Speaking in upstate New York on Wednesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy took a swipe at the Biden administration’s response to the tragic fire on the island of Maui in which 115 people have been reported dead and an astonishing 1,100 people still unaccounted for.
“We’ve got disasters going off in this country. We saw the devastation that has happened in Maui, the need to go there,” McCarthy stated of the fire that destroyed the historic town of Lahaina.
“But I’m very concerned about the response,” he continued. “We still have hundreds of individuals that are missing. I think there’s gonna have to be a congressional investigation in response of what happened. How could we lose that many Americans in today’s age? “
“And the federal response seems very delayed,” he declared. “The president’s response to have no comment? That’s unacceptable. So I’m going to work with committees too to look at investigating what went on so that never happens again as well.”
President Biden, often hailed by the Left as a decent, compassionate person, was at the beach in Delaware last Sunday when he was asked about the enormous tragedy in Maui, where the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in the last 100 years occurred. According to Democrat Hawaii Governor Josh Green, the damage from the fires that utterly ravaged the historic town of Lahaina could amount to $6 billion.
The compassionate response from the president as he was leaving the beach? “No comment.”
By Wednesday, officials were only able to identify 27 of the 115 victims.
In 2018, a fire nearly reached Lahaina; Maui’s top emergency management official, Herman Andaya, who resigned last week, later told a special Maui County Council meeting held in the wake of the fires in 2018,“It nearly, nearly reached Lahaina Town. And, had it jumped Lahainaluna Road, it would have been, I mean, it would have been devastating.”
Lahaina resident David Jung asked after the 2018 fire why civil defense sirens were not sounded as the fire headed toward the town. Interviewed after last week’s fire, he stated, “It was the exact same scenario in 2018. The only difference is that with the fire five years ago, the winds stopped at the very last minute. Call it an act of God or luck or whatever, but they had their second chance. They had five years to figure this out and fix it. Instead, nothing was done.”
“We were given a bunch of lip service, and instead of preventing another fire, the focus of the meeting was ‘Look, we’re gonna give you guys money and reimburse you,’” he continued. “And we were: ‘No, no, no, no, that is not what we want. You can give us all the money in the world; we just do not want this to happen again.’ But everything we told them was completely, 100% ignored.”