This was originally broadcast live on August 18, 2023 while Jeremy was on the ground on Maui. We had to reupload do to technical difficulties. Jeremy on Twitter: @jeremyreporter (https://twitter.com/jeremyreporter)Jeremy on Instagram: jeremyreporter (https://www.instagram.com/jeremyreporter/) ***** Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon. Please subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @...
What you are about to hear is the majority of a conversation that I had with Jeremy Lee Quinn, who was the only national reporter on the ground in the Lahaina area in the week after the fires, as I understand it.
It was an excellent conversation.
Unfortunately, it was marred by technical difficulties that caused the audio on Jeremy's side not to be recorded for the first 20 minutes or so.
So the conversation will start abruptly mid-stream.
I think it is still well worth a listen.
It is a viewpoint that you likely have not heard, and frankly, his perspective changed my opinion of what likely happened in Lahaina quite substantially.
So I hope that you will give it a listen.
I apologize for the technical failure, and I apologize to Jeremy, who has done heroic work in unearthing the story surrounding this terrible disaster.
Hey folks, welcome to a very special live edition of the Dark Horse podcast with Jeremy Lee Quinn, who is a photojournalist.
He is also a broadcaster working with a local affiliate in Hawaii.
Jeremy Lee Quinn, welcome to Dark Horse.
Yeah, very good to see you, and I should mention that you have been a guest on Dark Horse, I believe, twice before, which brings us to an odd fact of the story which I think has no relevance here, but you are very frequently at the epicenter of major historical events.
In the other cases I know of, it's because you have deliberately brought yourself there Knowing that things were occurring and that journalism needed to occur.
In this case, it seems like you've been working in Hawaii for the last two years and the fire or fires in Maui, the fire in Lahaina happened and you found your way into that story because it needed to be reported.
The chaos!
That has come with a response is indicative of only that chaos.
And you can imagine in the circumstance that unfolded, right, you've got fires springing up.
People in charge of dealing with fires, A, don't know how many there actually are.
They know about the fires that are reported.
They don't know about what fires they may be about to be surprised with.
Have to divide resources across these things.
It is quite likely, to my way of thinking, that they would have divided resources in ways that might not actually be defensible.
In other words, if you have wealthy people's land threatened, and other people's land threatened, and they make a decision to try to preserve the wealthy folks' homes, that's not defensible as far as I'm concerned.
But it's not something that would surprise me if it had happened, and therefore it would create a reluctance to just simply open the books and explain how everything occurred.
But there are confounders here, because remember we're dealing with a 1,000 acre fire over in upcountry, the estate country as I described it.
It's 1,000 acres.
How big is the flare-up?
You know, is it even a couple acres?
So, you know, yes, fire moves very fast when it's hit by 65 mile an hour wind gusts, extremely dry conditions.
Maui, I have always lamented how, especially on that side, it is extremely dry, this island.
It can be, especially during the summertime.
And it reminds me, you know, I'm from California, And so it reminds me of the driest conditions that I have grown up with in California wildfires that, quite frankly, I was very happy being away from in my career.
You know, Tahoe fire, just all kinds of different fires that I've had to be at.
You know, so there is that confounder, which is they put their resources on the bigger fire.
Not necessarily the fire with the richest people.
Now, that said, I am the one who has been grilling the county, and they would not call on me at the first press conference because I'm a pain in the ass, and I issued my questions to every agency saying, tell me the timestamp that the emergency evacuation order was given.
If they were to truthfully answer that, the evidence that I see points that the time stamp of the emergency order was 6.40 in the morning, and then at 9 a.m.
it was declared 100% contained.
Therefore, I have seen no evidence, and I'm going to get a chance to ask the Mayor this directly coming up very soon, I've seen no evidence that a second p.m.
afternoon Already by the four o'clock and five o'clock hours Lahaina is being choked by this enormous cloud.
as self evacuating, evacuating on their own.
It never says that an order is given.
Already by the four o'clock and five o'clock hours, Lahaina is being choked by this enormous cloud.
I get more video in day by day and it quickly just succumbs to being a inferno.
Okay, so I would say I don't have expertise in firefighting.
I, like you, am a Californian and so I've been through many fire seasons and watched things done well, done badly, and everything in between.
But there is a question, of course, as to whether or not to prioritize the biggest fire, whether to prioritize the fire that's closest to the densest population.
Those are tricky calculations, and in a context where you have these tremendously powerful winds, you have emergencies springing up in various places, and, as you point out, You have these natural bottlenecks that come from the fact that there aren't very many ways in and out.
And so it is easy to imagine that small amounts of incompetence turn into calamities very easily with the fog of, not war here, but the fog of an ongoing emergent disaster.
So that has the potential to explain a lot.
There is also the... Oh, go ahead.
I can explain a little bit from my point of view.
I only know what I've seen, who I've talked to on Thursday in the evening.
I'm sorry, I gotta back up to August 8th, Tuesday.
So this is the hours of the fire between 4 and 6 p.m.
where Lahaina essentially is consumed.
I'm on the Big Island in a district called North Kohala, just north of Kona.
I will post some video of, I just found my outtakes as it were, where I'm doing, I'm shooting my stand-ups as we call it, where your reporter is just standing there.
Now I'm a one-man operation.
My camera is in the SUV for the affiliate that I work with on a tripod inside the SUV shooting through the window and I'm speaking through a wireless mic.
That's because it wouldn't last a second if it were outside on the sticks.
I am recording and I'm being I'm just blown about and at times physically moved by these winds.
If you open a door and the wind catches it, your car door can go off its hinges.
You feel that happening.
What happens to me is I'm supposed to do my 6pm live shot and I see behind me there's this stump that's burnt out.
I picked a place that had been mopped up already with a burnt out melted ranch fence behind me.
Because it looked great and I'm a reporter and, you know, I framed it for the drama.
So I'm looking behind me and there's this stump that's every time that it's hit with a wind gust, it starts glowing.
It's black and then it's glowing.
I look back again and then I see embers.
I look back a third time and all of a sudden the grass line, a dry grass line that shoots back several yards is on fire and it's smoking and it's right behind me.
I get the call, you know, okay, we're going to have you in three minutes.
No, you're not going to have me in three minutes.
I'm shutting down the shot and not just for my safety, I have to find somebody.
That is what was on my mind.
I went to the last point in that subdivision known as Kohala Ranch where I had seen a fire engine and my heart dropped because it was gone.
It was not there.
Now I am navigating just one street in a subdivision of Three ranch blocks.
Trying to find somebody.
I see a pickup truck.
I hail the guy down.
I say, you know the place with the melted fence?
You guys got a flare?
There's a flare out.
He thanks me profusely.
He's the ranch manager.
He's on a walkie-talkie.
He radios the fire department.
Keep in mind, I have zero bars through this while I'm driving.
Not because of the fire necessary.
Okay, so I hear a recipe for disaster.
which we know is the case in West Maui, but just because it's the big island and we have remote areas where you do not have reception.
And I would imagine there are places in West Maui where reception is limited as well.
Okay, so I hear a recipe for disaster.
I hear a recipe for theorizing about nefarious intent that unfortunately maps onto that disaster landscape.
But there are things I've also heard reported that aren't accounted for here.
So, for example, in the aftermath of the fire, the refusal to distribute materials that were donated, that were supposed to be going to people who were suffering, The undercounting of bodies where individual firefighters saw more bodies than were being accounted for by the entire recovery effort.
What can you say about why it is that there is the appearance of of a cover-up and of a pretend rescue operation where materials are simply never making it to the people who need them.
So let me address the second one.
Materials are making it to the people who need them.
There are seven distribution sites, pods as they're called, and each one is not set up by the government, but they are set up by individual communities, all of which have their own character to them.
Several of them are led by the indigenous native Hawaiian community and have ties to the sovereignty movement who are, you know, believe in sustainability for the Hawaiian people and are doing everything that they can to take care of community.
But that is not exclusionary.
That is not exclusionary to others who may not be of that ancestry.
There are, I would say, four sites that are like that in different parks.
But again, anybody is welcome to that aid.
Also, there's a firefighter site, which retired firefighters and firefighters from all over the islands came And that's in Napili Plaza.
So that has a little more of a establishment vibe to it, I guess you could say.
But even the firefighters that I interviewed there said, nobody's really in charge here.
This is all volunteers.
Then there was what I used to call the county site.
And even that site, everybody says, everybody's a volunteer here.
The only affiliation was the guy who was on point.
His wife worked for the county, but there was no sort of official The people had to mobilize and do what they had to do to get these goods that they knew were coming to them.
And yes, I do get reports that the Coast Guard told people they couldn't go a certain way by the island of Lanai, which is that neighboring island that's owned by that You know, billionaire and so forth.
And so they were told they couldn't go that direction.
There are different, you know, anecdotes, but for the most part, you should know this.
All seven of these pots are very well stocked right now with goods and they are distributed them.
When you are in West Maui, people walk up to you and ask you if you've eaten, if you would like, you know, and for days I declined, of course, and, I had my own, you know, way of eating brought food with me, but people are provided for.
It's not a humanitarian crisis in that sense.
People have stepped up and are doing what government failed to do.
Okay, but FEMA, the Red Cross, is it distributing materials as you would expect?
Are they?
I wouldn't say FEMA, but the Red Cross, I have seen them in the hotels.
They are distributing aid.
They are also trying to get people registered, which is a big part of it, so that they can be reimbursed.
So they are on the ground.
FEMA has a public relations specialist who I interviewed.
And my question was, what do you do about the widespread public distrust and all of these anecdotes about what you're here for?
FEMA has a search and rescue squad that they are primarily in the burn zone, from what I have seen.
mobilized there and are providing cadaver dogs.
The question that you asked first, transparency, one of my pieces was a woman in a hotel saying, tell us, tell us the truth.
We've already lived it.
We, how much, that's what someone else said, how much worse can it get?
We've already lived it.
Another principal at a school said to me, this is inhumane to keep us in the dark like this.
Because remember, everybody in West Maui for over a period of a week was disconnected communication-wise.
I said, I would go to these pods and say, what do you need?
And they said, information.
Yes, there are nuances of, we need baby formula, we don't need clothes, we have way too much clothes, we need this one thing, we need feminine products.
Yes, there are the lists of, yes, we need more of this and we need less of this.
And those pods are communicating and trading, so to speak, so people get things at the pod that they don't have, that another pod might have more of.
But the number one Commodity that was lacking was information.
People were disconnected.
They didn't know what had happened.
And a huge part of healing is understanding what has happened to you.
And I think when it comes, I asked my dad once about conspiracy theories.
My dad is, he's now a retired public health doctor.
And I'm interested in your take on this, that what is it in our ancestry that perhaps Is a survival skill to be paranoid and distrustful?
Is a survival skill when something so disastrous like this happens that we jump towards certain defenses so as to ensure that this will not happen again?
And there are one of two options.
You know, I posted evidence pointing to failure.
You know, and not conspiracy.
But those are the two options, really.
Is it something that was planned, or is it something, an immense seismic failure that all of us, you know, are still stunned and traumatized by?
Well, I want to answer your question.
I know I said that there were two options.
There are really three, and so far I'm compelled that it's the third, which we'll come back to in a second.
But you asked me why it is that we humans are prone to look for nefarious motives and collusion in conditions where there's terrible misfortune.
And I would say There are two things.
One, in the absence of a properly functioning civilization, there's an awful lot of collusion.
So, it makes sense to be actively aware of it because, more often than not, it is present.
In the functioning civilization, that is not the case because those who would conspire against the public's interest cannot profit by doing so.
And so, collusion can become rare.
The problem is we are living in an era where capture has disrupted all of the things that would allow us to figure out what's taking place, and has enabled those with the power to collude well, to transfer well-being from other people to themselves.
So especially having just been through COVID madness and watching Collusion at so many different levels simultaneously, it's hard not to feel that those forces are liable to be lurking behind any great misfortune.
And believe me, if they were in this scenario, I wouldn't be shy about contemplating it.
I think there are people just plain cold enough to inflict this much misery if it benefited them sufficiently and they thought they could get away with it.
I don't put it past them.
What I do put it past them is to be able to orchestrate this as a result of an opportunity presented by a hurricane in such a way that it would both be so devastating.
And difficult to establish.
So, I am open to the possibility that something like that has happened, but I'm skeptical that it did.
And the reason... This brings us back to Category 3.
Somebody could have planned a disaster that they would have unleashed upon the discovery that nature was going to give them an opportunity to cover it up.
That's the full collusion explanation, which I, so far, have no reason to believe is accurate.
Then there's the pure incompetence explanation, which frankly could explain an awful lot of what I've heard just by virtue of the fact that it's very hard to manage a disaster like this well, and it's very easy to Monday morning quarterback the errors, and the errors were compounded by people Uh, making bad calls and fearing that they would be exposed or who knows what.
But the third possibility, which I think is so far what I think is most likely, is you had an organic disaster that will predictably have had There will be somebody who was warning that Lahaina was a tinderbox and that all it was going to take was the wrong set of weather circumstances and, you know, downed power lines to unleash a firestorm that wouldn't be controllable.
They will have been ignored.
That's almost always true in the cases that you have a disaster like this, where somebody saw the potential and it was much easier to ignore them than listen to them.
But then, The thing that really makes this difficult to sort out is the fact that there clearly are opportunists who live by this mantra, never let a good, what do they say?
Disaster go to waste?
Crisis go to waste.
And we obviously have people doing land speculation, which is absolutely ghastly in light of the disaster that has unfolded.
But it's obviously happening.
That speaks to a willingness to find fortune in the tragedies of other people.
So when you see that, when you see people willing to look at this through that cold lens, willing to take advantage of this opportunity, and you wonder, well, what else would they have been willing to do?
The fact is, I think It would be lovely if we could take off the table that this was an evil beyond what humans would have endeavored to create, and that's just simply not true.
The willingness to do it is probably something we can establish, but the opportunity to do it isn't so clear.
Well, this land is ruined.
There's no incentive.
It's a complete loss.
It's a town that had so much history and was so vibrant and it's just gone.
It's leveled.
And it will take decades until it's something else again.
I don't see any logic in that, and it hasn't been beneficial for me to entertain any kind of... You know, as I said, I get these texts all the time, but you cannot fake this level of incompetence.
That's the other thing.
You know, when it came to the tsunami warning system, the woman that I interviewed in the hotel, the evacuee, she said, we have these go off every month.
Anybody who's lived on Oahu or the Big Island or Maui knows that these systems go on all the time.
The director who has now resigned, his explanation was that would be an indication to seek higher ground.
And he didn't want people, per the protocol, to be seeking higher ground and going towards the fire.
Now, he was disconnected to the reality of the cell phone videos, what we see in the videos, which is a big, dark, black cloud hovering over Lahaina.
It was very obvious where the fire was and where you needed to move away from.
So when I presented his rationale to the evacuees, to the survivors, they said, "We knew where we needed to go away from the fire that was about to reign terror, essentially, and destroy all of Lahaina." It was obvious where they needed to go, but what those sirens would have done was woken people up and quickly mobilized people much sooner.
In the 4 p.m.
hour, if those sirens were off, people wouldn't have been standing in line at Safeway or in an orderly manner to pay for not wanting to loot, but people were waiting in line at Safeway to pay for water because they knew they needed to stock up on water and goods but people were waiting in line at Safeway to pay for water because they knew they needed to So those sirens would have done a lot, I believe.
Also, text alerts wouldn't have come in then, but they would have come in in the aftermath.
And they would have come in in the days after when all of West Maui was left on its own in the dark for a week.
So So the missteps and the incompetence that I have witnessed and that I have challenged is too real to be faked in my opinion.
Yeah, I hear you loud and clear.
And, you know, let's take that decision not to fire off the tsunami warning.
On the one hand, I understand what the residents are saying, which is, we're not dumb.
The evidence was clear.
If you'd fired that warning, we would have properly interpreted it.
On the other hand, as the person making the decision to set off the alarm or not, you can imagine the terror of There is, you know, as I understand from you, that there was some discussion on, for example, the web page associated with the tsunami warning, that the warning could be used in the case of a fire.
It didn't inherently mean tsunami, but to a population that lives in the shadow of the ever-present threat of a tsunami, as the Hawaiian coastal population does, the idea of setting off a A one-meaning alarm in which there is an urgency to move to higher ground.
I could imagine fearing sending people to their deaths, and I can imagine that having been an incorrect fear, but nonetheless it is an understandable one from the point of view of the person making the decision to do it.
So, you know, there isn't a good answer there.
There isn't a good answer to a lot of these things, because what you're talking about is somebody making a call remotely, likely.
Likely, this emergency office manager was closer to the other fire that we were talking about, Upcountry, or Kula as it's known.
Which had, you know, over a thousand acres burning.
So if he's closer to that fire and he isn't in Lahaina, then he does not see the smoke because the way Maui is situated, you know, that's not visible from where I am now, where anybody is, because that's up, you know, the twisting highway and 40 minutes drive or so away.
So he does not know necessarily.
So I want to make sure to cover a couple things before you have to go.
seeing.
And the people on the ground cannot tell him what they're seeing because all cell communication is down and has been since the late morning even.
So I want to make sure to cover a couple of things before you have to go.
Yes.
One is, so we've talked about the distribution of goods, which you're saying is better than we on the outside necessarily have reason to understand.
Yes, it's getting there.
The stuff is getting there.
People are stopping.
That's good news.
From the point of view of the under-reporting of deaths, you, I believe, have alluded to the possibility that that Frankly, it's an excuse that worries me because it is always used to cover up dirty deeds, which is that we can't afford to tell the public what's actually going on because they will be panicked or saddened or disheartened or whatever.
It's always nonsense, and it's often used in part of a cover-up.
But in your case, you're saying you hear people who are making the wrong judgment, but you believe they are making it earnestly, that they don't want to make life worse for people who've just been through hell.
The governor's quote at the first press conference, which was the Thursday after the fire, two days after, is, we do not want those in the shelters to lose all hope.
They knew more than we knew, and it was obvious that they were going to take what he called a conservative approach in disseminating the bad news.
This is a doctor, also a physician, who is our governor, who You know, who I don't have anything against, and I pressed him on the access issue at the tour.
The local media was taking a walkthrough of Front Street and the destruction, and I pressed about the access issue.
I don't see any malfeasance, but I see, is there possible that the numbers are throttled?
Yes, that's possible.
Let me tell you where we are.
When we reached 100 deaths, we were at 25% of the affected zones surveyed.
So that means if we're just going on proportion, that that would get us to, you know, 400 at some point.
Um, the, the, yes, people are wondering if it's a lot more just because of the sheer catastrophe of what, and the chaos of the evacuation.
People are especially concerned about children and the elderly.
It is true that school was cancelled for the day because of the morning fire.
So when it comes to who is being identified, I'm sure it is an arduous process I think that without, you know, if you're, if you're the governor, if you're, if you have to communicate the scope of what this is, this is what the woman in my piece that I posted said, tell us don't, you know, tell us we're going to find out eventually.
We are.
You can't hide things like this.
So if it is upward of what, at first glance, they're willing to admit, I would hope that they would reconsider and tell us.
This is going to be a slow, painful process.
That much is clear, because from the Thursday in which this presser was You know, we had the opportunity to first ask questions.
It has been a very long week and one in which the press was essentially excluded from the effective area.
And I only got in by my own share, you know, persistence.
So I will go one step further.
They just don't have the right to hold back the information.
They just don't have the right.
They have to tell you, even if it will dishearten people.
That's my feeling.
The power to not tell people things will be abused every time.
And I'm completely out of patience with that excuse.
So I agree that people need to know, irrespective of how awful the news may be, And we were told not to realize this was a sensitive time and this kind of thing, that this is traumatic.
Yes, I do understand that.
I am not unsympathetic.
All of us reporters have broken down, just completely broken down at one time or another in seeing what we're seeing.
I mean, it is just complete destruction and death.
And I've never seen anything like it in my In my career and.
And all of us are trying to hold it together, but we we need to at the same time confront and acknowledge the scope of this, and I think that's been happening.
But the way that the first week was handled in which West Maui was essentially sequestered and cut off and.
You know, in isolation, it was not.
It was unkind and.
The idea that, yes, there were issues when they tried to open up on the Friday after, so three days after.
People went straight for the burn zone and wanted to see.
And we're living in this, you know, selfie culture where everybody wanted that picture and to get it out first.
And I think that was a part of it.
Plus, you have to talk about the respect for the indigenous people, for the Hawaiian people.
I broke out and got there and the first person I talked to is a young man named Paele Kiacona and he was doing Instagram videos and he met me and I did a long form interview with him and his message was do not sell your land to the community.
We will get through this.
We will pull together.
Do not sell your land.
Do not sell your land to outsiders.
To outsiders, yes.
Do not sell your land to outsiders, to anyone outside.
And the short clip went viral and was seen over 3 million times, and I talked to the people who were feeling it, and who wanted to be heard, and they were banding together.
And so there is a lot of optimism, and there is a whole lot of fight, and there's a whole lot of strength that's coming out of West Maui right now.
And, you know, so don't get sidetracked by all the other stuff.
Everything, the community is working hard, They are coming together.
They're showing each other so much aloha.
We are getting the shipments, the provisions.
They were arriving to all of those drop sites, you know, and I was feeling it and I was pitching and, you know, a lot.
I wasn't wearing my collared professional shirt anymore because I was in a, you know, a shirt in which I could Lend a hand and work too.
If you were there, you were a part of it.
You were feeling it.
And that's what community stepped in where government was missing in action.
And so the story, the stuff I think of conspiracies is a natural human response to make sense of the unexplainable, to protect ourselves in some ways.
But there's a bigger story here.
With, I think, a less cartoonish villain, which is our own inability to accept things and to admit our faults, our mistakes, our missteps.
I mean, imagine being the person who made the wrong call on that day and what they're living with right now, you know?
There's a bigger story that's more human, and that doesn't have a cartoonish villain, but has people who are working hard, who are banding together, and who are surviving.
And it's an inspiring story, and it will be told.
All right, that's I think an excellent summation, and I'm tempted to leave it there, but I want to make sure to cover these other two things because I think they are important.
The story that people were trapped on Front Street, that the police themselves were forbidding people to leave, and that this caused many to burn alive in their cars, Has a very ominous ring.
I will say.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I don't I don't have a lot of time, so I'll dive right into it.
I just addressed this this morning.
I met with several people who were there, so I got and what it all comes down is to the logistical understanding of Lahaina town.
OK, remember, I characterize West Maui like this.
Lahaina is here.
You go on the highway right to Lahaina.
You would, the highway would technically continue into Lahaina and through Lahaina, but there's a bypass.
There's what, for all practical purposes, what we'd call a highway that goes around Lahaina called the Lahaina Bypass.
That's where the fire, remember the brush fires were up here and they jumped the bypass at 3.30 p.m.
according to Maui County's alerts.
Now that bypass would be the only way, not the only way, so if you're at where Front Street ends and those people are fleeing north, Front Street goes to the highway.
Front Street and the highway are parallel, the highway that goes through town, right?
Then Front Street keeps going and then eventually meets up with the highway up here, and then you go to those northern communities that we're talking to, Kaanapali and north of.
So, if you're looking north to your destination, I want to describe this.
This is so important, and it's a visual understanding.
You have two shopping malls, one on your right, one on your left.
The one on your right, as you're looking north, is called Lahaina Gateway.
That's where I'm going for the Mayor's Presser in just about five minutes.
I have an hour drive.
On the other side is called the Cannery.
That's where the Safeway was, where everybody was in line.
And then to get out of these malls, they don't have multiple entrances and exits.
And the line of Gateway only has one in and out, which is just like...
What?
So you have these two malls side by side.
You have your route of exit, which is called Honolapilani Highway.
Honolapilani Highway had fallen power lines.
Remember, 29 energized power lines went down during this sequence of the Lahaina falling.
So you have no good options in some way.
You could go the bypass and the police could send you around to go back to Kahului, the main part of Maui, but then they're sending you to where the fire was and where the fire jumped.
We don't know if that's burned out, if the police send you up the bypass and around.
They're sending people south on the highway if you're on the other side of the fire.
Sure, that's another whole evacuation scenario, but the northbound evacuation scenario I have determined you had no good options.
You had the bypass, you had forward through the down power lines, or you had Keawe Street, which is the street that leads to the bypass and goes towards the water.
And yes, I've confirmed with several that that's where police were sending people back towards Safeway, down Keawe Street towards Front Street, which then added to the backup on Front Street all the way into town and made Front Street impassable.
But that's as police were reluctant or unwilling or were under the orders, I do not know which one, to send people through the power lines on the highway or to the fire on the bypass.
So again...
These are incredibly difficult decisions.
The person I interviewed said, yes, hindsight is 20-20, but there were three difficult routes.
But he did say, I don't know why you'd want to send people back to Front Street.
The quickest route of egress was the highway.
Even if there were downed power lines, people were still going, and they were getting through.
They were braving it.
They knew that was their quickest way out.
And as the fire became more and more ominous, And began to bear down on Lahaina Town.
People did take that highway through the power lines.
So what I get from this is the town, the way it was set up and the climate and the environment made it into a death trap.
And what unfolded was the unfortunate consequence of the fact that people were left with no good option, as you describe on Front Street.
No good options, given the absence of warning and preparation.
Okay.
The last thing I want to ask you, and in some ways it's the most important.
I know you from prior stories that you've covered, including January 6th, where you as a reporter were actually in the Capitol.
Is it fair to say that if you had the sense that what was going on here was the result of premeditated skullduggery of some kind I'd be all over it if that was the case.
You would be all over it.
And let me tell you, just to get to where I needed to go to tell the story of the people of West Maui and what they've gone through and the pain, the suffering, the trauma that they're dealing with, I had to break away in a very unconventional way.
We were taking on a tour.
First of all, the I did not feel very welcome on the press convoy.
Even though I'm local media, there was, in my opinion, I was not so welcome that morning, I feel.
I ended up having to catch up to the convoy.
Then it turned out I was in front of the convoy, and then it turned out I had no good information from the convoy, and the convoy was passing me.
But eventually, I got into the governor's convoy, and I drove Saturday morning, which was the day five, the morning of.
No reporters were on that side at that time.
I did the walkthrough tour.
I tried to get answers to the questions.
I felt that I wasn't getting great answers.
I knew there'd be several press conferences to follow in which we'd get mediocre, nonsensical answers, whatever it was.
I felt the story was elsewhere.
It was with the people.
When we were leaving Front Street, We go through the burnt-out town, and I mentioned Keawe Street that goes to one side of the bypass, and the other one is Hoki Okio Street.
We go up that street, and then to the left is the bypass that would take us back to the other side, the north side of Lahaina.
The other is the road that would take us up to town.
The entire convoy turns right because I'm at the back and they had, you know, initially tried to ditch me, I feel.
I'll explain that another time.
I was given suspect information, let's just put it that way, of time and meeting place and not a lot of effort to usher me in.
But I saw, I see the convoy go and I turn left.
And that's it.
I knew that the story was up in West Maui for the last several days.
And I made it my business to be the only reporter that was there during that isolation to talk to people and get the stories out.
And you can find those stories, which I've published on my Instagram, Jeremy Reporter.
All right.
Jeremy Lee Quinn, I know you have to go.
I gotta go.
Good luck on your mission.
I really appreciate what you've put into reporting this story, and I know that if the evidence shows up that says there's some other explanation, that you will be all over it, and I will also be very interested in broadcasting it and making sure people hear it if that evidence exists.
Until then, people should be careful not to over-interpret what they've heard in a disastrous situation, because it would in some ways be easier if there was a villain.
I think so.
A cartoonish one.
And the villain that the mistakes and, you know, that people are unwilling to look at and face up to is much more real and tells a much different and much more important story for leaders in ages ahead to learn from, I think.
