At one point, he zooms the camera in on a cable dangling in a charred patch of grass, surrounded by orange flames.Treu’s neighbor, Robert Arconado, also recorded videos that he provided to the AP. Arconado’s footage, which starts at 6:48 a.m., shows a lone firefighter headed toward the flames as they continued to spread west downhill and downwind along Lahainaluna Road, toward the center of town.
"It was scary, so scary," Arconado said. "There was nowhere to go. … I witnessed every single thing. I never go to sleep." Robert Marshall, CEO of Whisker Labs, a company that collects and analyzes electrical grid data, said sensors installed throughout Maui to detect sparking power lines showed a dangerously high number of such live wire incidents that night and into the following morning.
After the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California killed 85 people in a disaster caused by downed power lines, Pacific Gas & Electric agreed to pay more than $13.5 billion to fire victims. State regulators adopted new procedures requiring utilities to turn off the electricity when forecasters predict high winds and dry conditions that might cause a fire to spread., the National Weather Service first began alerting the public about dangerous fire conditions on Aug. 3.
Hawaiian Electric’s Kimura said the company had started its own investigation. Its shares have plummeted by 60% over the last week on fears the company may have to pay big damages.