Episode Notes

Ep. 18 Manufactured Weather & “Natural Disasters”

• Fires / “Natural Disasters”

• Fires

• The extent of area burned by wildfires each year appears to have increased since the 1980s. (United States Environmental Protection Agency)

• Maui

• The Aug. 8 blaze killed 100 people, destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and displaced 12,000 people. Experts estimate it will cost $5.5 billion to replace the structures exposed to the fire. https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2024-01-17/wildfire-prevention-and-maui-recovery-top-the-agenda-for-the-2024-legislative-session 

• No updates to death / missing tolls after November 2023

• Investigators are still studying how the fire began. Heavy winds whipped up by a powerful hurricane passing south of Hawaiʻi helped the flames spread quickly, as did drought and non-native fire-prone grasses.

• 5 Takeaways from people in Maui SOURCE

• Survivors still need stable housing while Lahaina rebuilds.

• Maui faces a broader long-term housing crisis.

• Even before the fire, Maui faced a severe housing crisis. Maui needs to rebuild its lost housing stock and dramatically expand its supply of affordable housing. Hawai’i has the highest median home value in the nation, as well as the fourth highest level of homelessness. Since 2000, Maui has experienced over 300% price growth in homes. Many locals working service jobs, particularly in the tourism industry, do not make incomes that can meet such high housing costs. In Maui County, more than 50% of renters are cost-burdened (paying over 30% of their income on rent) and nearly 30% are severely cost-burdened (paying over 50% of their income on rent). 

• Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt and enhanced.

• In addition to housing and property destruction, Maui experienced severe damage to its critical infrastructure. For example, more than 2,200 water service lines were damaged. Rebuilding all of the water infrastructure could take years and cost much as $80 million, according to a local official’s estimate. Beyond restoring clean and safe water service, Maui’s water infrastructure demands modernization to enhance future resilience and capacity.

•  Unemployment has risen as tourism has dipped.

• More than 800 businesses and the major tourist hub of Lahaina were impacted. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate was 6.2% in November 2023, up from 2.5% before the fire,  This is largely due to the decline in tourist travel to the island after the fire. Prior to the fire, tourism contributed to about 40% of the island’s GDP, but businesses that serve tourists have had to cut back on staff with fewer visitors.

• While bringing back tourism will support employment and economic activity, with a limited stock of housing and hotel units, there is a tension between housing survivors and providing lodging for tourists.

• Survivors are dealing with profound trauma

• Since Summer 2023

• Some land in the upcountry in Maui is still on fire: https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/01/12/mfd-ground-is-still-smoldering-upcountry-maui-and-sometimes-igniting-new-fires/ 

• Jan. 17, 2024 - state lawmakers reconvene for a legislation session focused on Maui recovery

• “House of Representatives Speaker Scott Saiki emphasized the need to center Hawaiʻi when addressing these issues.

• Saiki also emphasized the need to address regulation of short-term rentals on a state level. “I happen to personally believe that this is one of the top issues that we have to address in order to provide more affordable housing to our residents,” he said.

• “It's really, really important . . . for the Legislature to take on short-term rentals head-on because I don't know if the counties are really able to do that. A couple of them have tried over the years, and haven't been too successful.”

• Solution for people put out of their homes by the fires? Federal government will come to the rescue and put up short-term rental units for the counties who haven’t had success at it before. “Senate President Ron Kouchi told reporters that the budget is in good shape to address the needs of Maui fire recovery due to an influx of federal aid and the ability to reallocate funds dedicated to less urgent capital improvement projects.”

• Rain-washed fire-related contaminants have made their way into the ocean off Lahaina leaving a muddy brown ocean surrounding the shores SOURCE

• “We were seeing really high turbidity numbers like I’ve never seen in the field before,” said Liz Yannell, program manager with Hui O Ka Wai Ola, a group of nonprofits that does ocean health work. “Incredibly high.”

• Yannell is part of a multi-agency effort investigating how toxic runoff from some 2,170 acres of burned land and more than 2,200 destroyed buildings may be leaching into Lahaina’s coastal waters and coral reef ecosystem.

• Although the Environmental Protection Agency has applied a soil stabilizer to scorched properties in Lahaina and Maui County has placed absorbent material and other pollution controls around storm drains and along Front Street, it’s highly likely that some level of contaminants found in the ash – things like arsenic, lead and volatile organic compounds – entered the ocean.

• Hit to Hawaii economy from Maui fire pegged at $1.9 billion through 2024

• Direct Energy Weapons (DEW)

• DOD spends about $1 billion annually on directed energy—concentrated electromagnetic energy—weapons, including high energy lasers and high power microwaves. US Government Accountability Office

• Directed energy weapons such as lasers and high powered microwaves may soon be used to defend against drones and rockets on the battlefield. These futuristic sounding weapons are part of a new wave of devices produced from billions of dollars in research and development from the Defense Department. CNBC

• Directed-energy weapons can be used discreetly; radiation does not generate sound and is invisible if outside the visible spectrum. Wikipedia

• Antarctica allegedly has technology that people can’t even imagine

• Can create earthquakes

• Raytheon

• DEW are stored at the Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico

• the Directorate develops and transitions technologies in four core technical competencies: laser systems, high power electromagnetics, weapons modeling and simulation, and directed energy and electro-optics for space superiority Air Force Research Laboratory 

• Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told reporters Wednesday that he’s looking to boost investments in high-powered lasers in future budget submissions as the service pursues new tools to defeat drone swarms. Defense Scoop

• “Modern lasers with power that is high enough to start any kind of fire operate in the infrared and so cannot be seen by the naked eye,” he [Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado, Boulder] said. Associated Press

• HEL (High Energy Lasers)

• Record Breaking Wildfires in Northern Hemisphere in 2023

• Canada

• https://abcnews.go.com/US/record-breaking-wildfires-occurred-northern-hemisphere-2023-new/story?id=103169036 

• “Boreal forests in regions all over the world have been experiencing the worst wildfires in recorded history in 2023, according to new research.”

• In Canada, which broke the record in late June for wildfire smoke emissions released in a single year, wildfires began raging in May, long before the start of the fire season, and are still burning with fervor.

• The total wildfire emissions for 2023 is estimated to be almost 410 megatonnes, the highest on record for Canada by a wide margin, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service dataset, which provides information on the location, intensity, and estimated emission of wildfires around the world. The previous annual record was set in 2014 at 138 megatonnes of carbon.

• Australia

• https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/world/australia/fire-season-bad.html 

• “The warmest winter on record, followed by an unusually warm and dry spring. Hundreds of fires along Australia’s east coast, including one that razed 53 homes in Queensland. And last week, on the west coast, a raging blaze just over a dozen miles from the Perth city center was fueled by an unseasonably early heat wave and strong winds.”

• https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/australia-swelters-through-heat-wave-amid-extreme-fire-danger-2023-12-15/ 

• Large parts of Australia on Saturday sweltered under heat wave conditions that prompted the nation's weather forecaster to issue bush fire warnings in several states. In New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, more than 50 fires were burning on Saturday and a total fire ban was in place for many areas, including Sydney, the state's rural fire service said. The agency said on social media platform X that more than 700 firefighters and incident management personnel were working statewide to fight blazes amid "widespread high and extreme fire danger".

• Washington

• https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/04/pacific-northwest-wildfires-impacts-2023/ 

• Washington state endures ‘catastrophic’ 2023 wildfire season with high ignitions, property loss

• Washington recorded 1,884 wildfire ignitions this summer, marking second-highest number in the state’s history.

• In Washington, a total of 165,365 acres burned, according to Angie Lane, who works for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) in the wildland fire management division. The 10-year annual average for acres burned is 472,881. Still, Washington marked its second-highest number of fire-starts this year at 1,884. That falls just behind 2015 when 2,013 ignitions were reported.

• Manufactured Weather

• HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program)

• Sending metals to the clouds to control our weather

• From Reddit… “it sends a very high-power radio signal to the ionosphere (an upper layer of the atmosphere which reflects radio waves) and then measures the reflected signal in order to study the ionosphere. You can think of it kind of like a powerful radar station. Understanding how the ionosphere varies over time (night/day, and due to things such as the solar wind, etc) is important for optimizing various communications technologies. HAARP's radio waves are powerful enough to cause brief physical changes in a very tiny part of the ionosphere, but any claim that it can significantly alter weather or cause disasters is bunk.” SOURCE

• ELF Waves

• Owned by Air Force

• Chemtrails

• Cloud Seeding

• Recent earthquakes caused by DEW’s?

• Turkey (2023): On February 6, 2023, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked southeast Turkey near the Syrian border, with thousands of aftershocks.

• In Syria, the earthquake exacerbated the effects of the ongoing war, deepening the crisis for approximately 3.7 million children.

• According to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the earthquake impacted an estimated 15.73 million people in Syria and Turkey.

• In Turkey, 2.5 million children — many of them Syrian refugees — faced an increased risk of poverty, child labor, or child marriage in the aftermath of the disaster.

• Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world, including some 3.6 million Syrians, according to UNHCR.

• World Vision responded swiftly to the disaster and, within the first year of response, helped more than 1.8 million people affected in Turkey and Syria.