Hawaii wildfire: ‘It feels like a bomb has been dropped’ say residents returning to aftermath
It was the first time the people of Lahaina had been allowed to return since wildfires laid ruin to their town three days ago.
A queue of cars, hours long, waited at the police checkpoint to show their documents.
Once cleared, they travelled the winding highway, under a tunnel cutting through the lush west Maui mountains and into town. Some were on mopeds, others in the back of pick-up trucks, wind whipping as they passed a series of picture postcard beaches.
They had been told to brace themselves for the scale of the devastation. But for many, what awaited them on arrival was even worse than they expected.
Front Street had been the beating heart of Lahaina, full of cafes selling shaved ice, hip bars and well regarded restaurants. But it wasn’t just a tourist town, it was an idyll for 13,000 locals.
Burnt out cars are everywhere
Ryan Nakagowa has lived here his whole life and returns with his family to see the damage on the ground. They’re wearing masks to protect themselves from the acrid smoke filling the air. Much of the wreckage is still smouldering.
“It really feels like a bomb has been dropped,” he says, “I feel like if you pinched me right now and I would wake up, probably better off. But this is the reality, unfortunately.”
The fires began on Tuesday. Pic:AP
Mr Nakagowa is wrestling with how to tell his five-year-old daughter that her school has burned down.
Meanwhile, his sister Natalie is reminiscing.
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“Everyone who came here, it was their happy place,” she says, “And now everything we know is gone. I can’t go to the gelato shop anymore.
“I can’t go to the bars we used to go to. There was bingo nights and trivia nights and such a big sense of community. Although we still have that sense of community, it’s not going to be the same for a while.”
There is little joy to be found in the ruins but Natalie tries. “Want to see what the top-rated trip advisor restaurant in Hawaii looks like?” she asks, pointing to a pile of twisted metal.
A bar owned by rocker Mick Fleetwood, of Fleetwood Mac, is still standing but has been torched, charcoal black on the outside and hollowed inside.
The fire that obliterated Lahaina was hot enough to turn metal into molten silver lava which now decorates the roads. In the ruins of what was the art gallery, a statue of an elephant and a model whale have survived.
The alerts did not go off when the fire started
‘Everything we had in the past is gone’
Down the street, sisters Christie Gagala and Abigail Ang are sifting through the remains of a place they have called home for almost two decades. Their dad built it and they lived here with 16 family members. They sob as they realise there is little to be retrieved.
“We lost everything,” says Christie, “thank God we still have each other and we’re all alive and safe and accounted for. We’re the only things we have now, because everything that we had in the past is gone.”
The US Army goes from house to house, searching the debris, marking the pavement with a spray painted orange cross once a search in completed.
Questions are mounting for authorities about their response to the wildfires. There is an outdoor emergency alert system on Maui, designed for circumstances like this but, for whatever reason, it was not activated on Tuesday afternoon.
It will cost billions to rebuild the town
“I hear there were no sirens that went off,” says Charles Offenbach, a local who lost his home in the fire, “We just had to know that ourselves. It was fight or flight with no warning whatsoever. And it spread in the matter of minutes.”
Some ran out of time. Near the harbour, the scene is apocalyptic. The shells of dozens of burnt out cars are moody against the sparkling, turquoise ocean. The occupants, it seems, abandoned their vehicles and jumped into the sea when they were unable to escape the flames by road.
Restaurants have been destroyed
Annelise Cochran was in the water for six hours with her neighbour, Edna. Burns from the flames cover her face.
“We were going in and out of consciousness,” she says, “we were hallucinating and holding hands and telling each other to wake up. Every once in a while we would get out of the water or go back up towards the fire just to warm our bodies.”
She, too, thinks the authorities were ill prepared. “There was no warning,” she says, “I was not told a single thing, I got no message, no alarm, nobody told me my house would be burned down or that my friends will be dying in front of me. And I understand that there’s no power, but that’s what an emergency system is for.”
As the number of dead rises by the day, the sense of loss swells and so too does the scrutiny of the response.
A Russian spy ship is currently on the edge of UK waters, the defence secretary has announced.
John Healey said it was the second time that the ship, the Yantar, had been deployed to UK waters.
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Giving a news conference in Downing Street, he said: “A Russian spy ship, the Yantar, is on the edge of UK waters north of Scotland, having entered the UK’s wider waters over the last few weeks.
“This is a vessel designed for gathering intelligence and mapping our undersea cables.
“We deployed a Royal Navy frigate and RAF planes to monitor and track this vessel’s every move, during which the Yantar directed lasers at our pilots.
“That Russian action is deeply dangerous, and this is the second time this year that this ship, the Yantar, has deployed to UK waters.”
Mr Healey added: “So my message to Russia and to Putin is this: we see you, we know what you’re doing, and if the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready.”
His warning comes following a report from MPs that the UK lacks a plan to defend itself from a military attack, despite the government promising to boost readiness with new arms factories.
At least 13 sites across the UK have been identified for new factories to make munitions and military explosives, with Mr Healey expecting the arms industry to break ground at the first plant next year.
The report, by the Commons Defence Committee, said the UK “lacks a plan for defending the homeland and overseas territories” as it urged the government to launch a “co-ordinated effort to communicate with the public on the level of threat we face”.
Mr Healey acknowledged the dangers facing the UK, saying the country was in a “new era of threat” that “demands a new era for defence”.
Giving more details on the vessel, he said it was “part of a Russian fleet designed to put and hold our undersea infrastructure and those of our allies at risk”.
Russian Ship Yantar. Pic: Ministry of Defence
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He said the Yantar wasn’t just part of a naval operation but part of a Russian programme driven by Moscow’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, or GUGI, which is “designed to have capabilities which can undertake surveillance in peacetime and sabotage in conflict”.
“That is why we’ve been determined, whenever the Yantar comes into British wider waters, we track it, we deter it and we say to Putin we are ready, and we do that alongside allies,” he added.
Asked by Sky News’ political correspondent Rob Powell whether this was the first time that lasers had been used by a Russian vessel against pilots, Mr Healey replied: “This is the first time we’ve had this action from Yantar directed against the British RAF.
“We take it extremely seriously. I’ve changed the Navy’s rules of engagement so that we can follow more closely, monitor more closely, the activities of the Yantar when it’s in our wider waters. We have military options ready.”
Mr Healey added that the last time the Yantar was in UK waters, the British military surfaced a nuclear-powered attack submarine close to the ship “that they did not know was there”.
The Russian embassy has been contacted for comment.
More than 250 passengers on board a ferry that ran aground off the South Korean coast have been rescued, according to the coastguard.
It said the Queen Jenuvia 2, travelling from the southern island of Jeju to the southwestern port city of Mokpo, hit rocks near Jindo, off the country’s southwest coast, late on Wednesday.
A total of 267 people were on board, including 246 passengers and 21 crew. Three people had minor injuries.
All on board were rescued. Pic: Yonhap/Reuters
Footage showed passengers wearing life vests waiting to be picked up by rescue boats, which were approaching the 26,000-tonne South Korean ferry.
Its bow seemed to have become stuck on the edge of a small island, but it appeared to be upright and the passengers seemed calm.
Weather conditions at the scene were reported to be fair with light winds.
South Korea’s Prime Minister Kim Min-seok ordered all available boats and equipment to be used to rescue those on board, his office said.
The coastguard received a report of the incident late on Wednesday, and immediately deployed 20 vessels and a plane to join the rescue effort.
It was not immediately clear what caused the vessel to run aground.
The vessel can carry up to 1,010 passengers and has multiple lower decks for large vehicles and passenger vehicles, according to its operator Seaworld Ferry.
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In 2014, more than 300 people, mostly schoolchildren heading to Jeju on a school trip, died when the Sewol ferry sank.
It was one of the country’s worst disasters.
The ship went down 11 years ago near the site of Wednesday’s incident, though further off Jindo.
After taking a turn too fast, the overloaded and illegally-modified ferry began listing.
It then lay on its side as passengers waited for rescue, which was slow to come, before sinking as the country watched on live television.
Many of the victims were found in their cabins, where they had been told to wait by the crew while the captain and some crew members were taken aboard the first coastguard vessels to arrive at the scene.
The Yantar may look scruffy and unthreatening but below the surface it’s the kind of ship a Bond villain would be proud of.
In hangars below decks lurk submersibles straight out of the Bond film Thunderball. Two Consul Class mini manned subs are on board and a number of remotely operated ones.
It can “undertake surveillance in peacetime and sabotage in conflict”, in the words of Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey.
The Russian spy ship Yantar. Pic: MOD/PA
Cable-cutting equipment combined with surveillance and intelligence gathering capabilities make this a vessel to be reckoned with.
Most worryingly though, in its most recent tangle with RAF planes sent to stalk it, the Yantar deployed a laser to distract and dazzle the British pilot.
Matthew Savill, from the Royal United Services Institute, told Sky News this was potentially a worrying hostile act.
He said: “If this had been used to dazzle the pilot and that aircraft had subsequently crashed, then maybe the case could be made that not only was it hostile but it was fundamentally an armed attack because it had the same impact as if they’d used a weapon.”
The Yantar is off our waters and here to threaten the West’s Achilles heel, says our government. Undersea infrastructure is essential to our hyper-connected world.
Undersea cables are the vital nervous system of Western civilisation. Through them courses the data that powers our 21st century economies and communications systems.
Pipelines are equally important in supplying fuel and gas that are vital to our prosperity. But they stretch for mile after mile along the seabed, exposed and all but undefended.
Their vulnerability is enough to keep Western economists and security officials awake at night, and Russia is well aware of that strategic weakness.
The Russian spy ship Yantar. Pic: MOD/PA
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That is why some of the most sophisticated kit the Russian military possesses is geared towards mapping and potentially threatening them.
The Yantar’s concealed capabilities are currently being used to map that underwater network of cables and pipelines, it’s thought, but they could in the future be used to sabotage them. Russia has been blamed for mysterious underwater attacks in the recent past.
A more kinetic conflict striking at the West’s soft underwater underbelly could have a disastrous impact. Enough damage to internet cables could play havoc with Western economies.
It is a scenario security experts believe the West is not well enough prepared for.
Putting the Yantar and its Russian overseers on watch is one thing; preventing them from readying for such a doomsday outcome in time of war is quite another.
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