Well it seems like the wild fires on Maui are under control at last, after leaving a trail of devastation and a death toll last reported at 111 but almost certainly higher.

This is the deadliest U.S. wild fire since Minnesota’s Cloquet Fire of 1918 which burned for four days and claimed 453 lives.

As the flames die down, the recriminations rise. Maui County Emergency Management administrator Herman Andaya has resigned for “health reasons” after criticism over his decision not to sound emergency sirens.

Andaya claimed sirens would have been “ineffective and confusing” causing people to potentially run into the fires. Residents claim they could have saved lives.

And one M Kaleo Manuel, deputy director of the state Commission on Water Resource Management has been given the sideways shuffle to a different position after criticism of his decision to delay release of water for fighting the fires for five hours.

You really should look up Manuel’s self-justification on video. It is the most amazing gobbledygook word salad without a single connecting coherent thought. A masterpiece of its kind.

“We’ve become used to looking at water as like as something we use and not necessarily something that we revere, that thing that gives us life…”

Do look it up, it gets worse.

Water use issues are complex wherever fresh water is scarce and we’re already hearing about conflicts between residential and agricultural users in Hawaii. But a primary principle of emergencies is fighting fires takes precedence over everything.

But there are already rumblings that this was a fire waiting to ignite due to lack of maintenance, of trees in areas of highly flammable vegetation left where high winds could blow them over electrical lines.

Time and numerous government investigations will tell but this could turn out to be something we’ve seen more often lately, the entirely preventable natural disaster.

The last time I was personally involved in one was around 18 years ago in Oklahoma one winter.

One night of freezing rain I remember how we listened to the sound of popping trees all night as the branches on our tree-lined streets tore off under the weight of the ice, often taking power lines with them. In the morning two-thirds of the state was without power. In some places for weeks.

Because unlike up here where we expect that sort of thing, it happens so seldom in Oklahoma that public works departments blow off trimming the trees back from power lines because they’ve got more pressing things to do with their time and budget.

Examples abound, maintenance is often an “out of sight out of mind” sort of thing if the consequences of neglect are long term.

Some years back a councilman in a small town in the north Midwest pointed out a potential maintenance crisis developing literally under our feet.

On the edge of the 19th century Western Expansion towns literally grew up overnight. Some of them such as the Twin Cities of Minnesota, Dallas-Ft. Worth, or Oklahoma City started big and continued to grow.

But many others remained pretty much the same size to this day.

What this meant is that all across the western United States there are towns where the infrastructure, particularly the horribly expensive underground infrastructure, is decaying at the same rate all over.

Small towns have gotten used to relying on state and federal funds for help with infrastructure. But what if the requests start coming in all at once?

The measure of a civilization is not just what it builds, but how it maintains what was built.

— Steve Browne is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent