Locals Have Been Sounding the Alarm for Years About Lahaina Wildfire Risk

 Grist - While the inferno happened shockingly fast for the people of Lahaina, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been building for years, like the dry grasses that caught alight and fueled the blaze. The enormity of the catastrophe speaks to both the challenges of preparing for the unimaginable and the incredibly high stakes of inaction.

Susanne Moser, a New England-based climate change resilience expert, says communities and governments are going to have to confront that reality as climate change makes disasters like Maui’s more likely to occur. It may be expensive, but if people don’t pay for it upfront, they may pay later in lives.  "I think what’s happening now is that climate change is essentially coming back at us with its bill much more ferociously and rapidly and in a much more integrated, systematic sort of way than we have tried to understand it,” Moser said.