In mid-August 2023, stories became popular on the Internet that a fire on the island of Maui, which killed more than 100 people, was deliberately set to seize land. We found out whether there is any basis for such statements.

Forest fires on the Hawaiian island of Maui raged on August 7 and 8, and efforts to extinguish certain areas took more than ten days. The fire almost completely destroyed the coastal city of Lahaina. By August 24 known about 115 dead, according to various estimates, from 1000 to 1100 people were missing.

Several narratives about this event immediately went viral on the RuNet between August 12 and 23. The bottom line is that the fire was not a natural disaster, but the work of human hands. The fact that it could have been caused by a certain death ray was written, in particular, by Telegram channels “Invasion» (52,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), “Sirius 888» (17,500) and Qanonymous (4200), TikTok users also posted videos about the mysterious ray (one of them typed 845,000 views, another - 533,000). The channels “Russia now"(286,000 views), "Lost past» (128,000; it is clarified that the UN is behind the incident, which wants to “rebuild Hawaii with its green sustainable technologies in the name of climate”) and “Signal"(72,000; the authors talked about a Chinese satellite laser). How assures Tsargrad TV channel (30,000 views), American journalists came to the conclusion that “the disaster was carefully prepared and planned.” As an explanation of its reasons, anonymous channels offer version that Thus “globalists are clearing land for their needs,” plots in Hawaii are already started American billionaires and celebrities were buying up, but the mansions of Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were mysteriously untouched by the fire.

Video, on the basis of which users began to make assumptions about the unnatural causes of the fire on Maui, before getting into RuNet, widely sold out on the English-language Internet. The video, just over a minute long, shows a series of explosions and flashes, including jumping over power lines. In the video you can see a gas station with a logo very similar to Shell's. Using the video verification service InVid “Verified”, they divided the video into frames and found one of them in higher quality. A search for this image led to the original video.

Stills from the video, the original source of the video in the article about the accident in Louisiana

It was filmed on December 27, 2019 in the city of Kenner in the US state of Louisiana. Local resident Giovanni Bommarito captured a series of electrical flashes on power lines. cause caused by an accident at a transformer substation. On complete the video shows both a Shell gas station and located There's an Exxon gas station on the opposite side. This video has nothing to do with the events on Maui in August 2023, like a number of other photos and videos that have become popular on the English- and Spanish-language Internet and were analyzed by fact checkers from Associated Press And Lead Stories.

Message TV channel "Tsargrad" was illustrated with another video - news plot Hawaiian TV channel KHON 2 News, published on April 27, 2023 (the Russian media kept silent about the fact that the video was four months old). The presenter reads a message from the US Army Corps of Engineers and warns the audience that from April 28 to April 30, from midnight to 5 a.m., residents of the Hawaiian island of Oahu may see green laser flashes as the Corps conducts topographic work. Among other things, the presenter notes that these laser flashes are safe for unprotected eyes. That is, this video has nothing to do with the fires on Maui.

At the same time, energy weapons, which are mentioned in many posts and which lasers may refer to, are quite real. USA and other countries research its potential uses are open reports American Government Accountability Office. However, the use of such weapons is still a big question, and developments are at the level of prototypes for field testing. In addition, modern lasers, which are powerful enough to cause fire, operate in the infrared range, so they cannot be seen with the naked eye. About this in an interview with AP told Ian Boyd is director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Claims about the “miraculously surviving” mansions of businessmen Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, as well as the 44th US President Barack Obama in detail dismantled our colleagues from AFP. Mansion Bezos is 25 miles (40 km) from the fire zone, and estate Obama is located on another island of the archipelago, Oahu. Data on any real estate on Maui owned by Bill Gates is not available in open sources, and in the photo distributed by social network users, depicted the Microsoft founder's property is not in Hawaii, but in Washington state. Verified did not find any news about the purchase of land plots by American billionaires or stars published in authoritative sources over the past three weeks.

The distance between the islands of Maui and Oahu is more than 100 km

The version of a deliberate arson organized by China, the UN, “globalists” or someone else is refuted by two more facts. Firstly, on August 6, on the eve of the tragedy, the US National Weather Service office in Honolulu released warning about the high risk of fires in Hawaii. The danger was explained by a combination of several factors: dry weather, insufficient air humidity and strong winds. Secondly, environmentalists and climate scientists note that Maui has been suffering from drought for several years. “Exceptional” winds on the island, as well as Hurricane Dora, which passed southwest of the Hawaiian archipelago, and many flammable grasses introduced by man, not adapted to the local climate and growing dangerously close to forests, together became the ingredients for “the perfect recipe for disaster,” she gave this assessment in an interview Science.org ecologist Carla D'Antonio from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

There is no official conclusion from American authorities on the causes of the fire on Maui. How reports The Washington Post, video evidence combined with electrical grid monitoring data indicates that the most likely cause was flaws local power system - the Hawaii Electric company, which provides power to the island, did not have an approved algorithm for turning off the power supply in conditions of increased fire danger. Coupled with the fact that many power lines are laid between thickets of trees, this, according to experts, could be the main cause of the fire. As of August 24, 2023 vs. Hawaii Electric submitted at least four lawsuits alleging the company was negligent and responsible for starting the Maui fires.

Thus, there is no evidence of malicious preparation of fires on Maui at the time of publication of this analysis, and the corresponding statements disseminated on social networks, often accompanied by photos and videos, are nothing more than speculation or deliberate distortions. The most likely causes of the disaster are heat, drought, an imperfect system for shutting down power lines in extreme conditions, and Hurricane Dora, which at that time was passing near Hawaii.

Cover photo: still frame from the video