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April 6, 2024

Oprah isn’t welcome anymore

By Susan Daniels

The day after the August 7th fire in Lahaina, Oprah Winfrey brought pillows and blankets to the War Memorial Stadium on Maui. The 1,000 people who sheltered there were grateful. They had escaped the fire with the clothes they were wearing.

Perhaps her largesse caused her to believe that what she had done gave her entree to those who were so devastated, not knowing where their family, friends, or even pets were. “Ohps,” as she is called by some residents, showed up two days later with a CBS camera crew intent on filming the misery of people living in tents. That unsuccessful attempt turned any previous goodwill against her.

When that debacle was followed by her promise that she and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, would start a $100 million campaign for Lahaina fire victims by each donating $5 million, things went from bad to worse. 

“Ohps” owns two houses, an airplane hanger, a private road, and 1,000 acres of land on Maui. 

She was accused of playing the victim and officially became persona non-grata and fled the island without donating any money, according to residents. Johnson donated his promised $5 million and also left the island. “Ohps” has still not returned to Maui and residents make it clear they don’t want her there.
 
The fire victims have yet to see any of the $150 million the state claimed it had in a fund. Four thousand people still have no permanent residence seven months after the fire and only sixty permits have been issued to allow people to start rebuilding their homes, although 2,200 houses were destroyed.
 
Greedy landlords are making life miserable for people who were in rental properties, according to a Maui source. They are throwing people out of properties they were renting for $4,000/mo. because FEMA is willing to pay $6,000 for the same property. A housing shortage has long existed in Maui and the fire made the situation much worse.

But the residents are getting it stuck to them in ways they don’t even know. Six weeks after the fire a news article reported that a temporary elementary school was going to be built to replace King Kamehameha III, which was a total loss. The estimated cost was $5.36 million. When the contracts were given, they were for $53.7 million and a recent article said the cost could reach $100 million -- for a temporary school with modular buildings.

Six hundred and fifty children attended King Kamehameha III and the temporary school will serve that many, but all those children were home from school that day and all the houses surrounding it were destroyed. Hundreds of those children have still not been accounted for. 

Granted, some children are doing online schooling and some have families that have left the island. But hundreds are unaccounted for and no one on Maui can get any information. Nor is the actual number of dead known. It is not the 115 Governor Josh Green says. Residents set the number from 600-800 based on the number of trucks they saw carrying the dead.

For Maui residents, the reality of little, if any, help coming is distressing, especially when Joe Biden just announced the government will pay to replace the Baltimore bridge that was suspiciously damaged, when replacing the bridge should be the responsibility of the shipping company. 

And as for “Ohps,” she may be worth $2.5 billion but to her neighbors on Maui, she isn’t worth a nickel.

Susan Daniels is a licensed private investigator and author of “The Rubbish Hauler’s Wife versus Barack Obama: A True Story” and it is available online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. She can be contacted at susandanielspi@aol.com.

Image: National Parks Gallery

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