The death toll in the wildfires in Hawaii has risen to more than 100, as announced by Hawaii Governor Josh Green on Tuesday, making it the deadliest fire in the United States in over a century.
Yet, 12 days after the deadly wildfires scorched much of the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, many local victims say they’re furious at a government response they describe as slow, inadequate, and uncoordinated.
The actions of President Joe Biden are being compared to those of former President George W. Bush, Jr, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but this time the Federal Emergency Management Agency is set to run out of money by the end of the month.
As the president is accused of prioritizing an increasingly unpopular war over domestic concerns, he is seeking a much greater amount of foreign military aid than the level of funding Biden has requested to replenish FEMA in a year that’s setting records for billion-dollar weather disasters before the arrival of the peak of Atlantic hurricane season.
The 15 weather-related disasters that caused $1 billion or more in damages set a new record for the first seven months of the year, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There’s grave concern that FEMA funding could lapse if Biden doesn’t get a spending bill through Congress, which he has asked to approve $20.6 billion in additional funding for Ukraine.
Bush never recovered politically from the perception that the federal government’s failure to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina extended the misery for tens of thousands of New Orleans area residents.
In his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” the 43rd president said he deserved the blame because “in a national catastrophe the easiest person to blame is the president,” and “Katrina presented a political opportunity that some critics exploited for years.”
Bush said the poor Katrina response, combined with the “drumbeat of violence in Iraq,” made “the fall of 2005 a damaging period in my presidency.”
When asked about the Hawaii wildfires while on vacation in Delaware, Biden hesitated briefly before saying, “No comment”— a response that has drawn widespread criticism, with both Biden fans and critics admitting the answer was “extremely poor”.
Although Biden later signed an emergency declaration for the disaster and ordered the deployment of federal assets on the island he will always bear the stain of having done nothing while the wildfires were raging except stick to his vacation plans.
” The president is commander in chief, but when Americans suffer, especially from a huge natural disaster, he must become comforter in chief,” said Leland Vittert.
The Biden administration has promised billions of dollars to help Hawaii recover from its deadly wildfires this month — but not a federal investigation into what went wrong. Among the questions that nobody at the federal level is asking are: Why the island’s siren system wasn’t used to prompt evacuations, how water lines ran dry while fighting the fire, and whether the White House was fast enough about deploying federal emergency assistance.
The death toll in Hawaii is at 111 and still expected to rise, but Biden is also going to have to address a rare tropical storm heading for California that is expected to have “significant impacts” and wildfires continue to rage in the Northwest, both in US states an territories of Canada..
As of August 19, 2023, there are 92 wildfires burning in the United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. These fires have burned more than a half million acres in 14 states.
The largest fire is the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which has burned 416,923 acres and is 81% contained. The fire is still growing, and it is not expected to be fully contained until September 1.
These fires are causing significant damage to property and infrastructure. They are also displacing residents and disrupting travel. The causes of these fires vary, but most are due to human activity, such as campfires, power lines, and arson. The climate crisis is also making wildfires more frequent and severe. Warmer temperatures and drier conditions are creating the perfect conditions for fires to start and spread.
Biden has also been criticized for backtracking on his climate promises. He has approved new oil and gas leases on federal lands, as well as massively destructive investments in fossil fuel infrastructure projects, despite his campaign promise to end new drilling on public lands.
However, his policy failures are less politically damaging as the appearance that he is out of touch or unconcerned with suffering people, plus Biden’s mishandling of the Maui wildfire destruction is the second bungled disaster response of his presidency.
After a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine earlier this year, Biden went to Europe before visiting the site of a potential environmental disaster. It took ten days for anyone in the administration to even say anything about the disaster.
Rather than hold Norfolk Southern accountable, Biden allowed the company responsible for the disaster to take the lead on cleanup and recovery efforts, which was derided for involving paltry and hard-to-get financial assistance for those affected.
The president has repeatedly shot himself in the foot by avoiding discussion of the Maui fire while stubbornly continuing a planned ten-day-long holiday, in the middle of a presidency spent two fifths of which he’s already on vacation.
“My heart and prayers go out to the victims of the devastating wildfires in Maui,: said Biden’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who added: “Thoughts and prayers are not enough, however, as Americans demand to know how we can prevent such destructive wildfires in the future.”
“Climate change is making wildfires worse over the long term, due to hotter and drier conditions and heavier winds generated by hurricanes. However, deforestation and soil abuse also cause drier conditions by reducing evapotranspiration and water retention,” said Kennedy. “Right now, in short, Maui needs a massive land restoration program.”
“That is exactly the kind of thing I have been fighting for my entire adult life. I have always taken on big corporate interests, polluters, and government agencies to protect and restore America’s forests, soils, wetlands, rivers, and oceans,” said the candidate during a conversation with Ed Dowd, Kennedy’s campaign treasurer, who lives on Maui.
Another Democratic presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson, criticized Biden for not going to Hawaii in the immediate aftermath of the fatal fires. Of Biden’s plan to visit fire-ravaged island on Monday. Williamson said it was too little, too late.
“Something is very, very wrong. What we consider our disaster emergency systems are clearly a disaster in and of themselves,” said Williamson, who has asserted that working Americans are being shortchanged by an economic and political system she wants to overhaul. “We saw it with Katrina. We saw it with East Palestine, Ohio, and now we’re seeing it with Maui.”