After a week of blaming the Maui fires on “climate change” (because a tree falling on a power line is caused by global warming), the Biden administration and its media are dodging accountability for the disaster.
We know that Hawaii officials not only failed to secure the power grid, they refused to sound the sirens and even provide water. And the Biden administration is resisting calls to investigate the role of the local Democrat government in the fires, and is instead expecting the corrupt system to investigate itself.
FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said this week that she would “defer” questions about any Maui investigations to leaders in Hawaii, whose attorney general has announced a probe.
As Biden prepares to visit Maui on Monday, the White House is facing tough questions about how to achieve “accountability” for potential failures that could have contributed to the unprecedented loss of life in Lahaina. After meeting with Biden this week, Criswell was asked if the president has directed FEMA to “get to the bottom” of questions like why evacuation sirens weren’t triggered and how faults in the island’s utility grid could have exacerbated the disaster.
The FEMA chief again deferred, citing the state’s leadership role in any formal probe.
“We always want to make sure that we understand what happened and how we can continue to improve so we can minimize the impacts that other communities may have,” Criswell said. “This is still going to be part of the state’s response to determine what level that they want to assess the cause and any of the initial response.”
I snipped out all the stuff about Rep. Nancy Mace endorsing a Democrat bill for a national disaster investigation board (you just know the result of every investigation would be ‘climate change’ and ‘fossil fuels’), but there is a federal role in investigating disasters.
When a cop sends a racist joke through email, there’ll be a dozen DOJ operatives tearing a local police station apart before you can sneeze. Yet when over 100 people die, there’s no interest in an evaluation.
The EPA dodged the disaster in Palestine, now it’s dodging the one in Lahaina. And while it’s premature to go there, the list of victims released thus far has few if any native Hawaiians making for a certain ‘Kill the Haole Day’ energy.
Either way we know the Biden administration would be a good deal more interested in investigating a natural disaster in Florida that spun out of control and killed 100 people, especially with the possibility that its boss might be facing Florida’s governor in a national election, and certainly if there was evidence that state officials had neglected to take proper action.
But Hawaii is the administration’s political territory with its own loyalists in office.
While the EPA has been resistant, the ATF is at least looking into the origins of the fire.
A team of investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was dispatched to Maui on Thursday to determine the exact origin and cause of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century.
Since the Aug. 8 fire killed more than 100 people, speculation about what caused it has centered on power lines, but investigators have found no definitive proof.
The five-member ATF National Response Team was expected to arrive Thursday night in Hawaii. It is expected to deploy in the field Friday morning.
“We were all devastated to learn of the loss of life and property on Maui from the Hawaii wildfires,” Jonathan T. McPherson, the special agent in charge of the ATF’s Seattle Field Division, said in a statement. “We will do everything in our power to support our local counterparts in determining the origin and cause of the wildfires there, and hopefully bring some healing to the community.”
Somehow I don’t trust their “local counterparts” very much. But then again how much do we trust the ATF?