Maui Wildfires: NASA Shares Photos Of The Devastation
The town of Lahaina is seen from 259 miles (417 km) above the Pacific Ocean. International Space Station captured satellite images of the devastation of the towns of Maui and Lahaina on Saturday, August 12.
The photo was taken from a spaceborne laboratory orbiting some 259 miles above the Pacific Ocean.
Apart from being documented around the world, this devastation has a deadly consequence of human-driven climate change- but it’s also being recorded from space.
On the scene’s lower left, is the coastal town of Lahaina. One of the hardest hit areas, nearly all the infrastructure of the town has turned to ash, including monumental buildings like the historic Waiola Church and natural wonders like a 150-year-old Banyan tree.
On Wednesday, the death toll of the catastrophic fires rose above 100. Shortly after confirming the figure, Governor Josh Green addressed the public saying, “We are heartsick that we’ve had such loss.”
Other Earth-orbiting devices like NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite and Europe’s Sentinel-2 Earth-observing spacecraft, flew above the wildfires on August 8, and offered terrifying images of the disaster that has been termed as the deadliest in the state’s history.
Though a specific cause for the fires is yet to be found out, experts have started speculating the causing factors of the devastation. NASA took a press conference on Monday, August 14 and suggested that the local situations of Maui such as abandoned sugar plantations and non-native grasses might have played a role in increasing the fire. But it also underlined that climate change was a huge factor in this unsolved puzzle.
“In general, climate change is a kind of threat-multiplier for wildfires,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
On Tuesday, August 15, local officials announced that the fires have mostly been contained. However, as they note, “When a fire is 100% contained, it does not mean it has been extinguished. It means that firefighters have the blaze fully surrounded by a perimeter, inside which it can still burn.”
Thousands of people were forced to flee their homes during the wildfires with thousands still being reported as missing.