Ezra Levant and Lincoln Jane revisit Lahaina, Maui, 18 months after a wildfire killed over 100 and destroyed hundreds of homes, finding fewer than 10% of lots rebuilt amid FEMA’s $20K–$30K "tiny home" camps. Survivors like Kenneth Durrell blame Democratic red tape for stalled permits, skyrocketing FEMA rents ($7,500/month), and water mismanagement—drought-stricken Lahaina while golf courses and hotels thrive. Businesses remain abandoned, funds diverted, and locals displaced, hinting at deeper political or environmental land-use conflicts. The episode argues systemic failures overseen by progressive governance left Maui’s recovery in limbo, exposing a pattern of delayed disaster response under environmentalist policies. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, an incredible show today, if I may say so myself.
We flew to Lahaina, Maui for a day and a half, not for a vacation, but to see what has become of the town where a wildfire tore through it a year and a half ago, killing more than 100.
What was on our mind is how is the reconstruction coming along?
A lot of people in Los Angeles would like to know.
What we found, I think, will shock you.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
A year and a half ago, a wildfire tore through Lahaina, Maui, killing more than 100 people and burning hundreds of homes.
It's been a year and a half.
So how's reconstruction going?
It's February 10th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
shame on you you censorious bug a year and a half ago wildfires tore through the town of lahaina maui killing more than 100 people Hundreds of homes and other businesses were destroyed.
So how is the reconstruction coming along?
It came to mind because we were looking at Los Angeles and the wildfires there that killed dozens and did more than $250 billion worth of property damage.
The fires in Maui were more deadly but affected less property.
Still, it would be a good way to predict the future in how quickly things could be repaired, especially since both jurisdictions, Maui and Los Angeles, are dominated by Democrats and environmentalists.
What would that mean?
Well, we went to Maui and we were shocked.
The vast majority of homes that were burnt have not been rebuilt at all.
In fact, the lots are just covered with a gray gravel.
No signs of reconstruction whatsoever in more than 90% of the cases.
There are signs of construction, though, high on a hill.
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is building a kind of internment camp.
No bars or locks on the door, but tiny homes where the fire survivors have to live far away in terrible conditions.
We went to Maui, talked to the locals, and we're bringing you footage that I don't think has been seen by anyone else.
To follow along, go to thetruthaboutthefires.com, where we compare the response in LA to that of Maui and to that of Jasper, Alberta, Canada.
Here's my report from Maui.
As for Levant here, I'm standing in Lahaina, Maui, one of the most beautiful places in the world, but I'm not here for a vacation.
I'm here for a 24-hour news visit with our videographer, Lincoln Jane.
We were here a year and a half ago when a wildfire swept down from these hills, blasted by 80-mile-an-hour wind, scorching everything in their path.
It was like a fire storm, literally, a tornado of fire.
It killed more than 100 people and wounded many dozens more.
The problem with so much of Hawaii is that there's really a circular road around the perimeter of the island.
So there were only one or two ways out of the entire town.
People rushed to get out, panicked, abandoned their vehicles, thereby causing a form of roadblock.
The same thing happened in the wildfires in Los Angeles, by the way.
We're here a year and a half after the fire because we want to have a cautionary tale for Los Angeles.
Los Angeles just had a massive fire.
The fire itself many times larger than the fire here in Maui.
Approximately $300 billion worth of damage, several dozen dead.
The devastation on a physical scale was larger.
We saw how Donald Trump has weighed in in Los Angeles demanding that the Democrat governor and the Democrat mayor cut through the red tape to allow recovery sooner rather than later.
You have emergency powers just like I do and I'm exercising my emergency powers.
You have to exercise them also.
I did exercise them.
Because I looked, I mean you have a very powerful emergency power and you can do everything within 24 hours.
Yes.
And I knew that Hawaii had a Democrat governor.
This is a Democrat state.
And so here we are and looking down by the water, you can still see with the naked eye.
It's as if only weeks had passed.
The debris is almost completely removed.
I would say fewer than 10% of the lots have any sort of construction at all.
It's a kind of ghost town.
And we just saw a bunch of little mini houses that we were told are a temporary FEMA solution.
They're like almost like a gingerbread house.
They're called tiny homes.
Talking to some locals, there's no hope in sight.
There's no timeline by which this city will be revived.
And so all sorts of schemes and plans are creeping in.
The Democrat governor has said he doesn't want there to be residences like there were before.
In some areas, he wants wetlands back.
So he wants an environmental replacement for people.
Because of the fire, which was a first crisis, there's now a second crisis, the crisis of politics, the crisis of red tape, of people not getting permits, and people just abandoning the area.
And so the vultures come in, whether it's a political vulture like the governor or a real estate developer vulture, I don't know.
But I know one thing, hundreds and hundreds of Mauians who used to live here have simply given up and moved on, either elsewhere in Hawaii or they've moved back to the mainland of the United States.
This is a cautionary tale for Los Angeles and for Canada too.
There's a third fire I'd like to talk about, the wildfires in Jasper, Alberta, Canada.
And it's similar both to the Palisades fire in LA and the Lahaina fire here, in that of course it was caused by nature, although I think it's assumed that the fire in LA was caused by human form.
Because there had not been proper forest management and culling of the dead fuel, the fire in all three cases whipped through the town, causing much more damage than if there had been a proper forest management.
So I'm not here to say that the fires in Jasper, Lahaina, or LA would not have happened, but they would have been less likely to happen and less severe had environmentalist politics not won the day.
And again, in all three cases, you have governments who are putting their own political aims ahead of the interests of the local residents.
In Jasper, the province is ready to fund single-family homes.
But Jasper's in a national park, so they have a kind of federal jurisdiction, and they're refusing.
They're insisting on utopian socialist, low-income, multi-family homes.
It's a bizarre replacement of what Jasper was really like.
Same thing has been threatened in LA.
The Palisades, a very wealthy, beautiful neighborhood.
The mayor and her hand-picked recovery czar want instead to have low-income housing.
And here in Lahaina, I'm not quite sure.
The governor's talked about an environmental solution, and it wouldn't surprise me if the land would be snapped up by a developer taking advantage of the fact that the red tape has strangled this town.
Donald Trump went to LA and cut through the red tape, or at least tried to in a day.
I think he should come out here to Democrat Hawaii, too.
It's very far away.
It's a very long journey from Washington, D.C.
It's a very Democrat place.
But you know what?
These are Americans, whether they vote blue or vote red.
And I know that Donald Trump has recently said that he wants to cut off almost all foreign aid.
Well, this place needs that aid as much as Los Angeles does.
Just like in Jasper, Alberta, Canada, it needs someone to cut through the red tape.
Now, Donald Trump won't help there, but maybe some other politicians can.
We're gonna continue our journey around here in Lahaina, a beautiful place where a terrible thing happened.
More than a hundred people perished in the fires here in Lahaina, Maui.
Winds Roar, Hillsides Burn00:04:55
There's no family in town that didn't lose someone or know someone who was lost.
One of those men is Kenneth Durrell.
He was a survivor, and he wrote the book, Ashes of Paradise, Surviving the Lahaina Wildfire, and he joins us now.
Thanks very much for meeting with us.
Thanks for letting me come on board.
I guess you and the other survivors are the lucky ones, but there must have been terrible psychological pain of losing loved ones and wondering why maybe you were spared.
There's a lot of burdens on the survivors, aren't there?
Yeah, our home actually survived.
It was one of the few neighborhoods that did survive.
So I witnessed the fire deep into the evening and unfortunately I knew several people that did perish.
A lot of people that, you know, almost everyone that I knew lost their home.
And then in the aftermath, a lot of people had to move off island.
They couldn't afford to stay.
So I've lost, it feels like you've lost more than just the 100 people that perished.
The ripple effect afterwards, it's still to this day impacting us.
Our hearts and prayers to those that were lost in our fire, 102 souls that didn't make it out that day.
Just so thankful for a wonderful, resilient community that we have here that was able to come together and get the cleanup process done.
Yes, there was a lot of red tape and permitting and we're still dealing with that.
Everybody has their own level of recovering that they need to do.
Some people left and left the island and moved to the other side of the island or took their insurance money and bought a new house and they're not rebuilding.
A lot of people were fortunate enough to get their properties cleaned up and the cleanup process went really well.
And this memorial, thank you to one of our community members and leaders, Soaka Itaufa.
He came here and he's the caretaker here pretty much.
Everybody knows that.
And just really thank him for making this possible.
And he built that teardrop and he did get help from the community, but a lot of it was out of his own pocket and he was able to put this monument up in memory of those that we lost and the teardrop that represents.
Was there any way to fight it or was it just completely overwhelming inferno?
Typically because of the rugged terrain of Maui, airdrops are what they typically use.
The winds that we had, they couldn't get the helicopters off the ground.
It was 80, 90 mile an hour winds.
I'm over 200 pounds.
There was one gust that blew me backwards.
I almost went down the staircase.
So I don't know how much wind force that is, but it was enormous.
I've never felt wind like that before.
Luckily, by the next day, the fire was subsided and the winds had subsided to the point that they could start putting out some of the hot spots.
I saw firsthand how bad the town was.
I did not recognize the town that I'd been in for over 30 years.
Why don't you talk to me a little bit about fire prevention and the first response?
Well, if you've been here for the last couple of days, we just had a thunderstorm that went overhead, heavy rains.
I got notifications on my phone of thunderstorms approaching, flash floods approaching.
On the day of the fire, I didn't get any notifications.
We have the most advanced alert system anywhere in the world.
The state of Hawaii has more emergency sirens than Indonesia or anywhere else.
Those are those green claxons you see everywhere.
And every month they test them, they do the air raid sirens to let us know that there's some sort of a natural disaster or some sort of emergency.
On the day of the fire, we got no notification.
We had a miscommunication with the electric company.
They were telling the police department, some of the lines are live, we don't know which ones.
So the police were blocking roads, preventing evacuations because they didn't know if you could drive over the power lines.
We had hillsides that have not been maintained.
We've got dry grass all over the hillsides.
And we've had droughts.
We've had water that's been diverted.
And so, you know, if you go just a few miles down the road, you will see lush green golf courses.
You'll see waterfalls flowing in hotels and swimming pools.
And yet Lahaina is absolutely dry.
Bone dry.
It's like a desert.
The water is there, but it's being mismanaged.
You know, it seems like Lahaina was forgotten about for a little while.
And then all of a sudden, after the LA fires, unfortunately, you know, then we started getting more attention back because of the similarities.
Hopefully they saw us and what we had gone through and they got to learn from what we went through because it was similar.
But, you know, yeah, their area was a lot bigger.
But as far as the evacuation went, hopefully the communities knew, like, don't wait for an evacuation.
You know, you see the fire, you smell the smoke, just, you know, evacuate.
Living With Delay00:11:16
Don't wait for an order.
Hawaii took care of Hawaii.
I didn't see the National Guard for probably the first week.
I don't think that I saw FEMA until they stood up on stage behind President Biden.
And then he told everybody about a kitchen fire that he had and handed every household $700.
When the average household in Lahaina had eight people, it's about enough to go to Burger King.
To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my 67 Corvette, and my cat.
It all came inside.
We got assistance and so on, and I'm not trying to take anything away from that, but it didn't seem like it was enough at the time.
When we had Oprah and The Rock putting together money that were actually getting into residents' pockets and the government did not.
I would say most of the lots, there's no construction.
Is that accurate?
Well, a lot of people didn't have full coverage.
Like they didn't have enough money.
Things have changed.
The value has gone up.
There's no more construction up here.
It's like a ghost town.
It's like the end of the world.
Maybe something's going to be built there.
I see some diggers.
I don't know what they're doing.
I'm not saying it's zero, but it's a small fraction.
You can see a few homes being rebuilt.
One there, three there.
But for every one that's being built, there's got to be 10 empty lots.
This lot has on it a certification by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers certifying that the debris has been removed.
No asbestos, there's erosion control.
I don't see the EPA giving it approval.
But this one and that all over here, the debris has finally been removed, but there's no construction.
It's not even close.
If you recall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned the Pacific Palisades residents that it could take 18 months to remove the debris.
So this slow motion strangulation by red tape could be coming to Los Angeles.
Look, there's a car there that's still absolutely burnt out, hasn't been removed.
Whose duty was that?
There's one brave soul building a new house there.
I wish him well.
But everything around him is burnt out.
There's someone living in a camper.
A year and a half later, they're living in a camper.
While massive empty lots are covered over by gravel, there's nothing going on here.
Huh, there's some early foundation work.
A year and a half in, it looks like there's going to build a home there.
I'm glad to hear it.
Why are none of those places being rebuilt a year and a half later?
There does seem to be a lot of red tape with that.
Do you know where any of that red tape is coming from?
Like, that's sort of a generic word, but is there an environmental permit or a development permit or a planning permit?
And at what level?
Like, who's saying no?
I'll leave that one for someone else to speak on.
There are people that are holding up the process.
I know that our mayor and governor could be doing more.
The houses should have, you know, permits and everything, that should be just fast-tracked.
Get the town rebuilt.
There's a lot of people that are not getting their permits because of how they've got their coastal zoning drawn out.
If you're on that side on the ocean side of the line, then you're not getting permitted, but there's a lot going on dealing with that.
And then again, there's other things going on as far as people that can get their permits for whatever reason, they're held up.
Yeah, I heard it's hard to get a permit.
You know, the state makes it difficult for the people to rebuild.
There's a lot of regulations and a lot of permits you got to go through.
I think it makes it more tough on the people.
It's sad that, you know, it takes so many, it takes a long time to get permits for local families.
And, you know, the process should be easier and faster for them.
FEMA is the budget, and they micromanage out to these other entities, whether it be Red Cross or Lima Charlie that's handling the housing.
But they put all these rules into place and it really felt like you were on parole.
You had to check in every couple of days.
If you missed two phone calls, you were out.
It was very troubling to people that were in such a stressful situation.
They'd lost friends, loved ones.
You've lost everything that you own.
Why is it so slow?
We know there's people who want to rebuild.
They're being put into tiny houses way up on the hills.
Why are none of those places being rebuilt a year and a half later?
There does seem to be a lot of red tape with that.
They could have rebuilt those houses down there in 18 months.
Instead, they built these soulless, prefabricated cells.
I don't even want to call them homes.
I'm not disparaging those who are living in there.
The opposite.
I'm condemning the politicians and the planners who, in the name of red tape or environmentalism or we need more studies or there's permits.
They've managed to build these tiny homes for people who are obviously sensitive about living here, but they haven't rebuilt actual homes.
We're amongst some of the tiny homes that are being built for Lahaina.
I'm going to call them fire refugees.
The government is building these pods.
They're so tiny, they're sort of prefab homes, but who would want to live here?
It really feels like some sort of internment camp.
So you have a pod there and a balcony, but there's no grass, there's no trees, there's no landscaping.
It's so barren, it's almost like a moon unit or something.
And there's different varieties.
You can see that one sort of looks like a garden shed.
I googled and these sort of pop-up manufactured homes are $20,000 or $30,000 depending on the details.
And you can see why.
They're so small.
It actually feels like that Australian COVID internment camp that they built as a kind of low-security jail.
It's so frustrating for me and I don't even live here.
Imagine seeing the land you were in.
It was burnt a year and a half ago.
It's been cleared.
The U.S. Army Engineer Corps says it's fine.
So every person we've spoken to about it says it's permits, it's licenses, it's governments, it's delay.
Why?
They seem to have built these tiny homes quick enough.
Why have they not allowed the rebuilding of Lahaina itself?
I think there are hundreds of these.
And over there, you can see they're going to have a recreation area with a few barbecues under some hut.
What are those?
Who built them?
Like, they look really tiny.
A lot of those are provided by FEMA.
Are they temporary?
What's the deal?
Yeah, they're temporary.
They're temporary.
There's different deals.
Some of them, people are going to have to actually pay to live in them.
So there's all these different things going on.
Not everything's the same.
You've already established your life.
You've built your home.
You've paid it off.
You're placed into a government housing.
And then when the proclamation ends after 18 months, you've got to pay this exorbitant rent.
FEMA, by coming and setting up the housing, they were paying $5,000 for a studio, $7,500 for a one-bedroom, $10,000 for a two-bedroom.
They set the market so high that now the rental prices on Maui are unrealistic.
I don't want to speak ill of the fact that there is assistance, that the housing is there and that's appreciative, but what they're providing, it doesn't look like the most comfortable living situation.
I don't even want to say the word, but it's a FEMA camp.
And they are working on these things.
I'm seeing progress.
I don't want to say that this isn't happening, but it's been a year and a half.
And I don't know how much longer people can wait to get back to their normal life.
There's no lawn, there's no yard.
This is like a prison.
I'm angry for them.
I'm angry with them.
Things aren't going well here.
Don't take it from me.
Take it from the signs of ordinary citizens who are frustrated by the pace of things and the direction of things.
Here's some signs saying, what don't you understand?
Residents only.
Look at this.
No tourists, no pictures, no stopping, keep out, local traffic only, residents only.
I'd be angry too if I had lost loved ones and a year and a half into it, my life was not back on track.
I'd be angry too.
Hey, Kenneth, what's this sign?
Who's behind it and what do they do?
It's my understanding that the goal here is to, if you would, you know, you're unable to remain in Lahaina, that you would sell it to the land trust and that that way the property would stay within Lahaina.
We don't want Lahaina to be bought up by outside entities and to change.
So the goal of this is to keep Lahaina within Lahaina and so that we keep the character that we had and keep the families that we know.
What is the future for this lovely waterfront property?
You can imagine who has their eyes on it.
Everyone from environmentalists to politicians to billionaires who want their own luxury hideaway.
If you can put aside the fact that you knew homes and families used to live here, it's pretty.
The greenery has come back, but you're looking at the ruins of an earlier civilization.
One, two, three, four, five stories.
Probably several hundred people used to live there.
It hasn't been taken down.
There must have been a hundred houses here and that major apartment block, and none of them are any closer to being rebuilt than they were 18 months ago.
Notice, enter at own risk.
Health and physical hazards exist.
Why is that risk still there 18 months later?
That looks like a was maybe a movie theater or a mall.
It's boarded up.
Is it because there was no business case to open it given that so much of the town has been relocated?
Old Lahaina Center, the entire shopping mall is still shut down.
Is that the future for the Pacific Palisades?
Here's the McDonald's.
There's still ads in the windows, but that place is closed.
Checkpoint ahead.
Is there really still a checkpoint?
18 months later?
You can see what used to be here.
The Hoku Jewelers, Bill Abong, vintage, European posters, Fleetwoods General Store, South Pacific Island Art, Gary Savage Artist.
So that's what used to be there.
They haven't even cleared the debris away from there.
We were told by a private security guard we weren't allowed to film.
I don't believe that.
Lahaina Needs Assistance00:06:35
There's no public interest reason for that.
We're not filming state secrets and we're not showing anyone, we're not violating any individual's privacy.
I think they were ashamed of what's going on.
And there were some residents who didn't want to be filmed.
I understand that.
And we did not film any residents.
You won't see any faces of any people.
We avoided the tiny homes that were being occupied as much as we could.
But I think they are sick of being treated like some curiosity, like some problem that has to be moved around or pushed around.
I would be furious and frustrated too if my property near the water was burnt to a crisp and the state wouldn't let me move in, but they put me in a FEMA camp.
Do you think that Donald Trump should come to Lahaina, check it out and say, I don't know what the red tape is, but we got to cut through it?
Like, do you think that he should pay attention to Lahaina?
If he needs to come to Lahaina to make that happen, you know, anything that will help get through the bureaucracy and the red tape and move this forward so people can move back on and not end up having to sell out or move away, anything that we can do to help these people out because a lot of the money that was donated, you know, didn't go to the homeowners to rebuild.
They seem to be the ones that are suffering the most is that homeowners that fell short on their insurance, that didn't get any help from FEMA, that had to go to live in a condo somewhere and pay $7,000 a month for a one or two bedroom while they're waiting to get permitted and while they're waiting to get money and they can't afford it.
So it's been a struggle and we already had a housing crisis on Maui before the fire.
I definitely hope that we have some leader, whether it's Trump or anyone else out there.
I just hope that we have leadership that does care about the victims and that will do things.
As you said, we've got tiny homes and they're up on a hillside and they're all just pushed together next to each other.
Why can't they be put on the lot?
While, you know, at least you'd be in your neighborhood.
You'd have a home on your lot, maybe, you know, put it off to the corner while you build the house.
I don't know.
Without being political about it, I think, you know, it speaks in actions.
And if he's willing to take these actions and be that common sense person, you know, that he says he is and do the things that will help us move forward.
We deserve the same treatment that looks like California is getting.
So hopefully we're not just left out of that process that he's doing in California.
And I know that it's a Democratic state, but then he's a Republican, but it seems like the community is coming together, you know, because that's what disasters do.
I was hoping that after seeing that interview when he went to California, I was, you know, in back of my mind, I was like, he needs to come to Lahaina, he needs to come to Maui because these Democrats, they're taking forever.
And, you know, I've heard that Trump wants to shake up the FEMA system.
My experience with FEMA was not ideal.
I wasn't particularly fond of FEMA.
However, we need their assistance.
So I don't want the program to be cut or budgets, things that would impact the victims negatively, but some reform to make the program more efficient, to make it actually more helpful to the victims of both Lahaina and Los Angeles and wherever the next disaster is.
We're not done yet.
I'm standing in the middle of Hanukkah Park in Maui.
Beautiful.
People coming here for picnics, a dip in the sea before sunset, kids playing in playgrounds, birthday parties.
Year and a half ago, it was very different.
This park became a de facto refugee camp or relief camp for the Maui wildfires.
This is where locals came with food and medicine, clothing, toys, educational materials for kids, whatever they thought was lacking in the community in the days and indeed weeks after the fire, ordinary people brought here.
It wasn't government workers, it wasn't FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it wasn't any government.
In fact, the government were absent.
There was no internet in the area.
So individuals brought some Starlink.
Rebel News actually brought a Starlink system all the way from Canada to share it with the apartment block where we came to do some reporting.
And we looked at what was going on at Hanukkah Park here and we volunteered to go to Walmart and buy some stuff ourselves.
And then we thought, well, let's crowdfund.
So we set up a crowdfund opportunity and more than $51,000 U.S. was raised for Maui wildfire relief.
I'm very proud of our Rebel News viewers for doing that.
And it felt appropriate because going to document a community in the aftermath of a tragedy feels more than voyeuristic.
It felt like perhaps we were taking some of the dignity from people by talking to them in their hour of vulnerability.
So giving back to the community by crowdfunding more than $51,000 felt like a way to meet our moral debt to these people.
But over there is the government's vision of the future.
Pod after pod, dozens, even hundreds.
It feels like a minimum security prison, to be frank.
That's how the fire recovery is in Maui.
Will that be the case in Los Angeles and the Pacific Palisades too?
guess we'll find out what do you think Are you shocked by how little has been done to rebuild Maui?
Do you think the same thing will happen to Los Angeles?
If you value the work we did, please go to thetruthaboutthefires.com and chip in to help us cover the cost of our economy class airfare to Maui.
It sounds like a gorgeous vacation, but we were only there for a day and a half.
We stayed in a low-budget Airbnb working, talking to people in that devastated town.
I hope you found our report interesting.
I have not seen that FEMA camp reported anywhere else.
If you value our journalism, please take a moment to chip in.