Originally Posted by
747FC
I'm watching the 5:00 news now. The lead story was this issue. It was mentioned that at the time Lahaina was evacuating during the hellfire, there were live electric lines on the ground.
Did HECO restore power? Power in Kā‘anapali went out around 5:30 am. By the time I got up at around 6:30 am and checked the Maui Electric outage website, I could see that nobody west of Ma‘alaea had power -- the entire west side was without power. So unless they restored it some time during the day, those wouldn't have been live lines on the ground, they would have been dead lines on the ground. But I wouldn't try touching them to verify whether they were live or not...
FWIW, I went to O‘ahu (flight left OGG at 11:15 am) and I kept checking to see if power had been restored to the west side throughout the afternoon. I never saw any place on the west side get re-energized that day according to the HECO maps.
Originally Posted by
747FC
I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that even if the MFD wrongly called the first fire contained and left the scene, HECO is still liable because after all, their equipment started the fire. Contributory negligence?
Yeah, probably. They started the first fire and without that, the second fire wouldn't have happened, if the second was a reignition of the first. But the fire department is also to blame for letting it flare back up after they declared victory and left the scene.