Rep. Fry to Newsmax: Is There a Cover-Up Going on in Maui?

Rep. Russell Fry, R-S.C., told Newsmax on Thursday that he has all kinds of questions about the federal government's response, or lack thereof, to the deadly Maui wildfires that devastated the Hawaiian island earlier this month.

"I live in a hurricane prone area," Fry said during an appearance on "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE." "We see disasters pretty frequently, but I've never seen that level of, really cover-up, ever in my entire life of seeing hurricanes on the ground, being on the ground. FEMA just doesn't act like that. Government officials don't act like that. The administration's response has been lackluster at very best, but it's almost been criminal."

"We still don't know how many people are missing?" he asked. "We don't know their status? This is absolutely ridiculous.

"When you look at the front end of this, the cries for help that were there from the beginning — 'we need water, we need resources' — and none of it was followed up with. Every single disaster takes a local, federal and state response. Here, you have three different directions, and no one's rowing the right way."

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters last week that the House will likely probe the federal response to the wildfires that killed at least 115 people and razed the historic enclave of Lahaina.

M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, waited more than five hours to release water as the fires were burning. The Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources later transferred Manuel to another position within the department.

Fry said that getting enough water to firefighters battling the blaze, on an island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, doesn't seem that complicated.

"To me, to see the level of tragedy that struck Maui, to know that families lost everything and then to know, on top of it, that we still, at this point, weeks later, don't know who we've lost, who we have accounted for or not accounted for, I think, is unconscionable," Fry said.

"FEMA has a direct obligation in this, and I don't want to hear excuses that this is an island and it takes a while. It's so easy to get on a plane and head over there to really figure out what's going on. They're not doing it. They haven't done it. Meanwhile, they're going off to Lake Tahoe to go on vacation. It's ridiculous.

"I think [how FEMA prepared] deserves a really good look, but, since then, it's just been a parade of horribles, one thing after another," he continued. "FEMA's response has been absolutely abysmal, and so there's a lot to investigate here from top to bottom, everything from freezing out the town, denying aid, not having proper accounting of people who were missing and their status.

"I think that's kind of the state of play, and it hasn't gotten any clearer since the fires. I think, in this day and age, that's reckless, and it's wrong, and the American people deserve better."

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