Deadly Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Wildfires

"They were moving fast. The winds were vicious and kept changing. He [Charles] said they were inside a dark smoke [that] felt like a tornado and they could not see nothing,"

"They kept calling each other’s name."
"He was screaming ‘run, run, run, Carole run.’ He eventually could not hear her anymore."

Gardner Hartley, Facebook post

 

"Indo-Pacom is on a hair trigger to be able to support as necessary. Everyone fully understands the pain that people are experiencing right now."

"We want to do everything we can help. But we also don’t want to contribute to the problem by sending unnecessary capabilities that then will hinder any type of emergency response."

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder

 

"The remains we're finding is through a fire that melted metal... When we pick up the remains ... they fall apart."  

"[Cadaver dogs still had a vast area to search for what could still be hundreds of people who are unaccounted for]."

"We're going as fast as we can. But just so you know, 3% — that's what's been searched with the dogs."

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier

 

"The mountain behind us caught on fire and nobody told us jack."

"You know when we found that there was a fire? When it was across the street from us."

Vilma Reed, 63, Maui resident

 

"I will tell you this, as a physician, it is a harrowing sight in Maui."

"When those providers, the police and this division, do come across scenes in houses or businesses it is very difficult for them because they know, ultimately, they will be sharing with our people that there have been more fatalities."

"I do expect the numbers to rise." 

Governor Josh Green

A group of volunteers who sailed from Maalaea Bay, Maui, form an assembly line on Kaanapali Beach on Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023, to unload donations from a boat. Maui residents have come together to donate water, food and other essential supplies to people on the western side of the island after a deadly fire destroyed hundreds of homes and left scores of people homeless. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

One of the most popular tourism resorts in the United States, Hawaii is undergoing a horrific wildfire emergency. Wildfires on Maui have killed 96 people so far and more lethal casualties are expected before this dreadful natural disaster is over. To the present, 2,700 structures have been destroyed by the wildfires that moved at astonishing speed to demolish everything in their path. Countless people have been left homeless, leaving social assistance authorities with a huge task of providing immediate relief to grief-stricken people.

The historic town of Maui is no more, completely destroyed. Disaster relief springs into action. And the hope is that the relief will be more effective than the largest integrated outdoor all-hazard public safety warning system in the world, that Hawaii has been so proud of. There are about 400 sirens positioned across the island chain; their purpose, to alert people to natural disasters and any other threats that could conceivably arise. What could go wrong?

Survivors reveal there was no sound of sirens, nor did they receive any kind of warning, giving them time to prepare. Hawaii's emergency management records indicate no warning sirens had sounded before people were forced to run for their lives. People realized the extreme danger they suddenly faced only when they actually saw flames or heard the explosions that erupted nearby in the state's deadliest natural disaster since 61 people died in a 1960 tsunami.

That territory-wide emergency system was developed as a result of a 1946 tsunami that marked the death of over 150 people on the Big Island. The system sirens are regularly sounded to test their readiness. And when they should have been sounded it seems that no one in authority actually thought to use them from a real emergency.

 

Officials had sent out alerts to mobile phones, through television and radio stations -- the fly in that ointment was predictably, wide-spread power and cellular outages would have had the expected result of limiting that outreach.

The death toll, warns Governor Josh Green, is expected to rise, with search and rescue operations continuing and cadaver-sniffing dogs brought in to help in the search for people's remains resulting from the inferno that overtook them. 70-year-old retired mail carrier Thomas Leonard from Lahaina wasn't aware of the fire and then he smelled smoke. The town was given no real-time information of the danger they were facing.

When he attmpted to leave in his Jeep he was forced to abandon it and run for the shore as cars nearby began exploding. There, he hid for hours behind a seawall while wind blew hot ash and cinders around him. Eventually firefighters arrived, escorting Leonard and other survivors to safety through the flames. 

 

A dry summer and ferocious winds from a passing hurricane fuelled at least three wildfires that erupted this week on Maui. As the most serious of the wildfires raced through parched brush, Lahaina was left a grid of grey, ashen rubble with skeletal remains of buildings under blaze-pancaked roofs. Harbour boats scorched, the stench of burning lingers on the air from torched palm trees.

Destroyed homes and cars Sunday, August 13, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. Rick Bowmer/AP

"The price tag is astronomical in the context of Maui's size, as annual output is about $10 billion."

"With the median single-family house price in Maui just above $1 million, the effect on the housing stock alone pulls the estimate into the billions. Combine this with the loss of a couple of hotels and numerous retail shops, most of which are more highly valued than the typical home on the island, and the number climbs considerably."

"Many visitors to Hawaii are known to travel to more than one island, which means that the cancellation of entire itineraries will have ripple effects beyond Maui. Some would-be travelers could also paint all of the Hawaiian Islands with the same broad brush and shy away from visiting, especially after volcanic eruptions on the Big Island in recent years."

Adam Kamins and Katie Nied, Moody's Analytics economists

A firefighting helicopter makes a water drop as a Maui County firefighter extinguishes a fire near homes during the upcountry Maui wildfires in Kula, Hawaii on August 13, 2023.  PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images

 

Witness to Genocide

"My family tried to decide what to do, to join the speedily retreating Russian troops and leave behind the property, the savings, the old furniture and keepsakes, the old books collected by my grandfather, the Torah which was in the  house for more than 150 years when my ancestors came from Germany."

"My family, meanwhile, was forced to go into the backyard and dig a pit. They were buried alive. An SS officer commanded the operation while the  youths of our neighbourhood threw children into the pit."

"[The occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union was] the most obscene decision of the Soviet leaderships in its post-war history, comparable only with the invasion of Afghanistan [statement predating the Russian invasion of Ukraine]."

Ilya Gerol, Born Riga, Latvia November 1940 - Died Montreal, Canada, August 2022

 

Ilya Gerol's family was prosperous, citizens of Riga, Latvia, but originally from Germany. Just before he was born the Soviet Red Army invaded and occupied Latvia. But then, while he was in his infancy, Operation Barbarossa was launched by Nazi Germany when its leadership decided to dissolve the Soviet Union's membership in the Axis Alliance and to invade Russia in June of 1941. 

When the Nazis were approaching the outskirts of Riga with mobile SS death squads, Einsatsgruppen joined by by Latvian auxiliaries shooting thousands of the city's Jewish population, his large extended family, disbelieving the underground news of Jewish slaughter taking place, held emergency discussions among themselves, trying to decide what they should do. In the end, because they believed they would come to no harm, they remained.

Ilya Gerol's mother believed otherwise, fearing for her life and that of her infant. Her trust in the cultured civil Germany that her larger family grasped at, was absent in her opinion. She took her child and rushed into the street where they were picked up by retreating Russians driving a truck. Only later would she learn that her entire extended family, deciding to remain where they felt they would be spared, were all murdered.

Having survived the war, Gerol studied at the University of Moscow and joined the Red Army Reserve. He was active in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. He set aside his private reservations and remained in Russia, becoming a journalist and by age 25 was chief editor for the Atlantica radio station in Russia. He became senior editor at the Russian language newspaper Sovetskaia Molodezh (Soviet Youth) and published two books on leaders of the Young Communist League.

As a journalist in the Soviet Union he prospered but could honour no principles he held dear: "There is only one condition; do not write what you have seen, write what we ask you to write", he later recalled. Eventually he published articles reflecting the reality in the U.S.S.R.; assaults on minority rights and personal freedoms, leading to his expulsion from the League of Journalists of the U.S.S.R.

Because his wife's father was a senior judge who intervened on his behalf, he was spared prison or forced exile. In 1979 he was allowed to leave the country. First to Vienna, then to Rome where he worked as a translator with the Canadian Embassy. There, he applied for refugee status in Canada, arriving in Vancouver a year later at age 39, fluent in English. 

He found work eventually as a journalist in Ottawa becoming a globe-trotting foreign affairs analyst with a number of significant interviews under his byline with leading world figures such as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Poland's Lech Walesa, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim (former WWII member of the Nazi Youth, and later Secretary General of the UN from 1972 to 1981).

None Shall Be Nameless and Faceless

"I couldn't shake the feeling that I had potentially walked past a photo of a family member without even knowing it."

"I'm the grandson of Holocaust survivors, all from Poland."

Danial Patt, Google employee, creator of website N2N (From Numbers to Names)

An engineer has created software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify anonymous Holocaust victims in World War II photos.  Photo EPA

"She believed [Geddy Lee's grandmother] that if they [her family] were all going to perish, they would perish together, and if they were all going to survive, they would survive together."

Geddy Lee, Rush rocker

Privacy rights activists, academics specializing in ethics concerns and human rights and specialists involved in the technology industry have all expressed concerns over artificial intelligence and face recognition technology and with good reason. Beijing for example, gives ample reason for unease over its broad, universal use of face recognition to keep tabs on its citizens and to gain information on their political orientation and activities deemed to be injurious to state interests. 

But like any technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries there are positive applications and there is the potential for negative use of new knowledge. And while Beijing uses face recognition to keep its population in line with its state-ideological oversight, a new application for facial recognition has been pioneered by a Google software engineer, Danial Patt, who was inspired to create the website From Numbers to Names. Here, the facial recognition facility is powered by AI analyzing photographs of Holocaust survivors to match them with headshots provided by website users.

"We reached out to Geddy Lee, from Rush, with a photo we thought was of his mother. He was able to confirm this was indeed a photo of her at the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen."

"Geddy was then able to subsequently discover photos of his grandmother, uncles, an aunt and other extended family by browsing the Yad Vashem [Israel] collection where the initial photo came from."

Daniel Patt, creator of N2N

Geddy Lee's mother, Mary Weinrib, survived Auschwitz, as a Holocaust survivor, and arrived as a refugee with her husband Morris Weinrib to Canada in 1946. She spoke of her Auschwitz experiences with her children, according to Lee. When a photo was discovered showing Mary Weinrib at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northwestern Germany Danial Patt contacted Lee. 

 

Born in Warsaw in 1925, Manya (Malka) Rubinstein who later became Mary Weinrib at marriage, was sent with her family to a labour camp in Starachowice, then later relocated to Auschwitz, and finally Bergen-Belsen, somehow surviving her ordeal. On a visit to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Patt was inspired to work on a project in his spare time with his personal resources, that would eventually become the Numbers to Names website.

 

There is now a team of engineers and researchers working on the project with Patt who aspires to partner with museums, schools, research institutions and other groups to raise awareness of the Holocaust. The website can be freely accessed and has analyzed over 500,000 photographs with roughly two million faces. The hope is that eventually 700,000 additional photos dating before and during the Holocaust will be accessed.

 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) uses the technology now. Its immense collection of a database exceeding 270,000 registered survivors with over 85,000 historical photographs represents an asset allowing the museum to access another one million photographs. The one constraining issue to completely identifying the vast number of people who passed through the gates of Hell in the Final Solution, is ebbing time. 

Currently there is no single list identifying the victims and survivors of the Holocaust (Picture: EPA/www.auschwitz.org)

"[There is so much interest in the N2N website] there is a backlog of potential identifications we're manually going through now."

"We have been developing the project over the course of evenings and weekends over many months. There's an urgency to this effort as the last remaining survivors pass, and there are many connections that could still be made."

“We simply show results, with similarity scores, and let individuals decide whether the results contain a positive identification,”

"We hope that N2N can help build those connections while the survivors are still with us."

Danial Patt, creator of N2N

Patt says that his team makes no software-based assertions about the accuracy of the identification, leaving that judgment to the people using the site.  Peta Pixel