Iran Is About to Make Its Hijab Laws Even Stricter

Almost a full year after the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s so-called “morality police” galvanized mass protests, Iranian MPs are pushing for even more stringent punishments to deter women from violating its enforced modesty laws.

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The Hijab and Chastity Bill—a draft law consisting of 70 articles—would intensify punishments for those seen flouting a dress code that became the flash point for the most widespread challenge to the Islamic Republic in four decades. The bill calls for increased fines and jail time, as well as the use of artificial intelligence to identify violators, according to CNN. These measures build on previous efforts to crack down on strict dress codes and identify unveiled women, including the addition of cameras in public places in April.

A straw poll taken Sunday saw 175 members of Iran’s parliament vote in favor of the move, while 49 voted against it, the BBC reported. If Iran’s Guardian Council, a separate, unelected body in Iran’s elaborate theocratic system, approves the bill, it would go forward on a pilot basis for between three and five years. MPs could then progress these measures into permanent law.

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Hijab—a headscarf conservative clerics say should be worn so snugly no hair is shown in public—became compulsory in Iran after the 1979 revolution, along with “modest” dress that cloaks the female body. By enforcing what many Muslim women said should be a matter of choice, the rule became a political symbol of the regime, showing that it is in control. But since last year’s protests broke out, more and more women have been moving about in public with their hair uncovered as an act of resistance.

Experts tell TIME that the new bill attempts to use financial coercion to deter women from collective activism. “This new bill has only one meaning: gender apartheid is legal in Iran and now they are backing legal ways to treat women like second class citizens,” Masih Alinejad, an exiled Iran journalist and human rights activist, tells TIME.

Read More: Iranian Dissident Masih Alinejad Won’t Be Silenced

As passage of the bill approaches, here’s what to know.

What does the proposed bill entail?

Under Article 638 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, hijab is enforced under the vague guidance that anyone who “violates any religious taboo in public” is punishable with imprisonment or fines. Women forgoing the hijab or deemed to be wearing it improperly could land a fine of between 50,000 to 500,000 Iranian rials ($1.18 to $11.82), or between 10 days and two months imprisonment.

The new bill is much more specific in its approach and classifies improper hijab as its own crime—punishable by a prison sentence of 5 to 10 years as well as a significantly larger fine of up to 360 million Iranian rials ($8,508), according to figures reported by CNN. Also proposed in the draft law is harsher penalties for businesses, celebrities, and public figures who are seen to be encouraging or allowing the rules to be broken.

“The bill is probably one of the most concrete and tangible legislative efforts to signal the path that authorities are considering to take with regards to enforcement of compulsory hijab laws after the [protest] movements,” Tara Sepehri Far, a researcher at Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, tells TIME.

She called the bill a form of “economic repression” that will disproportionately affect people from lower socio-economic backgrounds who can no longer justify the steep price tag behind their activism. “Can you afford to pay a fine? Can you afford not earning money at your cafe for 10 days? Can you afford to not pay your rent for two months? All of those are very deliberate measures to break the resistance,” Sepehri Far says. 

Read More: The Protests in Iran Have Shaken the Islamic Republic to Its Core

Why have leaders used Article 85 to push the bill through?

Article 85 of Iran’s constitution allows its parliament to pass a law without public debate. Sepehri Far notes that the article is intended for laws that require expert opinions at the committee level. But the government is increasingly using Article 85 to circumvent parliamentary procedure, including last year’s The Regulatory System for Cyberspace Services Bill, which rights groups say legitimized internet shutdowns and online censorship. In the case of the hijab bill, Article 85 allows hardliners to deal behind closed doors with an issue that has embarrassed the regime on the global stage, resulting in tens of thousands of arrests, and more than 500 deaths.

According to the BBC, at least one MP, Gholamreza Nouri-Qezeljeh, voiced his concerns about the bill, noting that it focuses too heavily on “criminalizing and punishing” women in breach of hijab laws.

Experts and activists echo this sentiment, saying the government is being calculated in its secrecy because it does not believe it has enough public support to push the bill through conventionally. “The reason for keeping it under wraps is fear of the public’s, especially women’s, reaction. The government is afraid of any kind of response and tries to achieve its goals at the least cost, but the issue is that their calculations often turn out wrong,” Alinejad says.

What message is the government sending to dissidents?

Women defying modesty laws, human rights defenders representing these individuals, and the journalists reporting on the movement have all been targeted and punished. Three actresses—Azadeh Samadi, Leila Bolukat, and Afsaneh Bayega—who chose to remove their hijab were diagnosed as mentally ill for choosing to forgo the hijab, and ordered to undergo enforced psychological treatments.

Sepehri Far says that the bill is the regime’s way of communicating that it will not back down, and to show onlookers, global and domestic, that they remain in control. “People have taken a step forward and at least created this alternative reality, and they’re paying a huge price for it.”

She adds that the demonstrations shows people were willing to take enormous personal risk, and that may change if this bill passes.

But Alinejad remains hopeful that the people of Iran have nothing to lose. “The truth is, the paths of the government and the people have diverged, and each is going its own way,” she says.

source https://time.com/6305813/iran-hijab-laws-stricter/

Raging Wildfires Trigger Mass Evacuation in Northern Canada

Wildfires have forced an evacuation of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. 

Officials with the territorial government told residents in the highest risk areas to evacuate immediately. Other residents have until 12 p.m. local time on Friday to leave the city of about 20,000.

Depending on smoke conditions, those leaving by car will be escorted through the active fire zone, officials said. Residents who can’t leave by road are being asked to register for evacuation flights.

Read More: What Remains After the Flames: Scenes From the Ash-Colored Streets of Maui

For some, it will be the second exodus in recent days. Evacuees from the remote communities of Hay River and Fort Smith were already being housed in Yellowknife, according to an update Tuesday. 

Canada is experiencing the worst wildfire season on record. More than 1,000 active fires are burning across the country of which more than 670 are out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. So far, 13.7 million hectares have burned, far exceeding the 1995 record of 7.1 million hectares.

source https://time.com/6305629/wildfires-yellowknife-canada-evacuation/

A Pig’s Kidney Has Been Working in a Human Body for a Month, a Medical Milestone

(NEW YORK) — Surgeons transplanted a pig’s kidney into a brain-dead man and for over a month it’s worked normally — a critical step toward an operation the New York team hopes to eventually try in living patients.

Scientists around the country are racing to learn how to use animal organs to save human lives, and bodies donated for research offer a remarkable rehearsal.

The latest experiment announced Wednesday by NYU Langone Health marks the longest a pig kidney has functioned in a person, albeit a deceased one — and it’s not over. Researchers are set to track the kidney’s performance for a second month.

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“Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it’s looking like it is,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s transplant institute, told The Associated Press.

“It looks even better than a human kidney,” Montgomery said on July 14 as he replaced a deceased man’s own kidneys with a single kidney from a genetically modified pig — and watched it immediately start producing urine.

The possibility that pig kidneys might one day help ease a dire shortage of transplantable organs persuaded the family of the 57-year-old Maurice “Mo” Miller from upstate New York to donate his body for the experiment.

“I struggled with it,” his sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, told the AP. But he liked helping others and “I think this is what my brother would want. So I offered my brother to them.”

“He’s going to be in the medical books, and he will live on forever,” she added.

Genetically-modified pigs

Attempts at animal-to-human transplants have failed for decades as people’s immune systems attacked the foreign tissue. Now researchers are using pigs genetically modified so their organs better match human bodies.

Last year with special permission from regulators, University of Maryland surgeons transplanted a gene-edited pig heart as a last-ditch attempt to save a dying man. He survived only two months before the organ failed for reasons that aren’t fully understood but that offer lessons for future attempts.

Now, the Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to allow some small but rigorous studies of pig heart or kidney transplants in volunteer patients.

Read More: Chronic Kidney Disease is Poised to Become the Black Lung of Climate Change

The NYU experiment is one of a string of developments aimed at speeding the start of such clinical trials. Also Wednesday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported another important success — a pair of pig kidneys worked normally inside another donated body for seven days.

Kidneys don’t just make urine — they provide a wide range of jobs in the body. In the journal JAMA Surgery, UAB transplant surgeon Dr. Jayme Locke reported lab tests documenting the gene-modified pig organs’ performance. She said the weeklong experiment demonstrates they can “provide life-sustaining kidney function.”

These experiments are critical to answer more remaining questions “in a setting where we’re not putting someone’s life in jeopardy,” said Montgomery, the NYU kidney transplant surgeon who also received his own heart transplant — and is acutely aware of the need for a new source of organs.

A long waiting list for transplants

More than 100,000 patients are on the nation’s transplant list and thousands die each year waiting.

Previously, NYU and a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham had tested pig kidney transplants in deceased recipients for just two or three days. An NYU team also had transplanted pig hearts into donated bodies for three days of intense testing.

But how do pig organs react to a more common human immune attack that takes about a month to form? Only longer testing might tell.

The surgery itself isn’t that different from thousands he’s performed “but somewhere in the back of your mind is the enormity of what you’re doing … recognizing that this could have a huge impact on the future of transplantation,” Montgomery said.

The operation took careful timing. Early that morning Drs. Adam Griesemer and Jeffrey Stern flew hundreds of miles to a facility where Virginia-based Revivicor Inc. houses genetically modified pigs — and retrieved kidneys lacking a gene that would trigger immediate destruction by the human immune system.

As they raced back to NYU, Montgomery was removing both kidneys from the donated body so there’d be no doubt if the soon-to-arrive pig version was working. One pig kidney was transplanted, the other stored for comparison when the experiment ends.

“You’re always nervous,” Griesemer said. To see it so rapidly kickstart, “there was a lot of thrill and lot of sense of relief.”

How long should these experiments last? Alabama’s Locke said that’s not clear -– and among the ethical questions are how long a family is comfortable or whether it’s adding to their grief. Because maintaining a brain-dead person on a ventilator is difficult, it’s also dependent on how stable the donated body is.

In her own experiment, the donated body was stable enough that if the study wasn’t required to end after a week, “I think we could have gone much longer, which I think offers great hope,” she said.

The University of Maryland’s Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin cautions that it’s not clear how closely a deceased body will mimic a live patient’s reactions to a pig organ — but that this research educates the public about xenotransplantation so “people will not be shocked” when it’s time to try again in the living.

source https://time.com/6305485/a-pigs-kidney-organ-tranplant/

The Backlash to Bradley Cooper’s Prosthetic Nose in Maestro Ignites an Ongoing Debate Over Jewish Representation

On Tuesday, Netflix released the first trailer for Maestro, its upcoming Leonard Bernstein drama directed, co-written by, and starring Bradley Cooper. The actor’s appearance in the first glimpse of footage quickly reignited a topic of conversation that arose back in May 2022 when the first stills of the movie were released, due to Cooper’s facial prosthetics, which some alleged were unnecessary and constituted a troubling example of “Jewface.”

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The movie is centered around the iconic composer and his relationship with Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan), whom he married in 1951. Maestro, which also counts Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese among its producers, is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival which begins at the end of this month. It will be released in select theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20.

On Wednesday, Bernstein’s children Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein posted a statement to his official Twitter account stating that they are “perfectly” fine with Cooper’s use of “makeup to amplify his resemblance” and “we’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.” They pointed to their own involvement in the film and “the profound respect and yes, the love that Bradley brought to his portrait” of their parents.

(1/6) From Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein:
Bradley Cooper included the three of us along every step of his amazing journey as he made his film about our father. pic.twitter.com/y9xZWDotJe

— Leonard Bernstein (@LennyBernstein) August 16, 2023

Cooper as Bernstein

In the movie, Cooper portrays the famed composer, who is perhaps best known for composing the music for West Side Story alongside lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The focus of the drama is Bernstein’s 27-year relationship with Montealegre, who died in 1978. (Bernstein died later, in 1990.) In a June 2022 interview with Kveller, Bernstein’s daughter Jamie said that she felt the backlash to Cooper’s portrayal of her father was “ridiculous.” She told the publication, “Bernstein had a big nose and yes, he was Jewish. And what is the problem here? Are we really going to say they had to hire a Jewish actor to play [my father]?”

Despite Bernstein’s family’s support for the film, however, many users on social media expressed their distaste for the decision. One user replied to Netflix’s post sharing the trailer with photos of Cooper and Bernstein side-by-side and wrote, “This isn’t about making a non-Jewish actor look more like Leonard Bernstein; it’s about making a non-Jewish actor look more like a Jewish stereotype.”

Left: Bradley Cooper with his prosthetic nose, playing Leonard Bernstein.

Right: The actual Leonard Bernstein.

This isn't about making a non-Jewish actor look more like Leonard Bernstein; it's about making a non-Jewish actor look more like a Jewish stereotype. https://t.co/WrYWuweosW pic.twitter.com/WxspPtHktj

— Joel S. (@jh_swanson) August 15, 2023

Another user said, “Let’s talk about how prevalent of a trope it still is that Jews have big noses, even though nose diversity runs the gamut among Jews as much as any other group.” The user continued, “And here we are… enhancing a shnoz prosthetic for no apparent reason, reinforcing the stereotypes. What a putz.”

Okay. Let’s talk about how prevalent of a trope it still is that Jews have big noses, even though nose diversity runs the gamut among Jews as much as any other group. And here we are… enhancing a shnoz prosthetic for no apparent reason, reinforcing the stereotypes. What a putz. https://t.co/lpqVgGYxGu

— Tamar Herman תמר הרמן 타마르 허먼 (@TamarWrites) August 16, 2023

Jake Gyllenhaal, whose mother is Jewish, told Deadline in 2021 that he and Cooper had competing Bernstein projects, but the latter officially got the rights to the story in the end.

Reigniting a longstanding debate

This is not the first time debate has arisen surrounding whether only actors of a certain ethnicity or marginalized group should portray characters with the same background. Most recently, the movie Golda, due to release later this month, received backlash for star Helen Mirren’s significant makeup and prosthetics to play the Israeli prime minister. The film’s director, Guy Nattiv, defended his decision to cast Mirren, telling The Daily Mail, “If someone who’s not Jewish can’t play Jewish, does someone who’s Jewish play someone who’s not Jewish?”

Spielberg saw pushback when he cast non-Jewish actors, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, to play his parents in last year’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, although the fact that he himself was casting his own parents made it easier to shake criticism. When Kathryn Hahn, who is not Jewish (and also played a rabbi on the TV series Transparent), was cast to play Joan Rivers in a series, the conversation surged again. (The show didn’t end up moving forward due to issues with Rivers’ life rights.)

Referencing other instances of non-Jewish actresses cast to play Jews, including Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Rachel McAdams as an Orthodox woman in Disobedience, Sarah Seltzer explained in TIME why it’s difficult to talk about these issues as they relate to Judaism. “It’s not exactly racism or cultural appropriation, because Jewishness does not fall neatly into the categories of race, religion or ethnicity—some consider it one or another or some combination of the three—and because white Jews have access to white privilege in America … Jewish actresses like [Rachel] Weisz, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson are among Hollywood’s most feted stars. When a white actor or actress snags a role written for another race or ethnicity—like Johansson herself in The Ghost in the Shell—it’s blatant erasure. This isn’t that.”

Maestro, which is Cooper’s directorial follow-up to A Star Is Born, is certainly poised to remain in the conversation for many months to come, from Venice to its streaming debut in December and likely well into awards season in 2024.

source https://time.com/6305450/bradley-cooper-maestro-trailer-jewface/

Two Trump Indictments For Trying to Overturn an Election. Two Very Different Strategies.

Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis are each prosecuting Donald Trump for the same fundamental alleged crime: conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and cling to power despite knowing he lost. But they are taking fundamentally different approaches, made clear in the indictments they secured against the former President this month. Whereas Smith is pursuing a narrow set of four charges against Trump in federal court, Willis has produced a sprawling and expansive case in Georgia that charges Trump and 18 of his associates with a grand total of 41 criminal counts. 

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The contrast signifies the diverging strategies at the heart of their historic and politically combustible legal cases. Both are grappling with the complexity of prosecuting a former President who is also a leading presidential candidate in the next election—except they are not necessarily navigating the same set of headwinds. 

If Trump reclaims the White House, he could potentially exert executive power to inoculate himself from federal criminal vulnerability, such as attempting to pardon himself or appointing an attorney general who will quash the charges against him. That may be why Smith brought forth a lean indictment that he hopes can get to trial quickly, according to former federal prosecutors. “There’s a race against the clock,” says Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney, referring to Smith’s case. “In Georgia, that’s not really the case. No attorney general of the United States can shut down a state court investigation. So this case can proceed, even if Trump is elected.”

That may also help to explain why Smith eschewed charging Trump with inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Indicting him on those grounds, legal experts say, would tangle the prosecution in First Amendment arguments that could provide Trump more room to maneuver. Instead, Smith limited the 45-page indictment to the four counts of conspiracy to defraud the government, conspiracy against the right to vote, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and obstruction of an official proceeding. While Smith listed six unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators, legal analysts suspect he left them untouched for now to expedite the case. He could charge them down the road, or try to flip them as government witnesses against Trump in the intervening months. 

Willis, for her part, charged Trump with 13 criminal counts, including soliciting a public official to violate his oath of office, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree, conspiring to file false documents, and making false statements. Moreover, she charged Trump and allies such as former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani with orchestrating a criminal scheme to subvert the election results. They collectively face a range of charges but are all being prosecuted under Georgia’s anti-racketeering laws, what are known in legal parlance as RICO statutes, which have typically been used to prosecute members of the mob.

“She named those defendants because she has to be able to show the criminal enterprise,” says Anna Cominsky, a professor at New York Law School. “She has to show the overt acts of the participants. By naming these people, and saying, here’s what each of them did, either alone or collectively, that makes this a criminal enterprise. That’s what’s going to prove her case.”

While Willis has said she wants to try the case within the next six months, former prosecutors suspect that’s not a realistic timeline, especially given the number of co-defendants.

In fact, the case is unlikely to be resolved before voters cast ballots next year. “When you have 19 total defendants, you will have 19 potential motions,” says Jeremy Saland, a former Manhattan prosecutor. “You’re going to have motions to sever. You’re going to potentially have 19 motions to dismiss.” Willis has indicated she will push to try them all together, but the co-defendants are likely to seek separate trials, a decision that can slow down the process and that will ultimately be made by the judge. “I think that Jack Smith knew what he wanted, and he wanted to do it effectively,” Saland adds. “He wants to get this indictment rolled out and a potential trial in advance of the election.”

A federal judge will determine when the trial starts. Smith has asked to begin the trial on charges that Trump illegally plotted to nullify the election on Jan. 2, 2024, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Trump’s team has already sought to push that trial back, and most former prosecutors suspect they will successfully postpone it, as defendants are often able to procure trial delays, especially when there’s a voluminous amount of evidence presented through discovery. The government will also have to reckon with Trump’s packed courtroom itinerary over the next year while he faces multiple criminal indictments concurrently, including in a separate Special Counsel case alleging that he mishandled classified documents. 

But Smith will face another complication if Trump’s lawyers can shelve the matter long enough—the looming presidential election in which the defendant could be the Republican nominee. Trump is currently leading the GOP primary by more than 40 points in most polls. “Smith is keeping this trim and limited to Trump, because he really does want to take one of these two cases to trial before the next general election,” says David Weinstein, a former assistant U.S. attorney, “and because of the policies and practices of the Department of Justice, where they don’t want to be perceived as influencing an election. He wants to get his prosecution over and done before you get too close to the next general election.”

Meanwhile, Trump is expected to stand trial in March on charges from the Manhattan District Attorney that he falsified business records. And a federal judge overseeing the case alleging that he hoarded national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago Club has set a trial date for May 2024. Trump had asked for an indefinite postponement in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, saying it interfered with his campaign schedule, but Judge Aileen Cannon denied the request. 

While Smith will be racing to secure convictions in the federal cases against Trump, Willis may be able to proceed with her prosecution in 2025 no matter the outcome of the next election. It’s a reality that gives her the latitude to pursue a wide-ranging case from the outset. Should Trump win the 2024 election, his lawyers could argue that he can’t go on trial as a sitting president, but there’s no guarantee such a maneuver could work, according to McQuade. Willis’s case could stretch on for years, potentially making it the last-resort legal instrument that can hold those who tried to subvert American democracy accountable.

“Rather than try to do this sort of streamlined one-defendant indictment, she charged them all with the full scope of all of the conduct,” McQuade says. “She says she’d like to try this case in six months, but realistically, she probably knows that’s not likely. She’s in it for the long haul.” 

source https://time.com/6305281/trump-indictments-strategies-fani-willis-jack-smith/

The History Lost in the Maui Wildfires

As wildfires have ravaged the Hawaiian island of Maui in one of the state’s deadliest natural disasters of all time, residents are bracing themselves for the massive rebuilding efforts to come. But many of the artifacts and objects that tell the island’s history that were lost to the blaze will not be able to be recreated.

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Historic preservation experts in the town of Lahaina, one of the hardest hit areas, are still trying to figure out the full extent of the damage, but right now the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit that oversees several local historic sites, believe a majority of the collections overseen by the group—thousands of objects—have been lost. They are working off the assumption that anything made of paper, wood, ceramics, or fabric will not survive the fires. 

“We’ve lost four museums,” says Kimberly Flook, Deputy Executive Director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, out of at least 14 museums and sites the group oversees. “If you’re into environmentalism, if you’re into surfing, if you’re into history, something was lost in all those ways.”

Wo Hing Museum & Cookhouse—a social hall for the Chinese immigrants who helped build the tunnels and irrigation systems through the mountains—completely burned down. Baldwin Home, known as the oldest home still standing before the fires in Maui, no longer has a roof and the artifacts inside are believed to be in ruins. Old Lahaina prison—where people who were convicted of crimes were sent at the peak of the whaling era in the mid-1800s—lost its wooden gatehouse and wooden jail cell buildings. At the old Lahaina courthouse, the center of government for the region, everything but the walls is gone.

Among the prized possessions believed to be lost by Lahaina Restoration Foundation staff is an original native Hawaiian kingdom flag. On August 12, 1898, shortly after Hawaii was annexed to the U.S., the Hawaiian kingdom flag was lowered and replaced with the American flag. Flook says the flag was a great conversation-starter with visitors because “many Americans don’t realize that the path to statehood for Hawaii was not a choice.” 

Objects that show how native Hawaiians made a living for themselves are also believed to be lost, like featherwork, furniture, photographs, and kapa, a type of fabric used to make rugs, skirts, and blankets. It’s not only indigenous history that’s at stake, but objects representing the nationalities of people who worked on the plantations in the late 19th century through the mid-20th century—Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Portuguese, Scandinavian, Spanish, and Puerto Rican. Museum staffers are hopeful that artifacts made from stone and some types of metal will survive the fires.

Flook says that while some physical objects are now gone, many Native Hawaiians still remember their histories and are working to find new ways to tell their stories to visitors. As she puts it: “We’ve lost physical pieces of history. We have not lost our history, our culture. And we won’t.”

source https://time.com/6305270/maui-wildfire-history-museums-artifacts-lost/

Why Hawaiian Electric Is Facing a Lawsuit After Deadly Wildfires in Maui

In the wake of wildfires that ripped through Maui last week, many are seeking answers about what caused the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in over a century. That search has put Hawaiian Electric, which serves 95% of the island state’s 1.4 million residents, in the spotlight. The utility provider is facing a lawsuit over alleged inaction in the face of the destructive Lahaina wildfire that has killed at least 99 people on the island of Maui.

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Though an official cause of the wildfire has not been reached, Lahaina residents filed a class action lawsuit against the utility company, alleging that, in the days before the fires broke out, the company “chose not to deenergize their power lines during the High Wind Watch and Red Flag Warning conditions for Maui before the Lahaina Fire started.” The filing also claims that the company failed to shut off power lines even after the fires began.

Read More: What Remains After the Flames: Scenes From the Ash-Colored Streets of Maui

No shut-off plan

Hawaiian Electric did not deploy a public power shutoff plan—an aggressive safety strategy used in other states, such as California, Oregon and Nevada—to proactively shut down power to communities with high wind conditions and increased risks of fire. 

Intense wind gusts knocked down approximately 30 utility poles across the region on August 8, many onto trees and roads, and complicated evacuations, according to Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen, who confirmed that some electrical lines were energized when they hit the ground.

According to the Washington Post, Hawaiian Electric was aware that a power shut-off was an useful strategy, but didn’t include the step in it in its fire mitigation plans. Hawaiian Electric spokesman Jim Kelly, told CNN that the utility company does not have a formal shut-off program in place, since the power is needed to provide water for firefighters.

“Pre-emptive, short-notice power shut-offs have to be coordinated with first-responders and in Lahaina, electricity powers the pumps that provide the water needed for firefighting,” Kelly told the New York Times.

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Research firm CoreLogic has estimated that the residential property damages stand at $1.3 billion, but Hawaii Gov. Josh Green estimates the losses “approach $6 billion.” On Friday, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez announced a “comprehensive review” of the decisions and policies surrounding the fires, which the state’s emergency measures were largely unprepared for. 

An emergency management plan published by the state of Hawaii in February 2022 rated wildfires as low and medium risk across the board for its effect on people, property, the environment, and emergency management program operations. 

The state’s outdoor emergency siren system—which it says is the largest in the world—is meant to alert residents to tsunamis and other natural disasters, but it did not activate during the fires. 

Scrutiny and lawsuit

Power lines have been responsible for the spread of many destructive wildfires in the U.S.  From 1992 to 2020 federal, state and local fire services dealt with 32,652 powerline-ignited wildfires across the country, according to Inside Climate News. In California alone, the electric company PG&E has been blamed for more than 30 wildfires since 2017 that wiped out more than 23,000 homes and businesses and killed more than 100 people. The company recently reached a $150 million settlement for its involvement in the 2020 Zogg fires. 

Documents filed in the Hawaiian Electric lawsuit allege that the company had studied wildfire mitigation plans filed by California utility companies, which included a shut-off plan during high wind and so-called “red flag”—when warm temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds combine to produce an increased fire risk—conditions to prevent wildfires. But the documents allege that Hawaiian Electric never created a plan of its own. 

In a statement to ABC News, Hawaiian Electric’s Kelly said that the utility company would cooperate with local officials as part of the investigation into the cause of the wildfires but did not comment on the lawsuit. The company did not respond to a request for comment from TIME.

The vulnerable nature of Hawaii’s grid has been a concern for years, the Washington Post reported. “I think we were all playing on the fact that we got lucky — up until now,” Jennifer Potter, a Lahaina resident and former member of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, said of the poor shape of the state’s electric poles.

Amid the scrutiny, Hawaiian Electric has seen its share price tumble, plunging over 40% to a 13-year low, on Monday morning following the lawsuit. The company’s shares were down more than 30% on Tuesday.

Government filings show that the company reported its plans to make infrastructure more resilient, including putting lines underground in vulnerable areas, hardening poles and launching a program to remove hazardous trees. 

“The risk of a utility system causing a wildfire ignition is significant,” the company wrote in one filing, noting that a large objective was to “minimize the probability of the Companies’ facilities becoming the origin or contributing source of ignition for a wildfire”.

source https://time.com/6305095/hawaiian-electric-wildfires-lawsuit/