Tulsi Gabbard

You don't?

And I'm saying that not just because of belief, but because I went there...

I was in army training in Fort Leavenworth when this happened.

Thankfully, I was able to take leave and get back to Maui as quickly as possible.

I think it was the second or third day after the fires.

I went, obviously, directly out to West Maui to go and talk to people.

This was a community that was in my district when I was in Congress for eight years.

And I wanted to know what happened.

And speaking to the firefighters, the people who were there, community leaders, the convergence of events that resulted in winds changing direction, funneling through the valley,

this side of the island is very, very dry.

It didn't used to be that way.

There's a whole long story we don't have time for right now about how the water was diverted away from a side of the island that used to be very lush and diverted away at the top of the mountain to irrigate the plantation fields on a different side of the island.

And so...

land that used to be very lush is now very, very, very dry.

Every single summer there are brush fires that break out.

Firefighters are very busy often.

They're able to put them out in time, but the convergence of the brush fires with these hurricane speed winds funneling through the valley essentially turned this situation into what they described as a horizontal blowtorch

that then went directly across that side of the island and within minutes, raising everything that was in its path.

I haven't been following it too closely.

I saw the video they put out about how they donated $10 million and then they were asking everybody else to give money.