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Maui residents struggle to rebuild their lives one year since deadly wildfires

China

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      China

      China

      Maui residents struggle to rebuild their lives one year since deadly wildfires

      2024-08-10 15:50 Last Updated At:21:57

      Many struggling families on the U.S. island of Maui are battling to rebuild their lives amid a critical housing shortage and inadequate insurance coverage one year after the devastating wildfires.

      It's been one year since the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina burned to the ground on Maui. The exact cause of the fire still remains under investigation.

      Equipment from Kimo Clark's excavation company was all he had left after the devastating wildfires.

      "I lost my shop and my house, but not one of my pieces of equipment or my trucks. Not one," said Clark, a local resident, also owner of Truth Excavation.

      And his team used them to rescue victims.

      "He (one of my fellow) took our water truck, and he just worked throughout the night, and he saved and probably a dozen people, maybe more," said Clark.

      Over the past year, Clark's company has been helping homeowners prepare for reconstruction. They're ahead of schedule with the cleanup, but many don't have what it takes to rebuild.

      "Everybody, including myself, we are way under-insured. Most families I know or homeowners, they have about half the money to rebuild their house. Just to what it was not anything extravagant, fancy. It's just to rebuild what they had. We have half the money," said Clark.

      Maui was already facing a critical housing shortage, with a need for more than 10,000 units before the fires destroyed nearly 2,200 homes.

      Steve Dolan and his wife thought they were lucky to have home insurance, after they lost their home of 51 years, but a clause in their coverage limits housing assistance to only two years.

      "After two years, I'll be living on the beach right next to these guys. Because the rents are astronomical here. Five, six, seven thousand dollars a month. Okay. That's why these people are living on the beach. Because they can't afford a simple condo or a simple one bedroom apartment," said Dolan, a displaced fire victim.

      The mayor of Maui recently proposed banning short-term vacation rentals to create thousands of permanent leases and bring rent prices down.

      Not everyone's on board to give up lucrative revenue, but many locals, like Marie Loquet, are okay with it.

      "Some people just lost everything. They had literally the clothes on their back. So many of the people who have vacations around us, there were no tourists here. So many of us decided on our own that we would let people who had no home at all stay in our units, which financially was a pretty hard situation because we made good money on vacation rentals. But you wanted to be part of the solution. You didn't want to be part of the problem," said Loquet, a retired home owner.

      Maui residents struggle to rebuild their lives one year since deadly wildfires

      Maui residents struggle to rebuild their lives one year since deadly wildfires

      Maui residents struggle to rebuild their lives one year since deadly wildfires

      Maui residents struggle to rebuild their lives one year since deadly wildfires

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      Robot competition wows public with advancing brain-computer interface technology

      2025-01-21 17:09 Last Updated At:18:37

      The 2024 World Robot Contest Finals, just concluded on Tuesday in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province, has captivated visitors with exciting robot battles and groundbreaking technologies.

      The event consists of two major competitions: Brain-Computer Interface or BCI Brain-controlled Robot Competition and Youth Robot Design Competition.

      Running from Jan 16 to 21, the event covers more than 20 major events, 50 minor events and 100 competition groups, providing a broad competitive stage for robot enthusiasts around the world.

      During the six-day event, incredible displays realized by BCI technology, like typing and communicating with mind, have also taken the spotlight at the fair.

      BCI refers to a system allowing a person to control a computer or other electronic device using his or her brainwaves, without requiring any movement or verbal instruction.

      At the competition site, young contestants, wearing portable devices on their heads, silently controlled line-following robots to complete challenge tasks by leveraging their brainwave signals.

      Wu Qin, a referee of the competition, explained that the performance of contestants is determined by their level of concentration during the event, with the data being collected from within the human brain.

      "The BCI device works kind of like a fitness tracker that monitors our heart rate and blood oxygen levels," Wu added.

      Meanwhile, a display and experience area, showcasing various application scenarios of BCI, have attracted crowds of visitors.

      "I just experienced the mood breathing light and visual typing. Both are quite advanced. I haven't come across similar things before. This competition let us learn about these novel devices, and it's great," said a visitor.

      Robot competition wows public with advancing brain-computer interface technology

      Robot competition wows public with advancing brain-computer interface technology

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