Authorities are evacuating at least 3,800 people from the area near a mountainous national park near the Mount Teide volcano in Tenerife after a wildfire broke out on Wednesday (Aug. 16), Reuters reported.
What’s Flooding?
Northern Europe is inundated.
Storm Hans caused chaos across Northern Europe last week, but hit Norway particularly hard, causing flooding and landslides that isolated parts of the country. “It’s a big crisis for us. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Pål Erik Teigen, chief of staff at Innlandet police district, told The Guardian.
India, now.
Shimla and its surrounding area in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh after torrential rain earlier this week caused landslides and…
