To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the national director of the Green New Deal Network — a cliché of an activist group devoted to popularizing a variety of progressive social-justice and climatological causes through quasi-revolutionary cosplay — everything looks like “climate change and colonialism.” Those are the two culprits behind Maui’s deadly wildfires this month, the organization’s figurehead wrote in an op-ed for Time magazine.

Blaming the fire on climate change and the sundry social maladies that allegedly accompany it became a cottage industry in this historic disaster’s wake. Indeed, if climate change wasn’t directly responsible for the devastating blaze, Hawaii governor Josh Green agreed that the phenomenon at least “amplified” the causes of the blaze. Its proximate amplifiers notwithstanding, the cause of the fire increasingly looks like both human error and human malfeasance.

It has been all but established at this point that the devastating fire that consumed Maui likely began as a result of a live power line snapping during a high-wind event, collapsing into some dry brush that the local utility provider had not cleared. But we may never fully establish the sequence of events that produced the fire, partly because the evidence has already been tampered with. Via the Washington Post:

Hawaiian Electric — which acted quickly to restore power on the island after Aug. 8 — hauled away fallen poles, power lines, transformers, conductors and other equipment from near a Lahaina substation starting around Aug. 12, documents show, before investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) arrived on scene.

Those actions may have violated national guidelines on how utilities should handle and preserve evidence after a wildfire and deprives investigators the opportunity to view any poles or downed lines in an undisturbed condition before or after the fire started, according to court documents, letters and other records obtained by The Washington Post.

Not only is the utility accused by Maui County in a court filing of “inexcusably” failing to shut off power in response to the warnings it received of incoming high winds and failing to maintain the vegetation surrounding its equipment properly, it is now accused of misleading state and federal investigators.

This is only the latest in a series of revelations about the incompetence of functionaries occupying sinecures in a one-party state dropping their respective balls with terrible consequences. But quite unlike global levels of heat-trapping emissions or the weather those gases influence, individual Hawaii residents can actually do something about the unacceptable incompetence of their public officials.