Something like this fortunately happens rarely but it is not ever about ignition. Anything can do that including static or small lightening.
The problem is always air flow turning a mass of fuel into a blow torch and add in hurricane force winds and you can readily torch the whole island. That blow torch efrect explains what happened to the road full of cars. I hope they all ran into the water.
It was still hyper hot and super quick. This was one nasty natural disaster for which we have no real protection. A sealed bomb shelter would make it because the fuel is gone so quick. nothing else though because all oxygen would be sucked up and consumed.
We have square miles of forest fires which are slowly advancing along an edge that it is possible to outrun and side step. give it an incline and you now have a rocket. wildfires work to consume surface fuel and not much else.
Our only useful strategy will be blanket forest grooming. this means dropping lower limbs to open up the woodlands and becoming through every two or more years in order to chip out the surplus. Towns certainly nee3d to create a proper halo. If the ground is not able to really ignite, it is plausible that the tops will not carry far either.
This may not be as expensive as it looks either.
How the Maui wildfires devastated Lahaina, hour by hour
In a visual timeline, survivors recount how they were overwhelmed by the fire’s speed, smothering smoke and lack of escape routes
August 13, 2023 at 12:05 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/13/maui-wildfire-started-spread/?
It is already the deadliest conflagration in modern U.S. history, but there is still so much unknown about the Maui wildfires that destroyed much of Lahaina last week. How many people died? What caused the blazes? To what degree did climate change contribute?
What is known is that thousands of people on Maui experienced horrors on Aug. 8 that they had never imagined, and that unfolded hour after hour.
Morning: Howling winds, then a brush fire
Lisa Vorpahl, a bank teller, woke to the sound of someone shuffling on her lanai. It was 3 a.m. on Tuesday when she looked out her bedroom window — along a dry, grassy slope overlooking her slice of tropical paradise — and realized it was just the wind.
Live updates on Hawaiian wildfires
Wildfires across Hawaii have killed more than 90 people, making them the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than 100 years. Here’s a detailed look at how the wildfires devastated Lahaina, hour by hour. As blazes continue, follow live updates.
Alexa Caskey couldn’t sleep, either. On the farm where she grew taro and breadfruit for her plant-based restaurant, she listened to gusts that would dislodge her garage door and topple the Hong Kong orchid tree outside.
Photographer Rachael Zimmerman woke up before dawn in her condo on Front Street, Lahaina’s seaside boulevard of restaurants and surf shops, to the howls rattling her window screens.
If there was any warning that fitful night that Hawaii was about to endure one of the most horrific and deadly natural disasters in the state’s history, it was only the wind.
Video recorded on the morning of Aug. 8 shows high winds blowing roofs off of buildings in Lahaina. (Video: @lei_dubzz)
For two days, National Weather Service employees in Honolulu had been sending out ominous alerts about powerful easterly gusts, whipped up by Hurricane Dora passing 500 miles to the south. They hit Maui at a time when much of the tropical island had been parched by severe drought, including the drier leeward side that includes Lahaina.
The next time Vorpahl woke up, she smelled smoke. The power was out.
A fire had started in the dry grass near her home on Lahainaluna Road, on a slope just east of the highway that bypasses downtown. Power poles fell in the neighborhood, and wires had snapped — leading several neighbors to later question whether electrical equipment had started the blaze.
Video captured on Aug. 8 at 9:30 a.m. shows the Lahaina Library engulfed in flames. (Video: Hawaii by Storm via Storyful)
Maui County authorities got the first reports of the fire by 6:37 a.m., and not long afterward, police were circulating in her neighborhood, calling out on megaphones for people to evacuate. Using a nearby hydrant, firefighters doused the flames.
She didn’t feel panicked. Fires were a regular occurrence. The blaze was small and didn’t appear threatening as she and her husband, Eddy, drove past.
“It’s Hawaii,” she said. “Nobody thought anything of it.”
They spent a few hours at their daughter’s apartment but returned home after Maui County — at 9:55 a.m. — sent out an alert that the brush fire was “100% contained.”
It looked that way to Eddy.
“Nothing was happening. A couple fire engines were there. They were all packing stuff up,” he said. “It looked 100 percent fine.”
Afternoon: Rapid flames, then ‘broiling smoke’
Lahaina sits on Maui’s western flank, a historic town rimmed by white-sand beaches at the foot of the ancient Puʻu Kukui volcano. On most days, it’s a postcard-perfect symbol of tropical bliss. But an early-morning blaze was ominous. And Mark Stefl, a tile setter, had reason to be wary.
He lived down the hill on Lahainaluna Road in a home he rebuilt after another wildfire burned it down five years ago. He had heard that the early-morning blaze had been extinguished. Around 2:30 p.m., he heard his wife, Michele, shout: “Oh, my God.”
The blaze had kicked up again farther down the hillside. Wind dragged the flames toward Lahaina.
It was still a few hundred yards away. Mark tried to reassure Michele that firefighters would handle it. But the speed of its approach was like nothing he had seen.
“Within minutes, there was a wall of fire 30 yards from the house,” he said.
Overhead, dry air — the result of a high-pressure system — was jetting over and down the slopes of the volcano, sending ferocious winds into his town, spraying gravel and ripping shingles off the rooftops. It was a worst-case scenario that some emergency planners had long warned about.
The couple scrambled to gather their dogs and cats. One rescue dog, Poppy, got left behind in the chaos. Stefl hit the gas in his truck as flames licked at the side of the house.
“I was praying to God that we didn’t die,” he said.
Phil Hopper said he and his family tried to flee the area but hit traffic on Aug. 8. They found shelter in a hotel lobby for the night. (Video: Phil Hopper via Storyful)
Not far away, on Komo Mai Street, AnnaStaceya Arcangel Pang saw the distant fire marching closer. The Lahaina native and family members — her grandmother, her mother, various cousins — live within blocks of one another, and all had decided to leave.
Pang, 31, texted her husband, who had left early that day to work in another town, to see what he wanted her to pack for him. He replied eight minutes later, but by then, her backyard was in flames, and she hastily fled alongside a caravan of relatives.
As she drove away with her dogs and a few clothes she had grabbed she could hear the sound of propane tanks exploding up and down the street, one after another.
“When I looked back, all I saw was black smoke,” she said. “It was then that I knew: If we come back, we are coming back to nothing.”
By this time, that same black cloud was starting to smother Lahaina.
The town of 12,000 had been the capital of the former Hawaiian Kingdom and a trade hub for 19th-century whaling ships. Lahaina had the oldest house in Maui, the Baldwin Home Museum, and a treasured banyan tree that has grown in a courtyard by the sea for 150 years. These days, tourists come to surf or snorkel, sunbathe and zip-line.
On Aug. 8, video shot in the afternoon shows downed power lines and billowing smoke in Lahaina, Hawaii. (Video: Kevin Foley via Storyful)
Caresse Carson, 41, catered to those visitors at her job at Captain Jack’s Island Grill. She had spent nearly two decades in Lahaina and valued its rich history. Mark Twain had visited the Pioneer Inn — across the street from Captain Jack’s. She liked to imagine herself tracing his long-ago footsteps.
Even though the power was out, Carson had reported to work that afternoon to help keep food from spoiling. On the drive in, she passed the home of her boss, Sam, and watched a chunk of his roof as big as her truck get ripped off by the wind. As she and Sam hauled bags of ice, black smoke started billowing through town.
It came on in an instant.
“All of a sudden, it was starting to barrel over the building,” Carson said. “It was completely black. You couldn’t see an inch in front of you. This was broiling smoke.”
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