Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id583112705
On Tuesday, August 8, what started as a small brushfire in the town of Lahaina quickly became explosions and an apocalyptic inferno, swallowing everything in its path and trapping people in place, triggering a state disaster declaration. Residents got no warning about the disaster — the island’s emergency sirens never went off.
✏️ The disaster that happened 🔗 View Highlight
id583112722
With locals complaining that “there’s no government agency helping us,” it was up to the fire-stricken Hawaiians themselves to pull together and organize a relief effort. Surfer and Maui resident Kai Lenny told CBS that locals “were kinda sitting back, waiting for help to arrive, and then nothing was sorta happening,” and that “it was just like, day after day, ‘Where are they?’” Even now, survivors without power, shelter, medicine, and other basic necessities complain about a muddled and absent government response.
✏️ The reaction of the people as no help was in site except from each other 🔗 View Highlight
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FEMA’s defense is that it can’t start feeding aid to states until their governments request a disaster declaration from the president.
✏️ When bureaucracy trumps human decency and the ability to respond to disasters. 🔗 View Highlight
id583113740
With FEMA set to run out of money by the end of the month, its funding has been tied to the passage of a more than $20 billion aid package to Ukraine. Regardless of your feelings on whether the US should intervene in Ukraine, the much larger foreign military aid sum is not a great look at a time when the president is accused of prioritizing an increasingly unpopular war over domestic concerns. The tethering of the two makes it even worse. It implies either that US politicians can only agree to fund emergency recovery efforts for Americans if it comes attached to funding for a foreign war, or, as Republicans are framing it, that Biden is holding “Americans hostage by tying critical domestic disaster relief to foreign military aid” and using the former as a “bargaining chip” to extract further money for a war that more and more Republicans are souring on.
✏️ This is incredibly appalling. How does one justify tying a federal disaster relief fund to a foreign military aid bill? 🔗 View Highlight