What kind of Car was this?

[kf4rca]

Classic car burned in Maui.

[Electronic M]

Looks like a 36-38 Chevy to me. I'm fairly sure it's a GM.

There's one like that which shows up to the local car shows....It used to be a mild custom with perfect paint then the garage it was in burned and the owner rebuilt it into a rat rod keeping the flame seared body as is...

[ARC Tech-109]

1936 Chevy Master Deluxe, suicide rear doors and the double body lines.

[kf4rca]

Thanks. Did you know there are about 1.25 Million cars in Hawaii. Not sure how many are classic cars. Sounds like a lot for a small group of islands.
And every year about 5000 cars are abandoned. Owners don't want to pay to ship them back to the mainland. (Probably, many have liens on them!)
The salty environment (rain and sea spray) are rough on cars there. Gas (like everything else) is very expensive as it has to be shipped in from the mainland.
Electricity is provided largely by oil and gas fired generators and must be imported.
They're saying electric lines sparked the flames. When I was with SCE&G, I never heard of electric lines starting a fire.

[ARC Tech-109]

Apparently there is video evidence of this now

[kf4rca]

Heard that too.
My guess is Hawaii uses 4KV distribution. (Actually it could be 4KV, 4140, or 4400.) That's the voltage used in coastal SC. (It was at one time the standard in the US.) HV distribution (usually 13.8 KV) cannot be used in coastal areas. The HV just arcs everywhere due to the high moisture content in the air.
They probably use #6 copper wire since ACSR wire (used in 13.8 systems) would get eat up by the salt corrosion.
The lower voltage is less likely to arc and cause a fire. You can get an idea of the voltage by looking at the insulators on the pole.

[ARC Tech-109]

My town uses 2400/4160 distribution with Cu and Al conductors with black oval can side bushing transformers that date back to the 1960s, it's quite the mess but has proven to be very reliable over the years.

[kf4rca]

Back to the cars. I heard on shortwave that the aluminum rims just melted down to blobs of aluminum. I hope the don't throw those burned vehicles into the ocean. There are many fiber optic cables that can get cut.
Actually the fires started in 3 separate areas:
https://mauinow.com/2023/08/10/maui-...aui-wildfires/
So its unlikely it was caused by a downed power line.

[ARC Tech-109]

Honestly its hard to say what really started the wildfires, from an outsiders point of view it appears to be another "perfect storm" of events. Maybe it was more than one line shorting down in the high winds, a renegade cigarette or smartphone battery that exploded... all pure speculation at this point. Until the investigation has been concluded and released I'm not going to get on the blaming bandwagon regardless of what the news media has to say as things have a habit of changing without notice.

[Alex KL-1]

Very dry climate (at normally damp places) can start fires almost from anything, like a not completely extinguished cigarette, so is difficult to find one culprit.
In fact, when severe dry events occurs here, is common to wildfires starting near to highways, due to drivers tossing cigarettes and suchlike windows out.

Other thing, voltage wise... here we use 13.8kV even at coast, without noticed induced fires or discharges. We use even 34kV near where I live, in rural zone and the most far neighborhood, using hardware not so different from 13.8kV (only the insulators are bigger sized), also without notice even at severe dry events (at least I not heard nothing about). Maybe other people noticed something different.