What do you do in an emergency? Do you follow the rules or do you do whatever it takes to survive?
Among the legion of catastrophic government failures in the Hawaii wildfires, which included the failure to sound sirens or release water, were the barricades that cost lives instead of saving them.
In the early hours of the Maui fires, there were more than 30 power poles downed alongside the Honoapiilani Highway at the south end of Lahaina — a historic town that was decimated in the fires earlier this month. Officials closed Lahaina Bypass Road due to the fires, blocking the only way out of Lahaina to the southern part of the island.
One family swerved around the barricade set up to escape the flames, while another resident took a dirt road uphill to climb above the fire, according to the AP. However, many others who stayed in the cars on that road were stuck in a gridlock, with fires surrounding them on most sides with the ocean on the remaining side.
Nate Baird and Courtney Stapleton recounted their experience to the outlet, saying they loaded the car up with their two sons, Baird’s mother and one dog to escape the flames. When they turned south to escape Lahaina, they were met with cones and were told to turn around to Lahaina, which was already burning.
Instead of turning around, they swerved past the cones and escaped to a neighboring town.
“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.”
Baird told the reporter that if they had 10 more minutes, they could have saved children who were left home alone in their neighborhood during the fires.
“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.”
Kim Cuevas-Reyes said that she survived with her two sons by ignoring orders to turn right onto Front Street, which has now been devastated by the fires. Instead, she turned left and drove in the wrong lane to escape the town.
“The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came,” Cuevas-Reyes, 38, told the AP. “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.”
Leftists have destroyed both the basic functionality of government and common sense. They keep claiming that all of their rules are vetted by experts and follow the science, when they’re actually dangerous incompetent idiots who get people killed. We saw this during COVID, but really we were seeing what goes on every day. From Uvalde to the Hawaii wildfires, a combination of one-party systems, corrupt bureaucracies, and affirmative action leads to idiotic corrupt systems that get people killed.
And in the face of that, some people are still trained to follow orders. When your family is in the car and there are flames behind you, but a barricade in front of you, do you hit the gas or obediently go back?
The answer to the question has great implications for all of America.