Wombaticus Rex » 20 Aug 2023 01:11 wrote:Has anyone seen a rundown on this that doesn't primarily hinge on .jpgs and shit about Mountain Dew? The crime itself is very plausible and the fact the discourse around it is already being polluted by such flagrantly stupid shit doesn't necessarily mean it's a witch hunt being led by the context-averse.
Wells get poisoned for a reason, no pun intended there about our founders or our ecosystem here. Most of what observers (and participants!) consider to be conservative or right-wing media is controlled opposition, after all, and that's triply true for those participants. Whether it's a QAnon Yoga Mom or your classic Angry Vet in Shades, you can pretty much flip a fucking coin as to whether you're dealing with a real human being airing their real concerns online, even if they do it by posting videos ten times a day. Seeing is believing, and beliefs are worthless. When it comes to conspiracy theory media, those odds are far worse: pretty much everyone is either a retard or a Fed, many of them both.
If any of this speculation is true, there was a plan and there was a team. Both will prove to be documentably intertwined once you start assembling real leads. Data points that involve celebrities should be regarded with more suspicion than usual; they're not very capable people and there is no need for them to actually be read into the operations that burrow through their rarified air and highly-paid teams of assistants & handlers.
Also, as this story gains legs with Maui residents on the ground, expect an "insider" to come forward, score some early wins and then bring the whole ship down having a psychotic episode in public to discredit this "conspiracy theory."
I'm not saying this is a fuck up but this could easily have been a fuck up.
I've seen fires that are as bad as anything reported in your media this century and on occasion stopped them, even under really bad conditions. I still have PTSD from some of those incidents. But the wind in those videos is as bad as anything I've seen ever. Scary. I don't see how you could stop a fire running in front of a wind like that. I reckon it would be impossible.
Anyway what are the critical points of failure that happened?
Reports are power line failure is what caused the fire. There are videos of this online and they seem legit (tho everything can be faked these days.) The worst fires in Victoria around Melbourne - Black Saturday 2009 - resulted in massive pay out by the electricity company because their power lines failed, fell and sparked the worst of those fires.
Its also an opportunity and cover if you want to light a fire, but if the fires already burning do you need a cover for your arson?
Anyway the decision to declare the fire contained and then leave it needs to be investigated imo and I'd feel that way under any circumstances even without the context we have here.
So the second thing is the supposed containment.
I've been thinking about this. Before I saw the video of that wind and how dry the landscape is I was pretty sus on this.
I said so upthread.
When we (NSW RFS) black out a fire - ie make sure there are no ignition points, then depending on conditions we black out up to 50m inside the line of containment - ie the point where the fire has stopped. But even that doesn't always work and if a stump is on fire and has heat in it sometimes 3000 lt of water won't cool it properly. We've patrolled some stumps every day for weeks after fires and put a truckload of water on them each day. That still wasn't enough to cool them. However that's usually a specific situation - a hardwood stump from a tree that was felled decades earlier usually.
Human error comes into this. Its hard, boring work and if its 35 C+ ie hot, dry and windy as well people are more likely to make mistakes and make poor decisions.
But it also provides an opportunity to relight a fire if you have nefarious intent and its probably impossible to determine if this happened without eyewitnesses.
The entire phone network, emergency network and all comms were out.
This is a big red flag for me.
Hawaii isn't known for fire catastrophes but they do have a very advanced Tsunami warning system. At first i thought that could be explained by power failure but Tsunami's can come from local earthquakes as well so some sort of redundancy against local power network failure would have to part of that system wouldn't it? It would seem that way to me on the face of it. That is the bioggest of these comms failures issues imo.
Mobile phone networks are notoriously unreliable in fires. Smoke in the air is enough to ruin the signal at times and I imagine there was alot of smoke and it was driven ahead of the fire quickly by the extreme winds. But it sounds like the network had been turned off, not just failing on a case by case, message by message basis due to signal interference from the wind. That's another potential red flag if true.
The water failure is the biggest wtf moment for me tho.
Its not even an equipment failure according to the reports I've seen. It was a refusal to supply water by a water utility.
I just can't fathom that.
In NSW the RFS has the power to commandeer any water resource for fire fighting purposes in an emergency. That includes a private household water tank or any mains supply available to us. Obviously we don't abuse that power because we're a volunteer organisation and what we do is dependent on the good will of our communities most of the time. And if we take people's household water we replace it with good quality drinking water asap. But no one in any water utility has the ability to deny us water or switch off a supply during a fire emergency.
I just can't get my head around it.
I dunno what use water would have been in those circumstances to be honest. Sometimes all the resources in the world can't stop a fire and any time the wind is over 50km/hr that situation becomes more likely so ... I dunno. My immediate response is that surely a couple of lives would have been saved if water was available even if everything else was equal.
So there is potential there but at the same time its also within the scope of events with no overtly conspiratorial malicious intent. Even the water denial (allegedly authorised by someone of Hawaiian background) could be only malicious in terms of "fuck you haole wankers you can burn" tho I doubt that as well cos surely they'd know they were hurting locals as well.
And as we all know disaster capitalists will capitalise on a disaster at the first opportunity whatever the cause.
