why is the us air force destroying saa tanks

Les Munn went outside to take out the trash. By 8am she got her first whiff of smoke, an odour that would build throughout the day. The weather was building, said Lynn Robison, who lived in the heart of the historic town.

Standing up near the door of a pharmacy where he had set up for the night, he watched as his bedding was carried by the wind into the harbor. Richard Tenison, a homeless Lahaina resident, woke up to the rushing winds. Residents were given no indication it would flare up again. Munn, like most others, assumed this outage was linked to nearby Hurricane Dora, which authorities had warned could bring gusts of up to 65mph (105kph) to Maui.Īnd at that time, the local fires apparently fuelled by Dora's winds seemed insignificant.īy 9:55 am, officials had declared the Lahaina brush fire '100% contained'. 'I just thought it was going to be another blackout,' he said, noting the trade winds that frequently hammer the coast. Mid-conversation, the connection was cut.īut the outage alone wasn't especially concerning, Munn said. He had woken up at 4:00am that day to accommodate the six-hour time difference. Phones hadn't charged, alarm clocks stayed quiet and air conditioners shut down.įor Les Munn, a 42-year-old resident, the outage announced itself in a dropped call to the country's east coast. On Tuesday morning, Lahaina residents woke up to find their power was out. One thing seemed to unite their accounts: residents say they had no official warning before they fled for their lives, raising painful questions about the effectiveness of the emergency response and whether more people could have been saved. 'None of us really know the size of it yet,' chief Pelletier warned, growing visibly emotional.ĭozens of survivors shared their stories of escape and loss with the BBC, helping to piece together a more complete picture of the tragedy that unfolded on Tuesday, when fires moving at a mile per minute consumed the town. 'We pick up remains and they fall apart,' said Maui County police chief John Pelletier on Saturday, four days after a massive wildfire tore downhill through dry brush and grass and engulfed the island's western edge.Ĭlose to 100 deaths have been confirmed, making the Lahaina wildfires the deadliest in the US in more than a century.īut just 3% of Lahaina's charred ruins have been searched so far, stoking fears that the death toll will continue its sharp climb. LAHAINA, Hawaii - Lahaina, once Hawaii's royal capital, is now a crematorium.

Why is the us air force destroying saa tanks