Hawaii Gov. Josh Green appeared on “Face the Nation” Sunday and said over 1,000 Maui residents remain unaccounted, with many of this missing being children.

Green said the number is about 1,050 and would take an additional “several weeks” to account for them.

“That is hard to hear, Governor. I know a local Maui official said a large number of the dead may have actually been children who were left home that day because schools were closed, many of them alone or with their grandparents. Is that the case?” Margaret Brennan asked.

“That is possible. And that’s-that’s what we’re sharing here internally, that it’s possible that there will be many children. This is the largest catastrophe and disaster that’s ever hit Maui, probably that’s ever hit Hawaii outside of wartime events. So we just thank everyone in the world for reaching out and supporting us through all of the, you know, the ways that they can. Right now we are trying to make sure everyone is sheltered, and we begin to get all the federal resources we can to make life in some way livable for the survivors. That’s where we are at the moment,” Green said.

“With the siren system, you said to CNN on Monday and again on Tuesday that you believe some of the sirens were broken. When did you learn they weren’t fully functional?” Brennan questioned.

“We assess every siren across the state on the first of the month. And then we ask people to update them and fix them to their abilities. You know, I, of course, I as a person, as a father, as a doctor, I wish all the sirens went off. The challenge that you’ve heard, and it’s not to excuse or explain anything. The challenge has been that historically, those sirens are used for tsunamis. That’s when I came to Hawaii 23 years ago was told when I was living down near the shore. So it’s usually tsunamis and hurricanes,” Green responded.

WATCH:

Green’s excuse for the sirens not going off sounds like the same reasons given by Maui Emergency Operations Chief Herman Andaya.

Maui Emergency Operations Chief Gives ABSURD Reason For Not Sounding The Sirens

Green’s statements follow a heated press conference with Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen, who said he didn’t know how many children were missing from the fire.

WATCH:

During the interview, Green blamed climate change as part of the cause for the fire.

Of course, that notion is ridiculous.

Transcript from CBS News:

GOV. GREEN: I don’t know personally, whether or not the- the power lines were the- the primary reason the fire occurred. That’s why I asked for a comprehensive review, I think two days into this, which is very atypical. Normally, these kinds of investigations come months or-or more later. But we have to ask that question, we have to ask the question on every level of how any one city, county, state could have done better and the private sector. This is- this is the world that we live in now. In this case, and I’ve seen footage of it from some of the survivors, I’ve seen footage of how it looked during the fire and how things were exploding and what the fierce winds looked like. They were 80 miles per hour gusting and the fire, I’m now told, was as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It just destroyed everything. It’s not to excuse anything else from any company. It’s just to explain what the world should prepare for and I humbly asked all of the cities and states to spend that money now to prevent disasters like we are seeing here.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So just to be clear, when you’re talking about global warming, are you saying that climate change amplified the cost of human error?

GOV. GREEN: Yes, it did. There’s always going to be incredible things that people do to save lives, from the firefighters, from citizens. And there’s always going to be decisions that are made that I’m sure aren’t perfect in the moment. And- but when you have fire that move more than a mile a minute, and what happened I’m told by some of the survivors, they were at the initial fire. It was put out sometime late in the afternoon in Lahaina, and then the firefighters had to go to three other fires that had started because of the conditions. When they left the fire started up again. And then when the storm winds from Dora, which were that strong, swept it out, it just destroyed everything. So, there’s no excuses to ever be made. But there are finite- there are finite resources sometimes in the moment.

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